ABSTRACT
‘To be, or not to be’ [postmodern]—‘that is the question’; could this questioning be a signal in itself? Why do we temporalise the style of educational debate in this way? ‘The spirit of the [postmodern] is going to come back and will soon say to education—‘I am thy [postmodern] spirit’. ‘But here, at the beginning of the play, he comes back, so to speak, for the first time. It is a first, the first time on stage’ (Derrida, 1994, p. 3). Is education now to be recognised as a theatre? Are we clowns or grave-diggers? ‘One can also imagine an optic that would use the line as a depth-marker, as in excavations. One proceeds by clearing away the rubble of past ages, by destroying the peasant huts’ (Jünger, 1970). Is the postmodernist a peasant? ‘[Postmodernism] had been the gradual darkening of the dissident mind’ (Eagleton, 2004, p. 50). Back, back to the Marxist light! Does Marxism claim a never-ending monopoly on modernity? It would always be waiting, in the wings, shouting lines (texts) to an educator who had forgotten the right words to say. So doesn’t the modernist become a pedagogue, with a megaphone? If, then, education was a speech, a rehearsal of the right words, perhaps education must be borne, stiff and heavy, as an unchanging weight, the instrument of transmission, ‘[which] would fardels bear, to grunt and sweat under a weary {educational} life, but that the dread of something after death, the undiscovered {educational} country, from whose bourn, no traveller returns’. A conscience doth make cowards of all postmodernists! Then, the future educationist would already be shaped by a social conscience(?) Or does history become a merry-go-round, and education, another oscillation, ‘hitherto existing’, leaving nothing but a neoliberal ‘cash payment’? (Marx & Engels, 1973, p. 35). Is the pedagogue paid to forget? Paid to speak? Or is it their perception of duty? Or is education dead (a dead weight) and perhaps the educationist cannot but haunt? ‘I repeat, for Bataille, the question’: To die a postmodern death? The answer makes the ending more cryptic: ‘There exists a principle of insufficiency at the root of each being… (the principle of incompleteness)’ (Blanchot, 1988, p. 5). So, in the end, education is incomplete, and so is modernity: there is no death, no goal, no triumph. We will always have thought education as the past: ‘the experience of the spectre…One would even have to say that he represented or staged it’ (Derrida, 1994, p. 3). ‘Let me see. (takes the skull). Alas, poor {postmodernism}. I knew him… a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath bore me on his back a thousand times, and now how abhorred in my imagination he is’ (Shakespeare, 1981, p. 184).
