Heinz Duthel: Theses on Karl Marx, Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault

Heinz Duthel: Theses on Karl Marx, Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault

“Be an ideologue comrade, make us believe in ourselves, when we still believe in God. Teach us about tomorrow, when our feet are still stuck in yesterday.”

The real political task in a society such as ours is to criticise the working of institutions which appear to be both neutral and independent; violence which had always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that we can fight fear.

Heinz Duthel

‘Nothing exist that can proof that we exist’

© Heinz Duthel 2010 – second edition 2018

Heinz Duthel: Theses on Marx, Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

For my children

Karl’s Voice

Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert, es kommt drauf an sie zu verändern.

(The Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.)

(Karl Marx, 1845, Theses on Feuerbach)

The Poets’ Voice

But to go to School on a summer mourn

O, it drives all joys away.

Under a cruel eye outworn

The little ones spend the day

In sighing and dismay.

William Blake

Good sense which once ruled far and wide,

Now in our schools to rest is laid.

Science, its once beloved child,

Killed it to see how it was made.

Guiseppe Giuste (1808 – 1850) Epigrammi – 1849

(Gramsci’s translation)

We don’t need no education

We don’t need no thought control

No dark sarcasm in the classroom

Hey, Teacher, leave those kids alone

All in all we’re just another brick in the wall

The Wall, Pink Floyd, 1979

Abstract

. What I have tried to map out here is the basis of the theory of knowledge and social action on which I shall be basing my research; that fundamentally, human activity is social in character, that social structures are dynamic and relational, but exhibit a level of stability which results in dispositions gelling into objective structures. I develop a theoretical base and iteratively explore this in a setting, evolving a description of how we might understand (or model) the orientation of mathematics teachers. In other words, I am offering a detailed study of a context from which I present a description of an approach to conceptualising two teachers’ orientation. Although the particularities of the ‘cases’ are specific, the methodology is sufficiently transparent, and the theoretical development sufficiently well established to offer others an insight into diverse contexts.

The fundamental problem in which I am interested in this Study is how capitalist society is reproduced. Drawing significantly from critical social theory, the work of Karl Marx, Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault, I approach this problem by looking specifically at the contribution made by mathematics teaching to the maintenance of structured relations of domination. I construct theoretical, conceptual and methodological frameworks to enable me to study some of the underlying relationships between mathematics teacher predispositions and social structure. I discuss the weaknesses in Michel Foucault’s description of how discourses are sustained, and attempt to resolve these theoretical difficulties by drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s dialectical approach to the habitus. I begin by socially and politically locating myself before moving on to looking at how we can understand the way modern capitalist society operates. I move onto examining theories for understanding the interplay between human agency and social structure. Thereafter, I look at the social roots of mathematics education identifying those areas where our current ideas about teaching and learning are inadequately conceptualised. Methodologically, I draw heavily on in-depth sequential interviewing, and classroom observation. I construct a model for what I term the discursive positioning of two contrasting teachers of mathematics, and explore how these differences might relate to wider social structures. This discursive positioning relates the externalising discourses (through which mathematics teaching and learning encounter the wider social context), and the deep-rooted evaluative dispositions of teachers, which operate through mediating relations which balance the interplay between human agency and social structure. In addition, I illustrate how teachers’ beliefs and conceptions about their role, rest upon ideological foundations located in their inclination toward particular social relations.

Acknowledgements

For my son Teddy

Preface

The real political task in a society such as ours is to criticise the working of institutions which appear to be both neutral and independent; violence which had always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that we can fight fear.

[Foucault, 1969: Tr 1972 #16, p 171]

Ser ideólogo camarada,

Fazer-nos acredita en nós

Quando ainda cremos em deus.

Ensinar-nos o amanhã

Quando os pés ainda se arrastam em ontem.

Sergio Viera, 1970

(Poesia de Combate, Vol 2, Frelimo, Maputo)

In the everyday scheme of things, schools and the teaching of mathematics can seem to be both ‘neutral’ and ‘independent’ to quote Michel Foucault. Yet, there are too many stories of school and social failure for this to be particularly convincing. Seen in a different light schools are sites of contestation, resistance and violence - albeit mainly symbolic rather than physical. For many pupils, school days are happy days, a launch pad into successful careers and relative prosperity. For others, it is a daily experience of continued failure. It is this disparity which captures my imagination in this Study. If according to the poet Sergio Viera, it incumbent on us to liberate children from the limitations of today, to help them believe in themselves and to show them tomorrow, then we fail many children; children at the margins, children from ethnic minorities, children whose cultural backgrounds and outlook might be different from the norms of the majority of teachers.

