Matthew Clarke,Lacan and education policy: The other side of education

There are many very pleasant things to say about Matthew Clarke’s (2019) Lacan and Education Policy: The Other Side of Education. This is a book that specifically draws on Lacan’s four discourses – the discourse of the master, the discourse of the university, the discourse of the hysteric and the discourse of the analyst – as a way of understanding the now long established neoliberal educational policy agenda of this neoliberal age. And these very pleasant things should be said, because they bear down on a reader’s experience of the text, and include the following:

Most obviously, Lacan and Education Policy, despite Lacan being distressingly complex and dense and education policy being interminable and humourless, is a thoroughly enjoyable read. The enjoyment is not derived solely from the tone: the examples that are used to illustrate and support the explication of each of Lacan’s four discourses are helpful, consistent and relevant in supporting the case that education policy is not so much a discrete endeavour to rationally improve the educational outcomes of a country’s citizens; but is instead the site of a nexus of responses (the master, the university, the hysteric and the analyst) to the question of how to provide a programme of national education within a neoliberal context. Nor, given the startling clarity of the book’s argument, does Lacan and Education Policy reduce Lacan’s work to a level of generality and simplicity wherein the power and significance of Lacan’s thought is lost. Here is an illustrative example, drawn from chapter 5. In this chapter, which deals with the discourse of the hysteric, there is a focus on attempts by the media, the government, potential employees, to seemingly raise awareness about the shocking educational underachievement of some school leavers. This is a degree of underachievement that is represented in this neoliberal context in a number of tightly related ways: as a failure of the education system to equip the economy with an adequately trained skills base; as a failure of the education system to provide the realisation of a democracy of opportunity, demonstrated by the growing gap between the rich and poor in the UK over the past 20 years; all of which is traceable, according to the neoliberal interpretation of education by the persistent and predictable unequal distribution of state education examination results, which are nationally distributed according to an index of affluence and deprivation. Educational policy, from this neoliberal perspective, is therefore meant to work as an educational corrective to these entrenched inequalities: perhaps, for example, at the level of technical pedagogy (such as the teaching of phonics); or at the level of funding (such as in the UK, where the government provides extra funding for schools for pupils living in deprivation, based on their eligibility for free school meals); or at the level of management and local authority democratic accountability (as with the academisation policy established by the British government). But of central and precise significance to all of this is the undiscussed fact, the silently articulated consequence of neoliberalism, that all of these inequalities are produced by the very neoliberal policies and practices that they are actually meant to address. Lacan and Education Policy prompts us to consider two related questions at this point: why has neoliberalism configured education in this way? And, what, if any, is the evidence, that such policies have, in any thoroughgoing way, effectively worked as a mechanism to more equally redistribute educational and economic capital? To answer the second question first: the answer is virtually none, as the government’s own survey on the impact of 20 years of policy specifically designed to address social mobility and equality (Social Mobility Commission, 2017) notably demonstrates. But then, of course, how could there be since, as we’ve already noted, it is the competitive marketisation of all social being, including education, which is at the heart of neoliberalism which produces inequality in the first place? To address, now, the first question – why has neoliberalism configured education in this way? – any adequate answer must also consider why it is that contemporary education policy does not address this contradiction but instead perpetually re-enacts the same educational corrective strategy, with pretty much the same results, with educational capital distributed unevenly, broadly in line with the unequal distribution of financial capital. Lacan and Education explains this condition of perpetual crisis as a manifestation of the discourse of the hysteric, in which the structurally determined and unbridgeable gap between the policy activity of the neoliberal order, and the discourse of the master, in which the goals of the policy are represented, is the sole and incessant subject of its concern. The term, represented, is of key importance here. For simplicity’s sake, let us take the goal of a neoliberal education system to be that all children achieve the government’s prescribed educational targets which will be raised each year in order to ensure the continuous raising of standards and which will be translated into greater social (economic) equity. This goal is a manifestation of the discourse of the master. That this goal cannot exist by itself, in any unmediated fashion, means that it must be represented, and there must be a system, a series of procedures, a set of behaviours and practices that enact this representative process, which is the function of the discourse of the university. So, in the place of, and representing the educational goal of a neoliberal system, we have monitoring and assessment processes, league tables, testing regimes, performance related management and pay and so on, which are meant to realise the goal of the master discourse. But of course, the neoliberal educational goal has not been, and cannot be, achieved, for a variety of connected reasons. We have already noted that these include the central paradox that lies at the heart of the neoliberal regime; but related to this is the fact that for empirically consistent sociological reasons, education is configured differently in different people’s lives, which leads to the acquisition of different levels of educational capital, as is reflected in the uneven distribution of wealth and economic and other forms of opportunity; and that the neoliberal order refuses to accept these facts, because to do so would impinge upon its integrity, only ensures that the process will be repeated (an educational realisation of Freud’s repetition compulsion, born from the unconscious of the neoliberal order). Within this context, the discourse of the hysteric is obsessed with pointing out this very gap; the gap that is opened up between the empirical evidence – indicating that goal of the master signifier has not been achieved – and the effects of the discourse of the University, which serves to realise the goal of the master discourse. What this doesn’t lead to, at least not so far (and perhaps, for another discussion, this might involve some re-assessment of the effect of the discourse of the analyst), is a critique of the goal of the discourse of the master – which is, anyway, in a very real sense, given what we have said about it not being realisable, without a goal; just as neoliberalism is without any real kind of goal, other than its perpetual expansion, the contradiction of its infinite marketised economy of production and consumption – but instead perpetuates and intensifies the work of the discourse of the university (more frequent and punitive assessment regimes; a tighter control on educational freedoms), in order to more effectively serve the empty goal of the master discourse.

