Contemporary Learning Society A quarterly of social

Transkrypt

Contemporary
Learning
Society
A quarterly of social
and educational ideas
EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD
Teresa BAUMAN, Agnieszka BRON, John FIELD, Dorota KLUS-STAŃSKA, Robert KWAŚNICA,
Zbigniew KWIECIŃSKI, Jerzy NIKITOROWICZ, Joanna RUTKOWIAK,
Krystyna SZAFRANIEC, Bogusław ŚLIWERSKI, Danuta URBANIAK-ZAJĄC
EDITORS
EDITOR IN CHIEF Mieczysław MALEWSKI
EDITORIAL ASSISTANCE Adrianna NIZIŃSKA
TYPESETTING Witold GIDEL
COVER DESIGN
Anna MIKODA
REVIEWER
Peter ALHEIT
ENGLISH LANGUAGE EDITOR
Agnes KERRIGAN
Published under the INDEX PLUS
project of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education
Agreement no. 4/DWB/2010
Publikacja wydana w ramach Projektu INDEX PLUS
Ministerstwa Nauki i Szkolnictwa Wyższego
Nr umowy 4/DWB/2010
© Copyright by Dolnośląska Szkoła Wyższa, Wrocław 2011
ISSN 1505-8808
Dane oryginału
Kwartalnik myśli społeczno-pedagogicznej Teraźniejszość – Człowiek – Edukacja
DOLNOŚLĄSKA SZKOŁA WYŻSZA
ul. Strzegomska 55, 53-611 Wrocław
e-mail: [email protected]
http://www.dswe.pl
Contents
I. Articles
Lotar Rasiński, The idea of discourse in poststructuralism: Derrida, Lacan and Foucault .....................
7
Adela Kożyczkowska, The borderland as an artefact of a (homogenous) centre; the geopolitical,
economic, cultural and symbolic context ......................................................................................... 23
Alicja Kargulowa, On the counselling of a network society ................................................................... 45
Piotr Stańczyk, Tacit agreement, the culture of silence and the politics of voice ................................... 61
Mirosława Cylkowska-Nowak, Witold Nowak,
Moral panic over the Romani presence in Slovakia and Great Britain. A comparative study ......... 75
II. Research reports
Lucyna Kopciewicz, Karolina Rzepecka, The University, women and power –
on women’s presence at the top positions of academic hierarchies ................................................. 93
Ryszard Necel, The sense of political alienation in the thirteen countries of Central-Eastern Europe ... 111
Dobrochna Hildebrandt-Wypych, The social construction of life success among German youth .......... 129
III. Opinions
Paweł Rudnicki, Pedagogy and “Civilisation”:
misinterpretation, coercion and unreflexivity in education .............................................................. 145
IV. Reviews
Mieczyslaw Malewski, Od nauczania do uczenia się. O paradygmatycznej zmianie w andragogice
(From teaching to learning. The paradigmatic shift in Adult Education Research)
Wydawnictwo Naukowe DSW (University of Lower Silesia Press) Wrocław 2010,
ISBN 978-83-62302-08-6, pp. 239, rev. by Alicja Jurgiel ............................................................... 163
Hana Červinková, Bogusława Dorota Gołębniak (eds.), Badania w działaniu. Pedagogika
i antropologia zaangażowane (Action Research. Engaged pedagogy and anthropology)
Wydawnictwo Naukowe Dolnośląskiej Szkoły Wyższej (University of Lower Silesia Press)
Wrocław 2010, ISBN 978-83-62302-14-7, pp. 502, rev. by Dariusz Kubinowski . ......................... 167
I. Articles
Contemporary – Learning – Society
2011
LOTAR RASIŃSKI
University of Lower Silesia, Wrocław
The idea of discourse in poststructuralism:
Derrida, Lacan and Foucault
In recent decades the idea of “discourse” has become, increasingly popular. It is being applied in many contexts and research disciplines often without precisely defining
its scope and meaning. The case is made additionally difficult by commonsense connotations which ascribe to discourse the meaning of an “organized discussion”. This
notion is presently used in psychology, sociology, pedagogy, philosophy, anthropology,
linguistics and other disciplines of the social sciences in such different contexts and
meanings that the formulation of a clear and conclusive definiton that would satisfy all
its users seems to be an impossible task.
