Aspiration,abjection and precariousness: The neo-liberal educator’s desire for compliance

Aspirational discourse

Drawing on Kristeva’s (1982) notion of intertextuality and Michel Foucault’s (1984) concepts of episteme, statement, discourse, archive and genealogy, I suggest that intertextuality becomes not simply the way in which texts are read through other texts, but, moreover, acts as a mechanism for discursive change, which, in turn, impacts on the redefined discourse of individuals. How we interpret objects and events, and set them within systems of meaning, is dependent on discursive structures. It is the discursive structure that defines the field of vision and makes something significant. From this perspective, the government’s aspirational discourse arranges the vision into a narrative, and it is difficult to think outside of the narrative if that narrative is supported by institutional and cultural organizations. Statements are ways of speaking or texts that are presented as ‘serious’ and contain a truth claim. Discursive systems about underachievement change over time and, as such, our understanding of the real changes with them. The episteme is a set of statements that are brought together in discursive structures – in this case, which formulate a culture or a system of institutional support for the idea that low aspiration leads to failure. It is these systems of support which allow us to think about issues in a legitimate fashion. Discourse underpins practice in that it shapes the way we think about underachievement. This may not be a true interpretation of the ‘real’, but rather an interpretation regarded as convincing.

Abjection is not simply an enduring role imposed on an exploited and unknowing victim; abjection involves the neo-liberal state actively sustaining a social symbolic network in which the victim finds their subjectivity exposed to a ‘constituting’ set of processes, potentially leading to a ‘(re)constituted’ identity. The neo-liberal state does not directly take responsibility for the processes of self-formation; rather, the neo-liberal self is encouraged to conceive itself as formally responsible for the processes of becoming as experienced. Our sense of self, our subjectivity and our position in society are assumed to be a result of our personal activity and, as such, people are assumed to be guilty for how they end up and the circumstances in which they find themselves.

Abjection and alterity

Kristeva (1982) views abjection in relation to the construction of a psychic and social identity of the Other. Abjection is understood in terms of the limits of an acceptable self and shapes our ability to imagine the Other. Abjection not only characterizes the Otherness of a person, but encourages us to think of the Other by reference to things we are disgusted by. As such, abjection precedes all other attributes of the Other. As Butler (1990: 111) explains, the abjected ‘fall outside the human, indeed, constitute the domain of the dehumanized and the abject against which the human itself is constituted’. In an educational context, abjection is imposed on those people who do not fit into the regulatory ideal of achievement via aspiration. Such individuals are faced with mechanisms that marginalize and exclude, helping to generate what most of us would regard as ways of living that are ‘unliveable’ within ‘uninhabitable’ zones of abjection.

Abjection is, then, a product of the neo-liberalization of citizenship – the legal defining of populations as the ‘interiorized other’ (Butler and Spivak, 2007: 16). People without aspiration become the abject, ‘interiorized other’ of the school system. Citizenship thus has two faces: ‘the bearer both of subjection to sovereign power and individual liberties’ (Agamben, 1998: 125). Abjection is the imperative force of sovereignty (Bataille, 1993), the taking away of human dignity (Krauss, 1996). Abjection shapes our understanding of inequality, our perceptual field, by correcting and regulating our subjectivities. Individuals who are perceived to be without aspiration are imagined as anti-citizens who reject the self-scripting, entrepreneurial conception of selfhood promoted by the neo-liberal educator. People with low aspiration are viewed as an abject, classless class of vulgar and tasteless tragicomic individuals. In a similar fashion to Franz Fanon’s and Homi Bhabha’s analysis of the techniques of colonial and post-colonial forms subjectification and governmentality (Gill, 2008), the state draws upon the disciplinary forces of sovereignty, to generate processes of social inclusion and exclusion, that in the last analysis help produce abject populations who are blamed for their own exclusion. From Tony Blair’s government (1997–2007) onwards, neo-liberalism has been presented as a form of market-driven egalitarianism, producing a rhetoric of individualism, mobility and choice. Those individuals who choose not to actively engage with this rhetoric become ‘national abjects’, and include such people as bogus asylum-seekers, illegal immigrants and chavs (the word chav is pejorative term commonly used in the United Kingdom to describe a young lower-class person who engages in brash and loutish behaviour.). National abjects function as a subjectifying force, ‘in excess of what can be empirically proved or logically construed’ (Bhabha, 1983: 18). Neo-liberal governmentality regulates social life by exercising control over the intimate interior of the consciousness – that is, neo-liberalism reconfigures the relationship between the individual and the polity by inducing anxiety and promoting self-governance. For Butler (1993: 3), abjection is not a ‘permanent contestation of social norms condemned to the pathos of perpetual failure’, but ‘a critical resource in the struggle to rearticulate the terms of symbolic legitimacy and intelligibility’.