This Study is one part of a project to try to change the way some people are constrained, oppressed and restricted in their development and aspirations. It is about clarifying the mechanisms by which systems of power are maintained and sustained at the level of human agency in the mathematics classroom. Surely, this is a worthy aim, and one that we might expect all reasonable people to subscribe to and work toward?

If Marx’s project be regarded as the furthering, through the conjunction of social analysis and political analysis, of forms of human society in which the mass of human beings can attain freedoms and modes of self-realization in excess of any they may have enjoyed before, who can dissent from it.

[Giddens, 1981 #233, p 24]

Well no doubt there are many - especially those who stand to lose by such change. In addition, it seems to be at least interesting if not socially incumbent on us to ask, if no one could dissent from freedom and self-realisation, how did it all come to be this way? In this Study, I attempt a clarification of this issue. How comes it to be this way? I hope in this Study what I say will be taken as conjectural, and propositional, an invitation to engage rather than ‘dogmatic assertions’. I am not a neutral observer, trying to construct some external or objective reality. As is inevitable in such a work as this, there is much of me in here. Whilst I am writing as an academic researcher, I am also writing (among other things) as a partner, as a socialist and as a father. As a partner, I am aware that one needs to understand others, and to give in order to feel fulfilled oneself. As a socialist, I have certain values, duties and responsibilities to others. As a father to two tiny females, I face the future with aspirations for their welfare as well as some trepidation. The work in this Study brings together these three fundamental drives.

Referencing and citations

I have used Endnote Plus 2.3® to manage references and form the bibliography in this Study. I have chosen to give original publication dates in citations, whilst publication dates for actual sources used are given in references. For example:

Durkheim, Émile (1938: 1977) L'evolution pedagogique en France, (also published in 1977 as The Evolution of Educational Thought. Lectures on the Formation and Development of Secondary Education in France, translated by Peter Collins, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul.

In most cases involving major translations – most notably the works of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault – I used the official English translations. In citations, I have used the original publication date, followed by the date of the English translation actually used. In this case, page numbers refer to the English translation. For example, [Bourdieu, 1979: 1984 #45, p 387] refers to page 387 of the English translation of:

Bourdieu, Pierre (1979: 1984) La Distinction. Critique sociale du jugement, (also published in 1984 as Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Translated by Richard Nice, published by Routledge and Kegan Paul, London)

In the case of the works of Karl Marx and Valdimir Lenin, I have where possible used the Collected Works published by Lawrence and Wishart, giving again in citations the dates of publication of the original manuscript rather than the (somewhat historically arbitrary) date of publication of the volume. For example:

Marx, Karl (1844) ‘Economic and Political Manuscripts of 1844’, Collected Works Volume 3, pps 229 – 346, published in 1977, London, Lawrence and Wishart.

I do this not to suggest that I have actually read the original in whatever language the author wrote, but rather to be truer to a sense of history. It may seem a little perverse to some, but surely not as perverse as citing (Foucault 1990), (Durkheim 1977) or (Marx 1975). If only I could! There will of course be deviations from this specifically in the works of Lev Vygotsky, where original dates seem hard to come by.

The issue of citations is not a trivial matter in a work such as this. I cite other authors to show some affinity or disagreement with their work, and in addition to locate myself into the community of scholars by identifying whose work I have sought to develop. In carrying out work of this type, one inevitably comes across work cited by other authors. Where the work seemed important in substance, I have gone back to the original source and cited the original author. For example in Graham Hitchcock and David Hughes’ book Research and the Teacher. A Qualitative Introduction to School-based Research, [Hitchcock, 1989 #598] I came across reference to Claus Moser and Graham Kalton’s book, Survey Methods in Social Investigation [Moser, 1983 #590] in which they referred to three aspects necessary for successful interviewing. However, on referring to Moser and Kalton, I found that they in turn had drawn on Charles Cannell and Robert Kahn’s chapter, ‘Interviewing’, in Gardner Lindzey and Elliot Aronson’s edited book Handbook of Social Psychology. Volume 2 – Research Methods, [Cannell, 1954, 1968 #603]. In this case, I went back to Cannell and Kahn’s book, which seemed to be the substantive work, and which had only been drawn on rather than developed in the subsequent texts.

