Education is society … and there is no society: The ontological turn of education

Introduction

A common approach of education policy making by governments, nongovernmental and international organizations is to reform education systems with the aim of solving social problems. This idea of education as a fix for society ¹ has been critiqued by Smeyers and Depaepe (2008) as the ‘educationalization of social problems’, something the authors identify as ‘paradigmatic of Modernity’, locating contemporary examples alongside education reform initiatives in the 19th and 20th centuries that ‘would be gradually assimilated by the “people”.’ The educationalization of social problems performed by education policies relies upon a particularly instrumental configuration of the relationship between education and society. However, the instrumental arguments that pair education and society as means and ends to one another assume both that there is a society and that there is education, two discrete domains that can be theorized, historicized, and practiced such that one can and does effect change in the other. Even Dewey’s more nuanced instrumentalism (See Oliverio, this issue), where means are continually negotiated and ends are shiftingly ‘in view’ (cf. Dewey1980 [1916]; Dewey1991 [1938]), arranges society ‘as a product of education’ (1984 [1929]: 38) and locates in education the means by which we produce or approximate a reconciled (democratic?) society.

When critiques are leveled against the instrumentalism of policy, these critiques often replace a particular instrumentalism with another, presumably better, kind, e.g. replacing neoliberal instrumentalism with social justice instrumentalism (Carusi, 2019; Webb and Gulson, 2015; see also Blumsztajn, in this issue). The ability for education policy, theory and research to relate education and society instrumentally, to promote the educationalization of social problems for example, assumes that education and society exist in such a way that an instrumental relation holds between them, or, slightly differently, that relations of cause and effect can be inferred and intervened upon in order to make education (or teachers, or economic markets) more effective. But what must education and society be in order for them to operate in an instrumental relationship, particularly when education can be a fix for society? This question shifts our attention toward the ontological rather than instrumental makeup of education, society, and their relations.

The instrumental assumptions take for granted the ontological status of education and society, assuming that education and society not only exist as separate beings but are in such a way that allows one to change the other. These ontological assumptions make possible a great deal of educational theory, policy and practice, which would be difficult, even impossible, to articulate in the absence of such assumptions. If we cease to follow assumptions that institute an instrumental, causal or effective relationship between education and society, then we are left with the question of what education and society are, and we risk an answer that may not support the ontological assumptions of theories, policies and research that seek to reform society through education or vice versa. But why question the ontological status of education and society?

Recent work in social and political theory has argued for the impossibility of society, an argument discussed below, which invites a reconsideration of the relationship between education and society that breaks from the long held instrumental assumptions informing most education theory and policy. It would seem, first and foremost, that the instrumental relationship between society and education comes undone by rendering education ineffective as a tool to change an already impossible society or for an impossible society to change education. In order to think education in light of society’s impossibility and apart from the instrumental traditions of education theory and policy, we will first highlight the argument developed by Ernesto Laclau that concludes society is impossible and what emerges from this impossibility, namely ontological rhetorics (Szkudlarek, 2017, 2019; Carusi, 2019). After providing an overview of Laclau’s claim that society is impossible, we will offer some brief analyses of rhetorical tropes in educational policies and theories. The materials on which we base our analyses come from work on the non-instrumentality of education policy (Carusi, 2019), and on the politics of education theories that influenced the emergence of the modern discourse of education in Continental Europe (Szkudlarek, 2017). Finally, we will respond to the question of what education is in light of society’s impossibility.

The impossibility of society

Laclau has consistently emphasized the impossibility of society across his work. We should first clarify that Laclau’s impossibility of society is different from Margaret Thatcher’s oft-cited denial of society. Thatcher interchanges government with society, when she says:

They [people who think there is such a thing as society] are casting their problems at society. And, you know, there’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours.’ (Thatcher and Keay, 1987). ²

It is very simple to differentiate Thatcher’s claim from Laclau’s regarding the impossibility of society. It would be enough to point out that Laclau does not conflate government with society. But instead of quickly dismissing Thatcher’s quote, her words may prove helpful to introduce the basic unit of Laclau’s theory that will lead us to the impossibility of society: the demand. Thatcher denies the legitimacy of any claims or demands made by individuals to government/society. On her view, people making demands of society is little more than blaming a non-existent bogeyman for problems of an individual’s own making. Yet, we also see her making demands of society when she insists that a shared obligation (our duty) exists for us to look after one another. Demand can mean both request and claim. Laclau (2005) writes:

if the demand is satisfied [as a request], that is the end of the matter; but if it is not, people can start to perceive that their neighbours have other, equally unsatisfied demands -problems with water, health, schooling, and so on. If the situation remains unchanged for some time, there is an accumulation of unfulfilled demands and an increasing inability of the institutional system to absorb them in a differential way (each in isolation from the others), and an equivalential relation is established between them (p. 73).