What is a precarious life?

Agamben’s (1998) understanding of the biopolitical nature of modernity may appear to be a long way away from issues of aspiration, school improvement and school effectiveness. However, the mechanisms of the precarious life he identifies, taking his starting point from Foucault’s concept of biopower, are also to be found in current education policy and practice with its emphasis on the poverty of aspiration. For Agamben, Foucault’s analysis of power was concerned with political techniques – notably, the role of the police, by which the state assumes care of individuals and, secondly, the technologies of self. The state no longer wants to control those people who are a threat to the state, but wants to exert control over the whole population using technologies of power. In Agamben’s terms, the people who reject what the school has to offer run the risk of becoming the homo sacer – and our perception of school refuseniks has much in common with our perception of the refugee, asylum-seeker and prisoner in the concentration camp; they are all people who live in a ‘zone of indistinction’. They are all homo sacer, prejudged human victims who are included only to be excluded from political life. The presence of the homo sacer generates forms of anxiety that become central to modes of subjectivation within neo-liberalism, where such anxiety gives way to forms of precariousness. Even the most intimate areas of our lives – biological functioning and sexuality – have become politicized. One is born as a citizen of a given country, in which birth then acquires biopolitical consequences. The school can be identified as the point or intersection between what Agamben calls the juridico-institutional and the biopolitical models of power.

In order to combat fear and anxiety, and social and political precarization, the neo-liberal self is expected to develop a capacity for risk management. In these circumstances, forms of living together and common approaches to political action are not regarded as valid solutions to the perceived problems we face. For Butler (2004), individuals are attached to others, but this does not mean that we are merged with the community or that we are without boundaries. The body is a site of both desire and physical vulnerability. Butler wants to identify the conditions under which a grievable life is established and maintained, and the mechanisms of exclusion and practices of effacement. Each person is constituted politically, in part because of the social vulnerability of our bodies. In addition, our attachment to others means that we are exposed to risk and violence. There is a link between discourse and dehumanization in Butler’s work, and we see the same relation reproduced in schools with regard to pupils who are perceived to be without ambition. This discourse is silent and melancholic in that we assume no commonality and no common bodily condition with those without ambition. Such people have fallen outside the moral economy and outside the western conception of the human. Their presence reminds us that we all live with the risk of vulnerability. Exclusion and effacement have been rationalized on the grounds of ‘self-defence’. Butler (2004: 52) also argues that governmentality should be understood as a ‘mode of power concerned with the maintenance and control of bodies and persons, the production and regulation of persons and populations, and the circulation of goods insofar as they maintain and restrict the life of the population’.

Neo-liberal forms of governance involve increasing insecurity whilst arguing that there is no alternative. Isabell Lorey (2015) also explores the argument that governmentality is primarily about governing people rather than territories. Thus, governmentality does not consist in primarily being repressive or explicitly exploitive, but is based on an internalized self-discipline. Like Butler (2004) and Agamben (1998), Lorey (2015) also points to the significance of self-control as a key factor that serves to regulate a person’s own precariousness. Individualization is a form of isolation and is concerned with the ways in which individual people constitute their inner being using their imagination. Governance is concerned with what Foucault (1984) described as the ‘conduct of conducts’, and the emphasis is on the interiority of the person and the forms of self-referencing in which they engage. Subjectivation is positioned ambivalently: on the one hand, self-determination or self-creation and, on the other hand, subjugation and obedience. As individuals, we have mixed, ambiguous and often contradictory feelings about the world around us, including ourselves. Precarization is a contested field which is different from traditional forms of exploitation as it relates to subjective desires. Forms of biopolitical governmental power are not easily perceived as an aspect of neo-liberal restructuring because they often appear to be personal, rooted in our own personal responsibility as self-made, free decisions. These techniques of self-conduct contain ‘active modes of self-exploitation as well as forms of voluntary self-precarization’ (Lorey, 2015: 106).