On the other hand, a chapter by Stephen Lerman, ‘Culturally Situated Knowledge and the Problem of Transfer in the Learning of Mathematics’, in Leone Burton’s Learning Mathematics: From Hierarchies to Networks, referred to a book by Leslie Smith, Necessary Knowledge. Piagetian Perspectives on Constructivism in which a claim was made that Piaget had recognised the importance of the social dimension in learning. In referring to Smith, I found he referred in turn to citations from Jean Piaget. In this case I did not read the original Piaget – and made this clear in the text. My main reason was that in this particular case it did not seem important whether or not Piaget has actually said something or not, what was significant was how I interpreted the claim being made – that the social dimension was restricted to social interaction.

Throughout this Study, I refer to other authors by the use of both first name and surname. I do this deliberately out of respect, and a desire to feel that I am working within a community. I recognise that it runs counter to academic tradition, and apologise to those readers who may find it tedious.

The context of this Study

I am submitting this Study under the regulations appertaining to FLAEPA Academy Barcelona and hence, this Study is part of the central core of my work as an a scholar. There are no word limits – as indeed there would not be had I decided to apply for Master in Philosophy by published works, a route open to all Students. I outline my rationale for the length of this Study in more detail in the text – particularly in Chapter 1 by referring to my inclusion of a justificatory framework embedded within this Study. I have striven for clarity in expression and identification in key themes and concepts. In addition I have ‘shown my workings out’ in several places in this Study by giving some account of my journey to make sense of the theory and the data.

Chapter 1 - Setting the Scene

Synopsis of Chapter 1

In this chapter, I set the scene for the rest of the Study. Opening with a quote from Antonio Gramsci, I give you an opportunity to read some indication of how I see myself. You will of course make your own mind up, but the least I can do is to try, as honestly as I can, to give you some biographical background. I hope you will let me hold your hand as I take you on the journey I am making and let me be your guide. First, I want to encourage you to trust me by trying to indicate what drives me to undertake the journey. Second, I give you some sense of why I feel the journey needs making at all. Lastly, I give you a map of the journey we are about to make. I had just written an early draft of this chapter when I watched a BBC TV programme called “Grammar School boys” where several ‘celebrities’ recounted their experiences on passing the 11+ and going to the Grammar School. I was quite astonished at the similarities between my own experiences and some of the stories that were told in that programme. Surprise, joy, disappointment, segregation were all emotions that figured highly.

I have chosen to focus here on my formative early years for two main reasons. First because a central feature of the (social) theoretical approach I take underlines the importance of the influence one’s parents and early socialisation has on subsequent development and trajectory. Second, it helps to give an alternative view to the official view of educators and teachers. It was in my easily years that the basis for my research questions began their process of sedimentation.

Because narrative and personal stories are easy to read, this might be the chapter you enjoy reading most - if only out of prurient inclinations. Do bear in mind, it holds the seed of the start of a journey, and for that reason is intellectually demanding.

1.1. Introduction to Me

The first important task in studying the intellectual contribution of a writer is the reconstruction of the author’s biography, not only as regards his practical activity, but also and above all as regards his intellectual activity

[Gramsci, 1971 #282, p 382 – 383]

1.2. Background to the Study

Any description of classroom activity that cannot be related to the social structure and culture of the society is a conservative description.

[Walker, 1970 #476, p 143]

To explain any educational process we must have a conceptual apparatus that relates the economic and social structure of society to the teaching process.

[Lundgren, 1979 #477, p 42]

Neither the life of an individual, nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.

[Mills, 1970 #562, p 3]

1.2.1 The mathematics education context

“Mathematics is often about nothing at all” was how one correspondent to the Cockcroft Report, Mathematics Counts, published in 1982, summarised what must be many children’s experience of the subject. Mathematics is about collecting like terms, removing brackets and all manner of things that seem quite divorced from our everyday lives, interests or needs. Yet, it is a naïve description because it merely takes some of the surface features and ignores the complexity and underlying structure. Paradoxically, it is exactly because someone can say this that makes the situation more worrying - showing how alternative descriptions can be lost and how complete the hegemonic control can be over the nature of educational experiences.

One response to the criticism that mathematics is ‘about nothing at all’, is to tinker with the curriculum, to trying to make mathematics ‘more relevant’ using ‘real life’ or ‘real world’ examples. Yet, as I will go on to argue, and as Paul Dowling has demonstrated [Dowling, 1998 #391], this does little to change the situation since many of the contexts are unreal and mythological.

The three epigraphs that open this section are intended to give a feel for my position in this Study. It is my desire to liberate and empower; to liberate by exploring the ordinary, the everyday common normal practices. By problematising these everyday practices, such interactions and relations as may appear normal, insignificant or even essential in mathematics classrooms are raised as problematic.