An equivalential relation converts an assortment of unsatisfied requests into a single claim against the relevant institutional system to whom the demand is addressed. Thatcher demands that there is a shared duty of care between people in the absence of society. If Thatcher were to have had this demand as a request satisfied, then there would be no need to elevate the demand to the status of a claim. However, as we see in her quote, this demand for ‘looking after’ one another is a claim against society/government. Society understood as government is an obstacle to the ‘people who must look after themselves first’, a people who in turn represent the members of a new society where individuals, families, and neighbours care for one another without blaming the government for their problems.

What is of interest for discussing the impossibility of society is this moment when Thatcher articulates a ‘people’. She both negates the currently existing order wherein ‘they are casting their problems at society’ and then constructs a people of which she is a part: ‘our duty … ourselves … our neighbours’. In setting up the division between an us and a them, Thatcher articulates what Laclau (2005) calls populist reason, a kind of reason that creates a people (populus) who represent the fullness of society where the current society is deficient or lacking. The people representing the fullness of society make a demand that cannot be accommodated by the current society. Yet, just as the society under attack by Thatcher (the society of them) could not achieve its fullness, for example the fullness of the welfare state capable of providing resources to secure its citizens’ education, health, and so on, Thatcher’s anti-government society (the society of us) cannot achieve its own fullness either. One need only do a search on neoliberalism (on the web or in the streets) for evidence of its failure to constitute a fully reconciled society. However, this is not a fault unique to Keynesianism or neoliberalism. Instead, failure is an ontological feature of society itself. As Laclau (2014) explains, ‘[i]f the fullness of society is unachievable, the attempts at reaching it will necessarily fail’ (93). Society, in Laclau’s theory, is a fullness that we represent as the full satisfaction of particular demands (claims). Yet those particular demands are structurally incapable of representing society in its fullness or universality. Within the terms of a neoliberal society, the representation of fullness may see consumers with ever-increasing choices determining the winners and losers of market competition in a process of continual market self-improvement that would translate into social, economic and material benefits for all citizens. However, the achievement of this representation of fullness, to make the represented fully present, is an ontological impossibility. The policies, programs, organizations, individuals, etc., are rife with particular differences that will undermine any universal that emerges from them specifically because of the excesses of those particularities, excesses that necessarily escape the aim of total representation that a universal entails. Through this reasoning Laclau articulates a social theory in which society is impossible because ‘the social [as particular] always exceeds the limits of the attempts to constitute society’ (1991: 26).

So, to turn back to our concerns, what is going on when education policy and theory construe education as a fix for society? Labaree (2008) suggests that education in its institutional forms serves as a space to locate the ideals of social reform without infringing on the liberal values of individualism. In other words, education works as a stand-in for the failure of politics to bring about a fully-reconciled society, as if education is a voodoo doll for politics (what we cannot do on the body of the social, we do on schools and children) and the scapegoat of politics’ failure to realize its promised society. This may be the reason why the educationalization of social problems is a ubiquitous feature of modern politics. Rather than reiterating the already well-made critiques of the educationalization of social problems from Labaree (2008) and others (cf. Smeyers & Depaepe, 2008), our approach is concerned with how we comprehend education in light of society’s impossibility. Where the educationalization of social problems sees education as a proxy for society, the impossibility of society introduces the relationship between the universal (society) and particular (social) that goes beyond a ‘voodoo’ education pinned to social problems. To conceive education through the impossibility of society, we now turn to the constitutive role of rhetorical tropes in making society and education what they are.

