ABSTRACT
In 2013, Stephen Ball and Antonio Olmedo 1 published excerpts from email correspondence with educators in the UK and USA in despair over the political constraints placed on their practice, and in particular the use of school inspections to condition their self-conceptualisation as teachers. In the words of one school principal, ‘To think differently – that is to engage in learning rather than pseudo-measuring – is to be subjected to a totalitarian human and public relations meltdown’. 2 Ball has written extensively about the intrusion of performance measures in education, claiming that ‘the data-base, the appraisal meeting, the annual review, report writing, the regular publication of results and promotion applications, inspections and peer reviews’ 3 constitute the ‘terror of performativity’. 4 Ball defines performativity as a set of disciplines that requires us ‘to spend increasing amounts of our time in making ourselves accountable, reporting on what we do rather than doing it’, 5 and claims that the terror of performativity is directed inwards by teachers who are encouraged to blame themselves for failing to meet externally imposed standards for teaching. This preoccupation with ‘reporting on what we do’ 6 has, according to Ball, rendered teachers ‘transparent but empty’. 7 In the previous chapter, I explored the neoliberals’ rejection of the “irrationality” of the permissive society and alluded to their dismissal of progressivism as an adjunct to the collectivism favoured by anti-capitalists. Michael Apple argues that neoliberal ideology has led us to believe that Public is bad and Private is good, 8 and while this prejudice stems from the belief that the sharing of risk in collectivist societies is anti-heroic, the relationship between this ideology and the practice of performativity is less obvious. To illuminate what Ball describes as the ‘struggle for the teacher’s soul’ 9 inherent to the neoliberal project, and to consider in particular what performativity aims to ‘empty’ out of the teaching profession, in this chapter I offer a reading of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. Described as a ‘problem play’ 10 due to its complex and at times baffling juxtaposition of dark and comic elements, Measure for Measure is considered so impenetrable that critics have variously dismissed it as nonsense and hailed it as a magnificent poem, rather than a conventional stage play. 11 Shakespeare’s subtle depiction of clandestine knowledge as a means to influence action has prompted
making it a highly appropriate lens through which to scrutinise the terror of performativity.
