Abstract
This chapter revisits Paul Standish’s earlier work exploring ideas of Roland Barthes in relation to education. It concerns the way that iconic signs function, as found for example in Barthe’s Mythologies. Semiological analysis of this kind provides a rich means of critically considering contemporary educational practice as well as educational research itself. Lynda Stone’s work within this research group is relevant in some respects to this critique. The discussion examines the extent to which an iconography might be re-appropriated, not merely through a change in the terms and other forms that are current but through a reappraisal of the force of the iconic in contemporary thought and practice. Ironically perhaps, iconography today in its dominant forms hides its iconic nature through a kind of naturalisation. In response to this there may be ways of retrieving a sense of the religious force of the icon in order to disturb this naturalisation. One example of such a strategy is Bill Readings’ attempt to reclaim the university from its ruins by way of a reassertion of the ‘name of Thought’. Critically insightful as Readings’ ‘The University in Ruins’ is in many respects, his attempt to speak more positively is not entirely convincing. In the light of this relative failure, this chapter advocates a sensitising to signs that does not seek to install them in new iconic roles. This will have a bearing not only on educational practice but on the possibilities of educational research.
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Notes
- 1.
The cover image can be found at: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=images+barthes+paris-match&hl=en&newwindow=1&client=firefox&hs=e9r&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=jR8mUY3gEKOp0QWc04GwDw&ved=0CDAQsAQ&biw=1366&bih=588. Accessed 20 March 2013.
- 2.
The reference is to the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert.
- 3.
Here and in what follows the allusion is not to Plato or even to Socrates himself but to the fossilised Platonism of the Forms that has come down to us in various ways.
- 4.
Of course there is thought without language, in the minds of animals. In the human mind, by contrast, thought is so pervasively conditioned by language that it is appropriate to put matters this way.
- 5.
In “The Education Concept” (Standish 2008), which was written as a contribution to the Research Community’s work on educationalisation, I tried to show the way that the most central terms in educational research (especially in philosophy of education) had themselves become mobilised in ways that parted company with their ostensible function. This was a development from the lines of argument in my 1992 paper.
- 6.
The research was carried out with a team of staff, mostly from Roehampton University. See: http://www.roehampton.ac.uk/Research-Centres/Centre-for-Educational-Research-in-Equalities-Policy-and-Pedagogy/Current-Research-Projects/Formations-of-Gender-and-Higher-Education-Pedagogies-%28GaP%29/
- 7.
Readings follows Jean-François Lyotard in drawing attention to the kind of thinking that is called for when the frameworks of our understanding cannot contain the events that confront us, when we have neither received ideas, nor formulae, nor rules to guide us. The use of ‘event’ here is not casual: events are not those things we plan, they do not fit neatly into any predetermined schema, they come from outside the sphere of our mastery. It is in this sense that Thought, the thinking that we most need, is empty. When we are confronted by such events, the temptation is to adapt them to our existing frameworks. The imperative on us not to give into this temptation is especially acute in the university in view of the fact that the university is the place where the languages we have for understanding the world are to be pushed to their limits.
- 8.
As is well known, Lyotard borrows Wittgenstein’s term, but then uses it in a rather different and contentious way. Concerning Lyotard’s usage of the terms ‘language games’ and ‘phrase regimens’ James Williams explains: “In The Differend the somewhat vague concept of incommensurable language games is replaced by the concepts of incommensurable or heterogeneous (Lyotard has an unfortunate tendency to use both terms in similar circumstances) phrase regimens and genres. Phrase regimens are the syntactic types phrases can belong to.” (Williams 1998, p. 79) In The Differend Lyotard writes: “Incommensurability, in the sense of the heterogeneity of phrase regimens and of the impossibility of subjecting them to a single law (except by neutralizing them), also marks the relation between either cognitives or prescriptives and interrogatives, performatives, exclamatives … For each of these regimens, there corresponds a mode of presenting a universe, and one mode is not translatable into another.” (Lyotard 1988, p. 128).
- 9.
‘Science’ has a different range from Wissenschaft or Wetenschappen, and when the Geisteswis-senschaften are understood as ‘social sciences’, a subtle shift occurs. The use of the term ‘research’ in English colludes with this shift in meaning.
References
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Standish, P. (2014). Signs of the Times: Iconography of a New Education. In: Smeyers, P., Depaepe, M. (eds) Educational Research: Material Culture and Its Representation. Educational Research, vol 8. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03083-8_12
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