Ontological rhetorics and the tropological

The relationship between the universal and particular, or in terms of the above section, between society and the social, operates tropologically. Laclau discusses the relationship between society and the social as a catachresis, a trope discussed in detail by Szkudlarek (2011), wherein ‘the fullness of society is an impossible object which successive contingent [social] contents try to impersonate through catachrestical displacements’ (Butler, Laclau and Žižek, 2000: 78). Tropes work in myriad ways, as evidenced throughout the history of Western philosophy and rhetoric, and resist categorical distinctions between themselves. Metaphors can slip into metonymies into catachreses and so on (Eco, 1985). Moreover, tropes extend beyond the classical examples of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony into the very processes of naming. For instance, Paul de Man (1996) refers to zero as a trope, a point Laclau reminds us of when discussing the role of the tropological:

the zero is radically heterogeneous with the order of number and, moreover, crucial if there is going to be an order of number at all. In de Man’s words: ‘There can be no one without zero, but the zero always appears in the guise of a one, of a (some)thing. The name is the trope of the zero. The zero is always called a one, when the zero is actually nameless, ‘innommable’‘. So we have a situation in which: (1) a systemic totality cannot be constituted without appealing to something radically heterogeneous vis-à-vis what is representable within it; (2) this something has, anyway, to be somehow represented if there is to be a system at all; (3) as this will, however, be the representation of something which is not representable within the system – even more: the representation of the radical impossibility of representing the latter – that representation can take place only through tropological substitution. (Butler, Laclau and Žižek, 2000: 68, emphasis in original)

We can also point to Thatcher’s movement from ‘individual men and women’ to ‘our duty’ as relying upon a tropological shift. When Thatcher uses individuals, a term that inscribes a closed totality itself, to represent our duty, those parts called individuals act toward the same end: our duty. The shared duty of these individuals works to construct a ‘people [who] must look after themselves first’, which universalizes individuals into a people and impossibly erases and maintains the part/whole distinction or, more precisely, engages in a synecdoche. Similar to the phrase ‘you are unique like everyone else’, Thatcher’s quote works paradoxically to emphasize a kind of radical particularity – there are only individuals – while simultaneously flattening the particularity of individuals through the construction of a people with a shared duty. These sorts of discursive gymnastics do not operate logically, i.e. in terms of predicates that rationally follow from their premises, but tropologically, i.e. in terms of turning something into another thing by means of representation. ³ Rather than the categorical certainty that comes from rational principles like noncontradiction and the excluded middle, tropes work in excess of stated means and ends and can even provide the grounding assumptions that allow a rational logic to operate. The tropological work that discourses do in excess of their instrumental logics operate through ontological rhetorics, the rudderless representation of some particular social object as the whole of an impossible society.

The work of ontological rhetorics appears through the excesses of theory and policy (Szkudlarek, 2014, 2017, Carusi, 2019), and as a lens, ontological rhetorics show education as something that is always more than what theory and policy says, knows, or demands. Ontological rhetorics is concerned with the work that policy and theory do to constitute what education is specifically outside of or in excess to the instrumental reason deployed by theory and policy. This requires that we understand rhetoric differently from the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions that view it as a tool of sophistry or persuasion, respectively. Instead we pick up rhetoric from a Vichian tradition that understands the constitutive dimensions of rhetoric brought about through rhetorical tropes (Vico,1984 [1744]. See also Burke, 1941 and White, 2000). Ontological rhetorics focus on the tropological constitution of realities, that is, the ways that tropes marshal being in order to represent and constitute objects as real. Under the umbrella of ontological rhetorics, we are interested in how education is made real tropologically in and by education theory and policy, as well as what these multiple attempts at fixing what education is tell us about education apart from what these, primarily instrumental, attempts assume.

Rather than categorizing the relationship between education and society according to a single trope, or a distinct series of tropes, our interest in ontological rhetorics looks at the ways these tropological constructions are overdetermined, a theme we return to in our conclusion. While tropological relations are able to be determined by multiple tropes, each trope offers different dimensions to the object it brings into being. Using more widely known tropes as an example, when we take metaphor as a constitutive trope for the relationship between education and society, we can see how two domains are identified with one another. Education is society as a metaphor makes education into society and, as identical, society also becomes education. However, if we read education is society as a synecdoche, then a part is representing the whole. Education, as a part of society, is able to represent the whole of society. Each of these readings provides different terms for analysis: metaphor evokes identity whereas synecdoche introduces the part/whole relationship. Different tropes offer new sets of relations between terms that can collaborate to further cement (or sunder) the association between terms. Ontological rhetorics enables us to think what education is apart from what education is for in the very discourses that arrange education in an instrumental relation to society, namely education policy and theory. In the following two sections, we will review work done in education that uses ontological rhetorics to analyze education policy and theory.