Precarity is linked to inequality through Othering – ‘the construction of dangerous others, positioned respectively within and outside the political and social community as “abnormal” and “alien”’ (Lorey, 2015: 14). Such Others threaten the norm and are characterized by their illness, filth and criminality. We are often fearful and anxious not only by the presence of such Others, but also by the vulnerability we share with them. Aspiration promotes security and takes the form of ‘biopolitical immunization’, which we need to stabilize and heal any aspects of the self that we judge to be contaminated and, at the same, allowing us to exclude those who cannot be integrated by judging them to be beyond neutralization.

Aspiration for working-class pupils means rejecting their parents’ values, attitudes and beliefs, no longer wanting to be working class and wanting instead to be upwardly mobile. Building the capacity of the school to tackle this poverty of aspiration has become one of the central preoccupations of the neo-liberal educator – to identify pupils with low aspiration and place them within a ‘zone of indistinction’. The neo-liberal reforms of schools are intended to improve schools and make them more effective. However, the unforeseen consequence is that those pupils who choose to lead a life that does not conform to the school’s conception of aspiration are likely to find themselves within a ‘zone of indistinction’.

The behaviour of the boys in Corrigan’s (1979) and Willis’s (1977) studies would not be tolerated in schools today; such behaviours have become demonized, as reflected in figures from popular culture such as Wayne and Waynetta Slob, Vicky Pollard and Lauren Cooper (‘Am I bovvered though? … Look, face, bovvered?’), or the cast of the reality-television show Geordie Shore. Nombrilisme and self-critique have become central to the neoliberal understanding how to lead a successful life; at the same time such forms of self-crafting help to generate new forms of anxiety-provoking precariousness. The central anxiety is that many people experience is that they will be seen as a failure and make the transition from ‘lad’ to ‘chav’.

Since the publication of 1988 Education reform Act, schools in the UK have been subjected to much more rigorous forms of public scrutiny, inspection and audit. In addition, schools that are seen to underachieve in relation to a range of benchmarks are named and shamed. In order to fulfil its audit requirements, a central purpose of the neoliberal school is now to ‘correct’ the pupil by enhancing pupil ‘aspiration’ and breaking pupil resistance. The role of the neoliberal school is to undermine the processes of identity formation that working class children traditionally drew upon to give meaning to their life and place in the wider society. Children from working-class backgrounds should have the aspiration to want to leave the working class. Working-class pupils should no longer be proud of their class origins and should no longer embrace the forms of merit that Willis’s ‘lads’ aspired to in the 1970s.

However, because the counter-hegemony is now rooted in consumption, which is not emancipatory, it simply ties pupils more tightly to the neo-liberal project, where corrosive forms of consumption take their starting point from the same neo-liberal assumptions as contemporary school culture. Ironically, such consumption-driven resistance also legitimizes marketization and affirms forms of individualization that stress a culture of personal failing as the root of inequality and the superior status of the effective consumer. In the emergent moral economy, an individual is expected to engage in the consumption of desirable brands and ‘designer labels’, and young individuals, in particular, who are unable to participate in the celebration of consumption run the risk of being stigmatized and having their comparative inadequacy publicly identified. The neo-liberal moral economy contains within it a celebrity culture, which is built around forms of conspicuous consumption that are seen to be central to the public persona of entertainers, footballers, television stars and film stars – attractive people whom we should aspire to be like, with high incomes and a life constructed around style and pleasure.

Rather than adopting a cynical view that people leading a precarious life are duped consumers who internalize and essentially play out a script dictated by the market, the starting point for this argument is Foucault’s understanding of the relations between power and knowledge. This is employed alongside the way in which later commentators (Butler, Agamben, Bourdieu and Lorey) have developed an understanding of a precarious life – that is, an understanding where the central mechanisms for its continuation – the seduction-repression strategies which appear to be rooted in conceptions of fun, playfulness and humour – have displaced older modes of integration, social cohesion and cultural legitimation.

From this perspective, ‘education’ is not simply the transmission of knowledge and skills to participate in the labour market. Young people are subjected to forms of regulation contrived by people in power in an effort to get students to internalize new habits of conduct. And, equally significantly, those occupying the new positions of school leadership are not only expected to be responsible for the surveillance of young people, but are also judged in terms of their ability, as skilled practitioners, to make young people internalize new habits of conduct.