Recently there have been attempts to describe, understand and theorise the contribution (or constraints) made to learning through the social and cultural context in which teaching and learning takes place and there is a fast growing literature base. While this development does signify a move away from an embeddedness in psychology, it does not necessarily represent a significant change in orientation. Rather what appears to be underway is the development of a cultural psychology, concerned with changes within psychology to incorporate social influences and contexts [Lerman, 1998 #726, pps 333 – 334]. As Stephen Lerman points out “fully sociological approaches to mathematics education have not been prevalent” [Lerman, 1998 #726, p 333]. It is just such a sociological approach that I am attempting to develop and so my theoretical and conceptual underpinnings come from social theory rather than psychology. Consequently, I draw on such scholars as Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Karl Marx and other social theorists, rather than Piaget, von Glasersfeld, Vygotsky etc. (although their contribution to our understanding of social processes is important, acknowledged and in places incorporated). My main task is a sociological one. Put simply, this Study is an attempt to better understand the ways in which the teaching and learning of mathematics contributes to uneven social and educational outcomes and opportunity.

My approach to this is to look into the ways in which teachers conceive of their work as teachers of mathematics, and more specifically how this is organised by and related to their social imagery. By ‘social imagery’, I refer here to conceptions about social relationships, the patterns of relationships between different groups they envisage, the relational values that teachers hold and which allow them to operate as agents in the social field of mathematics teaching. This might seem an ambitious task, so in this section I will try to justify my decision to undertake it.

1.2.2 The social context

It can hardly be contested that we live in an uneven and unjust society where access to education and to justice depend on the capital one can appropriate and accumulate. There is ample evidence in the literature to support this contention such that it is hardly now contentious [See as a selection for example \Aggleton, 1988 #612; Anyon, 1983 #613; Anyon, 1981 #221; Anyon, 1981 #168; Anyon, 1980 #514; Bernstein, 1975 #201; Bernstein, 1975 #262; Craft, 1970 #631; Dubberley, 1988 #601; Jackson, 1962 #404; Robinson, 1976 #629; Tyler, 1977 #630; Willis, 1977 #22]. But unfairness, injustice and prejudice are not abstract concepts of macro-social analysis of an internecine class struggle. They are felt through the disappointment, hopelessness and frustrations of ordinary people as they get though their everyday lives. They exist in the knots in the pit of the stomach and the tears in the eyes. Injustice is a process that goes on all around us, even when - and arguably especially when - we do not look for it or recognise it. It has now been found that pupils from working class backgrounds do less well at school than those with middle class backgrounds [Croll, 1981 #575, 110]. Whilst this may partly be attributable to a paucity of material conditions in the home, it cannot totally be attributed to this because the trend is that even children from more affluent semi-skilled working class homes do less well than middle class children [Croll, 1981 #575, p 111]. At least in part then, the cause must lie elsewhere and may include attitudinal factors, differential resources available for educating children from different social backgrounds, and in addition teachers’ behaviours and the very nature of education favouring the thinking and disposition of some children rather than others. I will look further into this issue in later chapters, but it is a concern in this Study to look at the contribution to this inequity that might be played out in mathematics pedagogy. It is my contention that Mathematics plays a significant role in organising the segregation of our society.

Mathematics is not used as a selection device simple because it is useful, but rather the reverse.

[Willis, 1989 #768, p 35]

Mathematics education plays its part in keeping the powerless in their place and the strong in positions of power. It doesn’t only do this through the cultural capital a qualification in mathematics endows on an individual. It does this through the authoritarian and divisive character of mathematics teaching. Either one can do maths or one can’t, but an accusation or admission that you can’t is more than just plain fact of capability; it is a positioning strategy – something that locates one in particular relations with others. It locates you as unsuccessful, and lacking in intellectual capability; it locates you on the edge of the employment and labour market, as virtually unemployable. Mathematics education thus serves as a “badge of eligibility for the privileges of society” [Atweh, 1998 #767, p 63].

For all of my working life – now 25 years – I have been in mathematics education and have worked in largely working class areas of East London, Beira in Mo*ambique and Milton Keynes. I have therefore seen and been part of the very battles between pupils and a curriculum in which they could see little relevance. I have experienced the tensions and contradictions in being cast in the role of the enforcer and having to find my way through that and round that.