Ontological rhetorics of policy

Laclau’s work has been used to show some novel, even counterintuitive, dimensions of education policy, particularly as policies attempt to instrumentalize teachers and teaching. Using Laclau’s distinction between the ethical and the normative, Carusi (2017) introduces the ethical dimensions of despair to provide analysis of the phenomena of teachers both leaving the profession themselves as well as recommending that graduating students not pursue teaching as a career (see also Dworakowska in this issue). This negative response by teachers to their own profession exhibits an ethical act to the degree that it breaks from the normative order established by education policy, a normative order that positions teachers as the most significant in-school factor in student achievement. Despair works tropologically in at least two senses here. First, despair is to be avoided or overcome within education scholarship, policy and practice with some notable exceptions (Roberts, 2012, 2013, 2015; Kline, 2013; Cowley, 2017).To position despair as ethical in education, a field that presumes hope as its motivating passion, turns despair, that abject, disavowed and to-be-avoided-or-overcome passion, into something worthwhile. Second, despair works tropologically as something that does not follow from the logic of teacher effectiveness set up by education policy. Instead of proceeding according policies that entrench an instrumental (and binary) logic of teaching as either an effective or ineffective means to raise student achievement, teachers remove themselves from the profession by leaving and discouraging others from taking a similar position. Where education policy seeks to instrumentalize teaching and teachers, teachers refuse to be such a means, and take up a position that acts as a non sequitur to a profession measured by policy in terms of effectiveness.

In addition, the ontological work of rhetoric described by Laclau has been used to theorize policy as non-instrumental (Carusi, 2019). While policy studies have long evaluated and criticized education policy on the basis of its un/stated and un/accomplished means and ends, the recent turn to ontology in policy studies has questioned the taken for granted instrumentality of policy (Webb and Gulson, 2015). Applying Szkudlarek’s (2013, 2017) ‘excesses of theory’ to consider the excesses of policy, Carusi (2019) shows how the assumption of policy’s instrumentality misses the non-instrumental dimensions of policy that enable policy’s instrumental prescriptions to operate. In other words, policy constructs a world in which a means/ends approach can function; however, when policy analysis focuses strictly on the instrumental dimension of policy, the work that policy does to create the world in which instrumentality can proceed remains unconsidered. Carusi (2019) introduces the idea of copular metaphor as a way policy studies can elicit the ontological assumptions and projections of policy. Through this type of metaphor, policy is able to both identify and ground the domain of education with some other domain. The example provided by Carusi (2019) is the copular metaphor public education is a market, which identifies public education with an economic market and grounds each in the other, thus public education and economic markets operate according to the same rules. Through the copular metaphor public education is a market, four decades of US federal education policy has been able to prescribe instrumental solutions to education problems based on a reality, constructed by education policy, in which public education is a market.

Carusi’s work elicits the tropological dimensions of education policy and teachers’ responses to policy (see also Carusi, 2013). While policy making and criticism operate primarily according to an instrumental logic, the tropological runs in excess of and as ground for this logic. Teachers who resist the instrumentalization of their profession by policy absent themselves from the profession as an excess that does not follow policy’s prescription of effectivity. And policy itself contains tropological excesses that ground and identify education and the market with each other, establishing the terrain in which instrumental logic can operate.

Ontological rhetorics of theory

Analyzing the ontological rhetorics of education theory points to its involvement in the (impossible) construction of society as a social totality; or, more precisely, the construction of totalities in general, because the individual, as in Thatcher’s quote above, also needs to be construed as singular: as a subject, an identity or personality. In this respect, theory operates like policy as described in the previous section. In both instances, theory and policy ground what education ‘should do’ in a tropologically produced totality of society. The work of Rousseau (1979, 2002), equally concerned with educating Emile and the construction of the body politic (Szkudlarek, 2005, 2017), is paradigmatic of the tropological production of relations between education and the political. Szkudlarek (2017) shows how Rousseau shifts smoothly between education and the political by inscribing in both domains the same set of rhetorical strategies.