Ernesto Laclau, who placed the notion of discourse on the general map of the contemporary political philosophy, ranks it among the phenomena which came to prominence as a result of what one could call the transcendental turn in modern philosophy
entailing the type of analysis which is primarily addressed not to facts but to their
conditions of possibility (Laclau 1995, p. 541). The discursive analysis is based on the
assumption that every human thought, perception or activity depends on the structuration of the field of signification which precedes the immediacy of the facts. According
to Laclau, this approach differs from the Kantian reflection on the a priori forms of
human cognition and also from the phenomenological recognition of the subject as the
ultimate vehicle of meaning. In his opinion, the theorists of discourse assume a rigorously historical character of the “discursive a priori forms” and they propose to examine it with the use of the categories generated within de Saussure’s theory of the sign.
Such scholars, Laclau argues, use an idea of structure that largely ignores the role of the
subject in the process of the constitution of sense.
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LOTAR RASIŃSKI
In their book devoted to the analysis of discourse Louise J. Philips and Marianne
Jørgensen offer the general definition of discourse as “a particular way of talking about
and understanding the world (or an aspect of the world)” (Philips & Jørgensen 2002,
p. 1). The authors go on to emphasize that the shared element of all the “analyses of
discourse” is that our ways of talking do not neutrally reflect the world but rather play
an active role in creating and changing it. Acknowledging this determined “social constructivism”, the authors outline three main fields of “the discourse analysis”: Ernesto
Laclau and Chantall Mouffe’s discourse theory, Norman Fairclogh’s critical discourse
analysis and discursive psychology (e.g. Potter and Wetherell 1987).
The aim of this paper is to trace the historical evolution of the notion of discourse,
beginning from de Saussure’s concept of the sign, and to consider closely three postsructuralist theories of discourse as present in Derrida, Lacan and Foucault which have
cleared the way for contemporary approaches to this problem. I will attempt to show
that a more detailed analysis of the conceptions of discourse in post-structuralism indicates that as early as at their beginnings there appeared some essential differences in
understanding this phenomenon which challenges the thesis on the existence of a consistent reflection that could be referred to as the theory or analysis of discourse. It can
be assumed though, that these differences are somewhat “natural”, given the interdisciplinarity of what has come to be called “post-structuralism”. Naturally, discourse
considered in the context of an analysis of the structures of human unconsciousness
(Lacan) is not the same idea of discourse that we can use to analyse the structures
of power (Foucault). However, the aims which guide the individual theorists in their
examinations of discourse often differently influence their theoretical resolutions and
the specific terminologies which rarely allow themselves to be reconciled with the
propositions of other scholars. “The discourse theory” thus constitutes a heterogenic
field of “kin” conceptions conjoined by an emphasis put on the constructivist power
of language. In this approach it is assumed that language creates social reality (in the
weaker version it is assumed that language is the condition of our capability to know
social reality) although the relation between discourse and the social world may take
different forms in individual propositions. In Derrida the idea of discourse serves as
a model for the “deconstructionist” reading of texts whereby the notion of the “center”
is marginalized. In Lacan discourse is associated with the social through the individual
and, in addition, it is as ungraspable as the unconscious layers of the human mind. For
Foucault the main problem seems to lie in determining the status of what is called “the
human sciences” as a form of knowledge whereby the question of the functioning of
language intertwines with questions concerning its relations with the social and institutional environment that governs the production of statements in a given time and place.
The idea of discourse in poststructuralism: Derrida, Lacan and Foucault
9
De Saussure and his critics
In a series of lectures entitled Course in General Linguistics Ferdinand de Saussure
divided the sign into its signifying (acoustic image, signifiant) and signified (the idea,
signifié) components. In this way he rejected the referential conception of language
that was based on the distinctive thing-name. De Saussure assumes that the link between signifiant and signifié is arbitrary (de Saussure 1986, p. 67). The signified has no
fixed, signifying element ascribed to it, therefore no idea can assume a pre-determined
acoustic image. An idea, claims Saussure, can be compared to a value which in itself is
something completely arbitrary.
Ferdinad de Saussure developed an interesting analogy which compared the system of language to playing chess. For example, the chesspiece knight that is outside
the chessboard and the determined conditions of the game, has no value in the eyes
of the player. It becomes a concrete and real element only within the game wherein it
enters relations with the other figures. It then acquires value. Now, let us suppose that
during the game the chesspiece gets lost or damaged: can it be replaced with another
one? Certainly, and moreover, a totally different, dissimilar figure will serve exactly the
same purpose, because its value largely depends on what surrounds it. Thus de Saussure writes:
In the language itself, there are only differences. Even more important than that is
the fact that although in general a difference presupposes positive terms between
which the difference holds, in a language there are only differences, and no positive terms. Whether we take the signification or the signal, the language includes
neither ideas nor sounds existing prior to the linguistic system, but only conceptual
and phonetic differences arising out of that system (de Saussure 1986, p. 118).