These, anyway, are some of the reasons why Lacan and Education is a thoroughly enjoyable read; but the book provokes us to think about something beyond this, and to at least consider the meaning of the irony of education being uneducable, and perhaps approaching the understanding that maybe this is what education is: the subject that cannot be educated, with its identity dependent upon perpetuating its ignorance. What might the practical consequences of taking such a position be? Regardless of the ideology of the social regime that might be in power, and its political aims, the goal of the master discourse will always be characteristically empty, and attempts to realise this goal through the effects of the discourse of the university, will always fall short, as the discourse of the hysteric will incessantly point out. Since repudiating this order and economy of being is not really an option within the Lacanian world, perhaps what we are actually left with, the only option, the only agency that we are able to exercise is with the version of the master discourse that we might choose to inhabit, and the form that its goal might be realised in, through the effects of the discourse of the university? This would be an engagement with education at the political level, and would require, at least tacitly, a resistance to the endorsement of education as it is currently, neoliberally, configured. These and other provocations are why Lacan and Education is not simply a thoroughly enjoyable read, it is also a book that insights us to think about a radical shift in what education might mean and the politics of our engagement with it.

But there is something else about Lacan and Education that is of importance. Matthew Clarke’s text takes up to the very precipice of the plausibility of education being about education; or to put this more clearly: of education being about personal growth; of education being about achievement and fulfilment; of education being about access to knowledge which is also analogous to freedom; of education being about acquiring the skills that will help the individual exercise agency. Beyond that precipice, that education might be about personal growth, achievement and fulfilment, access to knowledge, or any other morally saturated attributes, are all revealed to be nothing more than the myths, the empty elements of the educational imaginary; which, rather than supporting the individual to break clear of a socially determined position, according to class, ethnic and gender identity, they are, instead, parts of a technology that reaffirms and entrenches division according to the circulation of the streams of power that support that established order. Up to the precipice, investments in education are investments in any of the ideological goals that any given educational regime might want to establish. And there is, of course, a lineage of figures adored by education because it powerfully endorses this educational perspective. The lineage includes, for example, Paulo Freire (1970), for whom ‘true’ education, education of the oppressed by the oppressed, rather than an education system that inculcated capitalist virtues, i.e. the dominant state education system (or lack of it), would lead to liberation. As well as Dewey (1902, 1916), whose opposition to instrumental education, in which learners are conceptualised as passive recipients of knowledge that is only approved by the academy, was through progressive education, which sought to connect learners to the social and intellectual nexus of a democratic community by supporting them to acquire the educational tools to independently critically engage with and develop the goals of that community. But then we should also include, as part of the same lineage, the Sutton Trust, whose entire reason for being is to support social mobility through educational initiatives and educational policy. Indeed, much of their data analysis is devoted to explaining the continuous disparity in levels of educational attainment, and how underachievement and therefore, according to this logic, limited opportunity, is linked to disparities in income, health, housing, food and other indicators of social and economic everyday experience and expectation, in relation to the more affluent sections of society. And just as Freire, Dewey and others argue, the Sutton Trust also argues, that the right kind of education will allow individuals to break free from their otherwise narrowly socially and economically determined identity. ‘Our research’, they state on their website, ‘has uncovered practical, evidence-based solutions to improve access to high-performing state schools’; with, in this case, some schools being part of the socio-economically restrictive matrix of the established order, and other schools being part of the liberationist branch of the true educational programme.