In his book on the politics of educational theories, Szkudlarek (2017) isolates three principal strategies that structure Rousseau’s educational and political discourses. Apart from the construction of totality (identity, unity, singularity), Szkudlarek points to the construction of visibility and invisibility in Rousseau’s theory. In its specifically pedagogical sense, theory speaks to how visibility and invisibility condition education practice. ⁴ In Rousseau we find numerous recommendations for making pedagogical influence invisible to the child (the tutor should win public respect before the child is born; the main strategy of upbringing requires that we set the scene of learning before the child arrives, so that particular stimuli appear natural to him, etc.). Analogically, Rousseau invents strategies of invisibility for politics: The Legislator, for instance, should work on shaping public opinion ‘in silence’, being apparently concerned with drafting ‘visible’ legal regulations that can only operate on condition that public opinion has been shaped previously. In more general terms, the control over visibility and invisibility of things, or their sensibility (Rancière, 2006), appears to be the prerequisite of modern power regimes (cf. Foucault, 1977), and ontological rhetorics of education are deeply involved in their creation. With Rousseau, the reader is given a normative guide to navigate what should and shouldn’t be visible when educating a student and/or governing a people, and similar strategies of making things visible and invisible re-emerge in other modern theories of education (Szkudlarek, 2017, 2019).

The third of these ontological strategies is the construction of temporality. Education is conceived as a temporal endeavour, concerned with shaping the future of individuals and societies as well as with conserving the past, keeping it alive. The present appears to be reduced to instrumental functions in educational theories – their emergence with the birth of modernity means that they need to be preoccupied with the construction of a future. The construction of invisibility mentioned above can thus be identified as a particular modality of temporal rhetoric, where the present (of a child’s experience) is ‘jumped over’, or encroached in instrumental terms, so that in order to shape the future one controls the past. Education is thus freed from the risk of direct and forceful intervention that would put the modern ideal of subjective autonomy at risk, because intervention takes place before the child enters the scene. The teacher’s agency becomes invisible, and therefore pedagogically effective, when it is the scene itself that ‘naturally’ inspires the child’s learning. ⁵

Understood in its tropological dimensions, education theory turns the categorical distinctions between visible and invisible, as well as past, present and future into an undecidable terrain where each becomes the other, where in and through these slippages, education occurs. The visible work of Emile’s teacher is rendered invisible for Emile to then reappear as natural in order for education to proceed properly. The present of the child is encroached by the past and future to assure the continuation (and continual improvement) of an ontologically impossible society that has never fully existed but appears as a horizon that education will instrumentally approach and ideally meet. Education theory, like education policy, construes a world prepared for education’s appearance, and this construal is done through a particular theory or way of seeing what education is. On this suggestion, we now turn to what we might venture about what education is when we think of it through the ontological rhetorics of theory and policy together.

What is education when society is impossible?

With the tropological construction of education performed by theory and policy discussed, we can now offer some concluding remarks for what education is when society is impossible, or as our title suggests, we now turn to consider what education is when there is no society. Having shown the tropological construction of education’s mooring in theory and policy, in what way can we think that education exists? Asked differently, when depriving education of its normative and/or instrumental anchorage in historical logic, economic necessity, identity of the Nation, and the like, what can one say of education? Even when one is capable of cohesively theorizing these heterogeneous tropes, tropes are diverse and incommensurable to categorical logics. This is well exemplified by Gert Biesta’s enumeration of education’s components: socialization, qualification and subjectification. Only subjectification is ‘specifically educational’, i.e. unlike the other two components, only subjectification can be realized specifically in educational settings (Biesta, 2010). Paradoxically, only subjectification is specifically educational, yet all three are constitutive of what education is.

Similar complexity may be traced along different ideological closures of what education is. When education is conceived as able to meet the demands of social justice, neoliberalism, salvation and so on, we begin to see that education itself has very little that it cannot accommodate, regardless of the conflictual and contradictory status of those accommodations. Education becomes a horizon for different normative and instrumental projects by promising the completion, closure and accomplishment of those projects. Education as a horizon of the neoliberal project will see only the best schools surviving in the competitive market of education. As a horizon of social justice, education will see equity, equality and inclusion for all students regardless of background. While these two horizons that are both education would conceptually undermine one another, this presents no problem for education, only for those particular projects. If education is directed simultaneously by incommensurable logics, some of which are not specifically educational, how do we think what education is without committing it to just another new (or old) mooring? May one say, following Laclau, that ontologically education does not exist? This question corresponds to the notion of overdetermination in psychoanalysis and political theory. Through a corresponding structural ambivalence between what is (not) society and what is (not) education, we are able to glean what education is when society is impossible.