The effective school is one that successfully deconstructs the anti-school cultures of the ‘lads’ and undermines their local traditions, upon which their identities were built in the 1970s. A situation of ‘precariousness’ (précarité) cannot be dismissed as cultural deprivation or a lack of cultural capital. As initially explored by Pierre Bourdieu (1998) in relation to the growth of ‘the precariat’, there has been a significant shift in the habitus, leading to new forms of practice that constitute a precarious life.

The neo-liberal educator

Research into educational leadership, school improvement and effectiveness focuses on educational outcomes as a product of inadequate leadership, poor teaching or related pedagogical activities in the school, at the expense of external factors that may generate unequal access to educational opportunities or, indeed, the personal choice of the learners. David Reynolds observes that the effect of social class, for example, is very small, accounting for only 3% of differences between pupils (National College, 2010). As Andy Hargreaves (2010: 9) suggests, effective schools ‘take ownership of the problems and reject the notion that the school itself can do little or nothing because it is somebody else’s responsibility to provide a solution’. The social context is not regarded as something that should prevent schools from being effective (Rassool and Morley, 2000). Teachers, not parents or communities or wider social inequality, ‘are judged to be responsible for student outcomes’ (Larsen, 2010: 216). However, as Carlo Raffo and Helen Gunter (2008: 406) point out, ‘the evidence that the historical links between social exclusion, low educational achievement and limited life chances have been broken is hard to come by’.

In addition, these approaches to educational research emerged while neo-liberal governments came to power in Europe and North America. The underpinning assumptions are that all children want to be successful in school, for success in school leads to greater opportunity and social mobility – the very things that all children should want, irrespective of social class or family background. These approaches focus on how inside, school-based factors, such as leadership, classroom management and teaching, are the most important influences on student achievement. There is a corresponding underemphasis on the social context of the school and the mechanisms of social exclusion found in the wider society. There is also an underemphasis on the pupils’ choice of life project and processes of becoming.

Contemporary approaches to school improvement emphasize, firstly, the importance of capacity-building in schools and, secondly, the importance of cultural changes in schools that bring about and maintain school improvement. Michael Fullan (2001: 7) argues that school leaders can enhance the effectiveness of the schools in which they work if ‘they continually work on the five components of leadership – if they pursue moral purpose, understand the change process, develop relationships, foster knowledge building, and strive for coherence – with energy, enthusiasm, and hopefulness’ (see also Fullan, 2002). Research into effectiveness has significantly helped establish the neo-liberal belief that schools, rather than social inequality, are the key to making a difference in pupils’ lives and their future life chances (Reynolds et al., 2001).

As Clive Dimmock and Cheng Yong Tan rightly point out:

broader socio-cultural contextual variables that influence student and school performance – such as race/ethnicity, diversity in classrooms and schools, parenting processes, socio-economic environment and resource equity (for example, class size, types of programme offered, compensatory education and social mobility) – are ignored. (Dimmock and Tan, 2015: 5; see also Tienken and Mullen, 2014)

School-effectiveness research has been described as practical and pragmatic in nature (Teddlie and Reynolds, 2010), and few researchers have considered the limited attention given to questioning the underpinning neo-liberal assumptions (Mortimore, 1992; Reynolds et al., 2011; Scheerens, 2013; Scheerens et al., 2001). This lack of attention to underpinning assumptions means that neo-liberal assumptions about market principles and the associated suppositions of self-sufficiency, personal initiative, individualism, self-regulation, new public management, institutional competition, parental choice and the value of benchmark-driven performative regimes are rarely questioned or reflected upon. Such limited critical reflection means that school-effectiveness research serves to legitimize neo-liberal ideas. This uncritically reproduces neo-liberal discourse about the personal origins of inequalities, as an unforeseen consequence of attempting to make schools more effective in neo-liberal terms.

School-effectiveness researchers leave themselves open to the suggestion that they are part of the neo-liberal project in relation to public services. This research shares the underpinning neo-liberal assumptions of individualization, focusing on educational outcomes as a product of the activities in school, rather than as a product of factors external to the school – notably, unequal access to educational opportunities. The research is also concerned with the role of effective individuals in leadership positions, finding more effective ways for schools to build capacity within a competitive market for education and ‘do something’ about the poverty of aspiration.

