Performativity, Statistics and Bloody Words

Abstract

The obsession with effectiveness and education, which has been going on for some years now, has been a much discussed and written about subject in the philosophy of education. In this chapter I want to discuss how statistics and the particular kind of discourse that emerges around them serves to suture the wounds in the discourse of effectiveness culture. I will begin by giving a flavour of how British schools operate and show how performativity functions within them. Lyotard who famously coined the term performativity believed that only resistance to effectiveness culture was to turn to absence and silence. In contrast, Derrida offers a more optimistic metaphysics and his philosophy of language frames the discussion of statistics that follows. There I argue that statistics simultaneously and paradoxically provide the promise of truth and absolute scepticism and that the disorientating effects of this suture over linguistic slippages/bleeding. This, I argue helps to maintain the farcical ‘fixing’ of statistics that goes on in British schools. Statistics like all numbers can never operate alone; they are bound to policy initiatives that tend to be emblematised through slogans. However much slogans (that become mantras) may, like statistics, suture the bleeding of language, this can never be wholly successful. This is where optimism lies.