Laclau and Mouffe (2001) developed their argument on the impossibility of society by referring to the concept of overdetermination in Louis Althusser (Althusser, 2005). They point to the fact that Althusser borrowed the term from Freud, who used overdetermination (Überdeterminierung) to describe the multiple factors that go into the determination of one’s dreams (Freud, 1994), and through Freud, Laclau and Mouffe view overdetermination as the condition and limit of possibility for society. They propose that overdetermination prevents the ‘determination in the last instance’ of society by material forces, economic forces in particular. Society is, instead, a phantasmatic closure of heterogeneous social relations. Its structure is not fixed by any universal logic as in Hegel and Marx, but only, as Laclau says, rhetorically (2014).

This use of overdetermination ignores why and how Althusser used the term himself (Lewis, 2005); however, by staying closer to the Freudian sense of overdetermination, Laclau and Mouffe are able to claim that society is a kind of fantasy of closure – society is the completion or closure of a particular discourse, a closure that is impossible for discourse due to its need to exclude something in order to constitute itself. In other words, the requirement for a discourse to exclude some element in order to exist, a constitutive outside, means that a discourse must maintain what it is not in order to maintain what it is, thus making it impossible to close itself off to its outside.

We follow in part Lewis’ critique of the inaccuracy in how Laclau and Mouffe (2001) reconstructed Althusser in this respect. Indeed, there is much more in this Althusserian concept than the authors of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy retain for their analysis. Where we part ways with Lewis is his insistence, in agreement with Althusser, on the singular necessity of the material (or the ‘real’ as he says) in creating social entities. How we read Althusser differs from Lewis’s critique. Overdetermination is not determination. It means that systemic contradictions (like those analyzed by Marx) always operate in a specific context that is also determining. Instead of thinking overdetermination as something that terminates with determination (in the last instance), we emphasize the ambiguity of the ‘over-’ in overdetermination.

Overdetermination, in our understanding, holds two meanings simultaneously, and consequently two issues arise in our use. First, ‘over’ can signify a position (above or on the other side of something else, like ‘over head’ and ‘over the horizon’), and second, over designates an excess in quantity or quality (like ‘overabundance’ or ‘overwrought’). Overdetermination may mean that something is determined from a different, or higher position so that this higher position is capable of imposing a certain articulation on what otherwise is heterogeneous and impossible to represent as singular. Overdetermination as a position works retroactively on already existing nebulous and scattered elements lacking common representation. In the second sense, overdetermination means something is being determined by too many factors simultaneously. In this latter, excessive sense, an overdetermined society would mean such a society cannot be established in a singular way following any single force that operates positionally, e.g. ‘below’ or ‘behind’ it— there is no universal logic that would overcome the heterogeneity of forces into some singular force. There are too many such forces exceeding whatever arrives to combine and unify them.

When Laclau speaks of societies being heterogeneous, he relies on this second, excessive sense of overdetermination: social forces cannot be unified by a universal logic to produce a conceivable identity, or essence, that could be meaningfully designated as society. In other words, society is never successfully determined. What we call society is a heterogenous combination of demands related to that which is missing – to diverse instances and experiences of lack (like the lack of justice, welfare, democracy, etc.). In the excessive sense then, we can say that society is never fully determined, only ever overdetermined. As we have mentioned before, Laclau says that even though social fullness (or total determination) is ‘ontologically impossible’, such fullness can be represented as instrumentally achievable. However, such representation must occur tropologically. Representing instrumental possibility, for example, can occur once a particular element assumes the representation of a (missing) whole, that is through a synecdoche or catachresis, which can then serve as an end for assorted means, e.g., policy and theory, to reach. How does this discussion relate to the analysis of educational theory and policy? Both educational theories and policies operate not only instrumentally, but also rhetorically, and rhetorical tropes are indispensable to their construction. One of their fundamental tasks is to create the objects of their own investigation: human subjects and social totalities in case of theory, and social totalities, social problems and political demands in case of policy. The work of copular metaphors that operate by simultaneous gestures of identification and grounding is of prior importance in policy discourse (Carusi, 2019), but they appear in theory discourse as well (Szkudlarek, 2017). When education policy and theory assume or attempt to define what education is, they tropologically represent what education is through the selection of particular referents, the market, the public, and so on. And because education can accommodate heterogeneous referents, it, like society, is overdetermined. Education – in its instances visible through the lens of theory and policy analysis – needs to be analyzed as overdetermined in both meanings proposed above, as positioned and as excessive, or as ‘overabundant’ in relation to its positional overdetermination. Let us unpack these claims.

