Abstract
In Democratic Education as a Curricular Problem: Historical Consciousness and the Moralizing Limits of the Present, Daniel Friedrich attempts to understand the discursive construction of the “responsible citizen” in contemporary, post-dictatorial Argentinian education. Through a Foucauldian genealogy of the figure of responsible citizen in Argentinian policy, curricular materials, and interactive museums/national parks, Friedrich reveals the various narrative structures, tropes, and concepts which frame what it means to be a citizen in a country coming to terms with its recent, violent past. At the center of this genealogy lies the question of historical consciousness and the naturalization of a series of dichotomies between past and present, democracy and authoritarianism, “the people” and its “enemies.” What emerges from Friedrich’s careful analysis is a pedagogical notion of responsibility as an identification with the project of democratic nation-building, and a set of skills for protecting the nation from external evil.
Friedrich’s analysis explicitly connects to Foucault’s genealogical method—a method that helps us understand who we are in the present by describing the discursive rules that construct the self, the nation, and the citizen. Additionally, his analysis more directly reminded me of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment which has a more overtly political and critical thrust than Foucault’s own tendency toward thick textual and institutional description. Like Adorno and Horkheimer’s analysis, Friedrich powerfully demonstrates how the pedagogical project meant to protect the people against the horrors of dictatorship turns back on itself, reproducing the very same discursive mechanisms and strategies deployed by authoritarian regimes. Both authoritarianism as well as the teleology of democratic progress found in Argentinian policy and curricular materials expunge democracy as a practice of dissensus, conflict, and agonism. This does not mean, as Friedrich rightly points out, that we can simply collapse one into the other. Rather, it shows there is a grid of intelligibility that underlies how the two constitute historical knowledge of the nation.
In light of this critique, Friedrich turns to what he calls a “post-foundational thought” (p. 117) that troubles the matrix defining “democratic education” and “responsible citizenship.” On this view, democracy ceases to be a set of predefined skills, and the narrative of nation-building ceases to be predicated on a disavowal of its own internal violence. Democracy, in this sense, becomes what Derrida refers to as an ethical practice of hospitality toward otherness, including the otherness of the self and of historical consciousness. According to Friedrich, agonistic democracy opens the citizen up to the darkness and violence that undercut dichotomies separating the shame of the past and the promise of the present, democracy and authoritarianism, and the people and its purported external enemies. Post-foundations thought thus lives within that which it deconstructs, openly acknowledging and taking responsibility for the contingencies of its own narratives.
Friedrich’s text is an engaging read for anyone interested in the relationship between personal memory, historical/national narratives, and education. While explicitly focused on Argentinian educational reform, the book offers a compelling example of Foucauldian genealogy with a potentially broad appeal. The concluding clarion call for a post-foundational turn is addressed to multiple, intersecting fields such as curriculum theory, memory studies, and educational philosophy. In addition, the move toward incorporating informal learning sites such as museums and art parks into questions of curricular design is refreshing; it produces a highly generative and dynamic text that moves beyond limits that often circumscribe the field of “curriculum studies.”
In conclusion, I would like to pose several questions of my own which seem to haunt the text. If democracy becomes an ethical practice of hospitality toward the other as Friedrich implies, what happens to democracy as a political action of agonism? How are these two related? Does ethics replace politics? While citing Rancière on dissensus, Friedrich’s final theoretical turn is toward Derridian hospitality, which in my mind is somewhat different. It would seem that ethics applies to those within society (within the consensus), those identified as “responsible citizens” already. Conversely, politics applies to those outside of society as the no-count who must force their voices into the conversation in order to re-count what has been counted. If this is so, then what are the implications for democratic education?
While there are several places within the text where Friedrich gestures toward the body, his overwhelming emphasis is on the linguistic/discursive formation of the citizen, historical consciousness, and post-foundational thought. In other words, democracy—ethical, political, or otherwise—rests in re-thinking curriculum. Yet, it seems to me that passing references to the effect of contemporary art parks and interactive museums on the body need to be given more attention in the text. If Friedrich recasts democracy as an ethical mode of hospitality, he does not seem to pay heed to Rancière’s thesis that democracy is first and foremost aesthetic, affecting the senses. While Friedrich troubles many of the parameters of curriculum theory, he seems to leave intact the primacy of thought, cognition, and conceptualization at the expense of the senses themselves. This second question opens up to a horizon beyond thinking: the possibility to move beyond the foundations of thought toward a post-foundational sensorium or affectivity. Although the text lends itself to such a theory, it remains decisively on the margins as a kind of minimal presence that needs to be recognized as the internal otherness of thought itself. Otherwise, the text could veer dangerously close to perpetuating the same structure of exclusion which is found in both state-sponsored democratic policy and authoritarianism. With an affective turn, critical curriculum studies might very well have to break with its own methodological rules and grids of intelligibility, moving beyond discourse and critical discourse analysis to phenomenological, aesthetic, and affective models of embodied intersubjectivity.
Furthermore, while Friedrich highlights a tension between historical consciousness and personal consciousness (collective versus individual memory), he does not directly deal with embodied memory residing in the tissues, bones, and sensorium of the flesh. Such a program might be necessary in order to more adequately capture the complexity of Friedrich’s own response to the space and time of the Museo de la Memoria (originally a concentration camp/school and now a museum). This location is an embodied location, which, as Friedrich is keen to point out, must be controlled and policed by an “official” pedagogical narrative of citizenship so as to ensure that the proper lessons of history are learned. What must be contained here is not simply “improper” thought but a body affected by the haunted space—a body whose own memories reside beyond the unconscious, and bear testimony to that which cannot be spoken. The question for Friedrich becomes, “What kind of genealogical narrative is hospitable to this kind of memory? What kind of writing does not silence the silence of the body’s memories?”
These questions are not to undermine the achievements of Friedrich’s book. Indeed, my intent is to stay faithful to Friedrich’s deconstructive tendencies, and thus continue the conversation by returning to the places within the text which remain open to further inquiry. It is a testament to the generative nature of his writing and the theoretical complexity of his analysis that such questions can be posed in the first place.