And this is one of the reasons why Freire, Dewey, the Sutton Trust and others are located firmly before the educational precipice because they all affirm the value of education primarily as a form of progress; crudely, a movement from a position of ignorance, characterised by limited agency and other forms of poverty, to a position of knowledge, characterised by the expression of the power of personal choice and the realisation of the various forms of affluence that are concomitant with that power. This, ultimately, is, from this perspective, why education is worth studying, it is what education means, it is the completion of its imaginary moral, technical and logical circuit, the means by which education justifies, feeds and establishes itself and its very plausibility: education takes you from a place of all sorts of darkness to a place of all sorts of light. Which is the reason why any communication from the view beyond the precipice is so, well, even more than disturbing. Having chosen Freire, Dewey and the Sutton Trust as representatives of the view of education prior to encountering our metaphorical educational precipice, let’s think of Althusser (2013) and Peim (2018) as representatives of the view from beyond. For Althusser, education, as a form of state apparatus, instead of being a practice that brings liberty, is a powerful means of interpellation, which in social terms reaffirms prevailing social identities, realised by divisions of class and power. And, as Peim explains, if you study education you will inevitably be studying the practice of these divisions in class and power; but, you may also be studying, simultaneously, how education in serving the practice of these divisions in class and power, declares that it is doing otherwise, that it is serving the democratic expansion of opportunity. In Althusserian terms, Peim is drawn to an exploration of the practices and processes by which interpellation in the educational sphere occurs; with how the subjects of education become integral parts of its very being, reproducing the same divisions that they simultaneously strive to dissipate through the architecture in which education is housed, the structure of the day into which education is divided, the content of the curriculum by which education is policed, and the pedagogic means by which education is inculcated. Doesn’t this sound familiar to the circuit of, not so much knowledge, but being that Matthew Clarke has described in Lacan and Education Policy? Within which the vacuous goal of the discourse of the master, or the ideology through which education is organised, motivates the manifestation of the details, the bureaucracy, the practices by which this vacuous goal will (never) be achieved, as expressed by the discourse of the university? But, for reasons already described, this will never happen; with the discourse of the analyst for ever pointing out the gap, the irreconcilable difference between the educational imaginary and the empirical experience of the divisions that occur in the distribution of educational and other forms of capital.

The reason why, then, it seems to me that Matthew Clarke’s book takes us up to this precipice, and not, like Peim, beyond, especially in the face of the general argument that has just been rehearsed, the consequences of which are a theoretical and political equivalence, is perhaps nothing more than a matter of tone. And to quickly illustrate this, let me take the example of a relatively old paper by Martin and Peim (2009); in which he convincingly demonstrates that the claims made, not only by Engestrom, but what Engestrom represents, in terms of a progressive educational future, organically related to some notion of local community, is little more than the expression of a will to power, a conclusion that I have little doubt that Matthew Clarke would share. What, I suggest, distinguishes Nick Peim from Matthew Clarke is, instead, that Nick Peim in this paper seems drawn – and if I might be bold enough to add, drawn in a Lacanian sense – yet again into demonstrating that yet another poster boy for progressive emancipatory education, and the philosophical and ideological assumptions that the poster boy represents, is just another version of the same old same old, just another version of maintaining whilst covering over, a desire to maintain and entrench power. Another elegant but forceful demonstration that educationally there is nothing else there; that education isn’t what it is supposed to be and can never be. Isn’t this a dynamic that is explicable through Matthew Clarke’s articulation of Lacan’s discourses? Does Matthew Clarke’s book perhaps indicate that Nick Peim’s work is as much a product of education in relation to these discourses as the neoliberal perpetual improvement agenda? Does this describe any meaningful difference? Does Lacan and Education Policy really, in this sense, describe another side of education?

There is one more question that Matthew Clarke’s book prompts, that it is probably only possible to raise and leave open. If the thesis of Lacan and Education Policy is more than a game, if we to allow ourselves to say something as crude as, Matthew Clarke in what he says about education policy is right, what is the point of continuing to write about, research, or in any other critical way, engage with the subject of education as education? Why continue to conduct theoretical and empirical studies that will have no impact on any kind of transformation but will instead continue to reveal the same processes of reproduction, based on the same conditions of lack, hysteria, subjectification and power? If this is what educational research has become, and in a sense must always have been, why not instead investigate, say, other processes of marginalisation and social systems that produce these effects and the experiences that this results in? Would this still be education? Is this what the other side of education might be?

All of which is why Matthew Clarke’s book is such an important book to at least know about, because it stands on the precipice, after which, educationally, even the reason – forget hope – for its redemption is gone.