The (double) overdetermination of education means, first, that ‘the educational’ (the diverse and incommensurable educating practices, agencies, rationalities, etc.) is informed, pushed and pulled by competing education ideologies, by their temporal orientations, by conflicting interests of parents, teachers, students, policy makers, by different logics of socialization, qualification and subjectification as in Biesta’s reconstruction, etc. In such a configuration, one cannot positively say what education ‘is’, because none of these competing forces (even the one that has been identified as essentially educational, like subjectification) can fully determine what education ‘is’. Second, it means that in spite of that impossibility, we do ‘have’ education as a discursively invested object of our concerns, policies or academic reflection, and such investments can be understood as operating rhetorically as described by Laclau in his analysis of the political. In other words, we are speaking of education being a hegemonic construction where, in situations where something is identified as an object of exclusion (educational policies are very productive in construing such objects of exclusion – mediocrity, poverty, teen pregnancies, inadequate qualifications or hate speech in social media) education becomes identified by a particular element that precariously defines what education is about: equal opportunities, employability, critical competence, excellence, new media literacy, intercultural awareness and the like. Interestingly, the non-instrumental turn in education theory is not free of such investments, and – in order to oppose instrumentalism – it identifies education with study (Lewis, 2015), free time, or schole (Masschelein and Simons, 2013), love for the world (Vlieghe and Zamojski, 2019, see also this issue), and so on. Each of these attempts can be read as a hegemonic claim whereby other demands are represented as excluded, ‘embraced’, or merely tolerated by such hegemonic attempts. We want to stress that these are rhetorical closures, that each hegemony operates in the mode of synecdoche when a particular element stands in for the whole of education. To sum up, the field of the educational is a theatre of operation for competing forces (which is precisely the situation Johann Friedrich Herbart wanted to resist by way of establishing paedagogik as a separate, autonomous academic discipline (Herbart, 1908)), none of which is capable of imposing its logic in a mode of determination. At the same time, these forces are crystallized, or hegemonized by particular demands that provide for their temporary identification of what education is.

And second, education is – in relation to any such hegemony, or identification – excessive. In other words, education will never establish itself as ‘education’ identical with itself, as a totality categorically demarcating what is and is not educational, or what is non- or not-quite-educational. Embracing employability as ‘education’ will also cater for subjectification; being concerned with inclusivity will simultaneously promote selections and segregation. As such, education can be understood as a constitutive element of the political: of the very process of construing social totalities and individual subjects as elements of such imagined totalities. We want to stress that this is not an instrumental relation where education is a means to political ends. Rather than being a separate institutional practice that can be seen as technically instrumental to or colonized by a politics external to its nature, in this ontological approach education is political as its co-constitutive element. What counts in education politically is not its development of rationality, social or cognitive skills or civic competencies. Nor does the political of education reduce to its instrumental relation to society, i.e. that education is a means to change or fix society. Rather, the political of education is productive of rhetorical tropes, topoi, and strategies that do not speak to ‘politics’ in their daily routines and configurations, but to the political, to the very unending, unaccomplished, impossible construability of society, that is, to the ontology of social becoming. Through this sense of the political, we can say that education is not in an effective relation to society except as one among countless other fantasies that support the closure/suture/fixity of the social. Instead, education is irreducibly ambiguous and requires ontological rhetorics to be anything at all. It is with this in mind that we can theorize education’s relation to society. Education is a tropological register of the social through which we continually encounter the impossibility of society. Rather than understanding education and society as each other’s instruments, we propose to see education as a shift, a distance, within the political – or within the ontology of social becoming. Rather than being effectively functional to current forms of political power, education contributes to the production of discursive resources necessary for the construction of any political entity, for configurations of the political understood as the ontological process of creating the frameworks of social life (Szkudlarek, 2017). Understanding education as a tropological register in the sense outlined here requires that education be political, that the political is an irreducible element of education, but what is political about education in the sense described here does not conform to the instrumental arrangement espoused and/or critiqued for education’s effectivity for political change. Instead, education is how we conceive the political as such through the countless and continued failures of education to achieve, institute, and fix the very society it promises.