Neo-liberalism also emerged at the same time as consumerism, with a growing inequality and new form of moral economy that criminalizes certain forms of working-class behaviour. Such neo-liberal approaches to public policy combine to provide the foundations for a potentially precarious life – a life in which inequality is viewed as a personal failing and not because of any wider processes of exclusion. Seductive forms of consumerism within neo-liberalism have also impacted pupil resistance in schools. Pupils seek to generate value and self-worth through their investments in style – an approach that school leaders can sometimes use to place pupils within marginalized and disadvantaged social positions. Such forms of consumption-driven resistance are interpreted positively by young people, and thus used as tokens of esteem to distance themselves from the school’s conception of aspiration – an approach that merely ties the young person’s life to the neo-liberal project by another route. Young people who successfully participate in the consumer market, and who are seen to have achieved in consumer terms, have fulfilled a different set of aspirations. Young people who cannot afford the tokens of esteem are not judged as victims of a system of inequality, but as lacking in good taste. In this way, young people are apt to be viewed as ‘flawed consumers’ who lack aspiration in terms of personal style and in the qualities of good taste needed to be successful in the marketplace of self and identity. They are thus perceived as individuals who do not successfully consume because they are, in fact, worthless.

In the UK, from the 1988 Education Reform Act onwards, there has been a series of measures introduced by Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron to bring about school improvement and ‘build capacity’ in schools by enhancing school leadership and school effectiveness. These approaches take their starting point from the free market and the state’s withdrawal from economic and welfare activity (Harvey, 2007). Since the publications of Willis (1977) and Corrigan (1979), such consumption-driven nombrilisme has, for many people, put an end to the traditional intellectual and cultural foundations of western civilization. Nombrilisme and self-critique have become part of the social fiction of how to lead a successful life within neo-liberalism. Consequently, within the neo-liberal condition, individuals are experiencing new forms of anxiety-provoking precariousness, as many young people make the transition from ‘lads’ to ‘chavs’. Young people, for example, are educated to view themselves as highly self-reflexive human agents engaged in projects of self-assembly – this in a world which appears to hold any number of meaning-endowing narratives from which young people are free to choose. Personal problems relating to a lack of money are no longer defined as public issues associated with economic inequality, but are experienced as internal psychic conflicts and perceived as embedded in personal failings. Violence in schools, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, the incorporation of tokens of esteem into the self, as forms of resistance, and the increase in NEET (not in education, employment or training) or status-zero young people are all manifestations of the same neo-liberal processes that lead to a precarious life. The concept of the NEET most clearly contains the negative subtext of having ‘no status’, as the young person is not in employment, not in education and not in receipt of ‘benefit’.

Since the 1988 era, schools in the UK have been named and shamed if their pupils underachieve in relation to a range of benchmarks. The mission of the school is to change the pupil who rejects what the school has to offer by breaking resistance and enhancing ‘aspiration’. One of the central roles of the neo-liberal school is to undermine the underpinning conception of merit within working-class culture that the boys in Corrigan’s and Willis’s studies expressed. By doing so, the school undermines the traditional ways in which working-class children give meaning to their place in the wider society.

Conclusion

In the 1970s, the boys in Willis’s and Corrigan’s research left school with a coherent working-class identity and looked forward to a life of manual labour, which they were pleased to embrace. The values, attitudes and beliefs of the boys who Willis and Corrigan described would no longer be tolerated in schools today. The contemporary neo-liberal project, as manifested in schools today, undervalues the agency of the individual pupil who wants to choose a life, culture and set of aspirations that do not conform to a neo-liberal conception of aspiration as found within school benchmarks. Today, pupils behaving like Willis’s ‘lads’ are likely to find themselves within a ‘zone of indistinction’ – that is, excluded, pathologized and Othered by forms of precarity linked to inequality generally assumed to be brought about by personal failing. The neo-liberal educator blames the victims, who suffer the most from the consequences of neo-liberalism. A set of institutional arrangements has been put in place to allow schools to build capacity and provide conditions for pupils to move towards the state’s preferred conception of the citizen or subject. To move in this direction is to be seen to succeed. The neo-liberal project controls and restricts the role of the teacher in facilitating the students’ critical understanding of how their personal problems are a part of wider public issues. Rather, schools have enhanced their capacity to generate feelings of shame and personal inadequacy in pupils who do not seek to conform. Paradoxically, this has the unforeseen consequence of adding credibility to the neo-liberal narrative. Thus, well-led schools perform well in the marketplace for education; improving schools improve against the benchmarks imposed by governments; and effective schools are schools that are effective in achieving neo-liberal objectives.