1.2.3 The research context

It was a natural progression for me to use the opportunity of doing a Master in Philosophy. to try to explore some of the roots of social discrimination. There is considerable research evidence, publications and doctoral theses demonstrating that mathematics education is unfair, unjust and that certain sectors of society are inequitably treated. Here I want to develop this work, but to do something further. I want to stand on the shoulders of those that have gone before me and to study the mechanisms and present a framework for explaining how and why some of the precursors to this injustice occur. Hence, in this Study there is a considerable section where I undertake a development of a theoretical framework. I found I could not separate easily the theoretical framework from the literature review. What I have tried to accomplish is to present three cognate areas – theories of social structure and organisation (Chapter 2) theories of the conceptualisation of human agency (Chapter 3) and theories of the social foundations of mathematics education (Chapter 4).

The importance of this triad lies in the role mathematics plays in society. It is in short the foundation of the technological age. “Mathematics and mathematics education are carrying the scientific and technological superstructures of our time” [Skovsmose, in preparation #700, p 1]. Less triumphalist, Pierre Bourdieu compares the teaching of mathematics to the teaching of the classics and dead languages claiming it to be “no less derealising and gratuitous” [Bourdieu, 1989 #687, p 110 – 111]. Mathematics education thus stratifies, demarcates, legitimises and enculturates. Yet, we know relatively little about the mechanics of these social processes, including the way in which social reproduction is achieved through acceptance or subservience. Consequently, I want to argue less that mathematics education can benefit from drawing on sociology, by arguing instead that sociology can benefit from studying mathematics education as an example of a mechanism for distributing power.

My own experience within mathematics education has led me to want to look for foundations, predilections and structuring frameworks that would support a social model for understanding teachers’ work. I thus wanted to explore and analyse individual teachers working in their natural setting, within a set of objective relationships. Pierre Bourdieu, the French social theorist, offered me an approach, which seemed fruitful through his notions of ‘field’ and ‘habitus’.

For Pierre Bourdieu, social action is localised and contextualised in both space and time. The driving force of human action and interaction are the conscious and unconscious dispositions that make us act and interact in the ways we do. This is what Pierre Bourdieu call the habitus – which I will explore in more detail in Chapter 3. However, human society does not consist of a loose coupling of individuals, but rather human social practice takes place in social fields, which Pierre Bourdieu defines as:

a network, or a configuration, of objective relations between positions objectively defined.

[Bourdieu, 1992 #342, pps 72 – 73]

Fields are therefore relational structures representing a collection of differing social positions often competing for power and are embedded with fields at different levels representing different levels of activity as “hierarchically intersecting sets” [Bourdieu, 1989 #41, p 44]. A classroom may be seen and analysed as a field, as also might be a subject department, school or the entire educational system. The particular field that a researcher might want to focus on will therefore be related to the level or focus of analysis.

The notion of a social field is an attempt by Pierre Bourdieu to free up social analysis from a rigid and over-deterministic class analysis in which social classes are seen to exist by and for themselves. Pierre Bourdieu's approach is to see social class indeed as social division, but as a dynamic set of relationships representing the state of play, in both time and space, of competing positions of power [Bourdieu, 1979: 1984 #45]. I find this a particularly useful conceptualisation for understanding the mathematics classroom because it offers a flexible approach to how we can conceptualise the way in which classroom practice emanates from teachers with differing social perspectives and intentions.

A further notion used by Pierre Bourdieu to explain the process whereby social classes are differentially favored by the education system is symbolic violence. The idea is that the education system takes norms, ideas, beliefs etc of the dominant groups, which are otherwise arbitrary, and enforces these through systems of power relations so that the cultural arbitrary is misrecognised not as arbitrary, but as legitimate thereby reproducing and legitimising relations of domination [Thompson, 1984 #331, p 57]. A central question here is how it is that symbolic violence becomes legitimised and operationalised through the characteristics and practices of individual teachers. Exploring this question requires us to operate at the deepest level of human agency.

In applying his epistemological framework to research, Pierre Bourdieu suggests a three level approach:

1. Analyse the objective position of the field with respect to the field of power

2. Map out the objective structure of relations of the positions held within the field

3. Analyse the habitus of individual agents

[Bourdieu, 1992 #679, pps 104 - 107]

Applying a Bourdieuian framework to my research, I needed to explore the political foundation of the discipline. In other words, I needed to explore the nature of mathematics education as a social field connecting this to notions of social power, and this forms Chapter 4. This draws on a wider theoretical understanding of the nature of society (Chapter 2) and on nature of culturally situated individuals (Chapter 3). Certain questions then needed to be considered. How can we understand everyday practices as a social phenomenon? How might we understand the common sense, taken-for-granted assumptions underpinning classroom practice? What alternative interpretations might be possible if we adopt alternative conceptual frameworks? My intention then is to construct some descriptive model for teachers’ differential engagement in the process of education.