The signifier and the signified, considered individually, have only a differentiating
and negative character and it is only their conjunction that transforms them into something “positive”.
A chesspiece has no positive meaning except for the one it acquires during the
game. Likewise, a linguistic sign looses its meaning if we consider it in separation
from the other elements of the language system. What happens in language is not determined by that which is non-linguistic. One could say that langauge “articulates” reality
in some way, however this process also remains totally arbitrary. Consequently, not
only is it the link between a concept and its acoustic image that constitutes its linguistic articualtion arbitrarily, but also no fixed connection exists between a concept and
a non-linguistic thing it refers to. We are able to know real objects, but only insofar as
our language allows us to. I want to emphasize here that de Saussure accepts that there
is an ultimate isomorphism between the order of signification and the order of being
signified. Every series of sounds corresponds to exactly one concept which means that
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LOTAR RASIŃSKI
it is possible to determine at any moment how in a given language system a signifier
relates to a signified. It is also worth noting that from the very beginning de Saussure
emphasized the social character of language (langue) (ibid., p. 74). While our language
(parole) may be shaped individually, its practical application may occur only due to the
fact that language is a convention agreed upon by a social group.
There have been many criticisms levelled at de Saussure’s theory of the sign, one
of detractions states that if language is only a form, not substance, and if there exists
a close isomorphism between the order of signification and the order of being signified,
then from the formal point of view both orders become indistinguishable and so it is
impossible to maintain that the character of the linguistic sign is dualistic. Hence the
so-called glossematic school of Copenhagen has proposed to renounce the Saussurian
conception of isomorphism and substitute it with the idea of the division of both orders
into units that are smaller than signs:
Phonologists have brought to light linguistic units smaller than signs: the phonemes
(the sign calf is made up of three phonemes k/ae and /f/. The same method applied
to content allows the distinction, in the same sign, of at least three elements (…)
or semes (…) bovine/male/young. Now it is clear that the semantic and the phonic
units thus located can be distinguished from the formal point of view: the combinatorial laws concerning the phonemes of a language and those applied to the semes
cannot be shown to correspond to each other (…) (Ducrot & Todorov 1979, p. 22,
quoted in Laclau 1995, pp. 542-543).
The break with the Saussurian tradition of understanding the linguistic sign had an
important consequence for the succeeding theories of discourse. If one assumes that the
abstract system of rules described by phonologists does not require any particular substance, it follows then that by the means of these rules one can describe any signifying
system operating in a society, be it nutrition, structures of kinship, furniture or fashion.
From this supposition the way leads directly to the renunciation of any substantial
differences between linguistic and non-linguistic phenomena which is precisely what
E. Laclau and Ch. Mouffe do in their Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. In this way the
phenomenological thesis on the crucial role of the subject in the constitution of sense
is also dismissed.
Derrida and deconstruction
Another point criticized in de Saussure’s theory was his usage of the term “system” understood as a closed totality that somehow organizes language. This problem is
closely linked with the aforementioned critique of de Saussure’s idea of isomorphism.
11
de Saussure says that: “language is both a self-contained whole and the principle of
classification” (1986, p. 10) and later on that:
A linguistic system is a series of phonetic differences matched with a series of conceptual differences. But this matching of a certain number of auditory signals and
a similar number of items carved out of the mass of thought gives rise to a system
of values. It is this system which provides the operative bond between phonic and
mental elements within each sign (ibid., p. 118).
Now, in the works of the classic structuralists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes, de Saussure’s idea/theory of “system” has been modified into the idea/
theory of “structure”1. Thus it can be argued that the post-structuralist critique of structuralism and the theory of structure is also aimed at the idea of the “totality” and “closure” implied in de Saussure’s system. According to Derrida, “the notion of structure
refers only to space, geometric or morphological space, the order of forms and sites.
Structure is first the structure of an organic or artificial work, the internal unity of an assemblage (…) governed by a unified principle” (Derrida 2001, p. 17). Thus construed,
structure becomes yet another name for a construction or an architectonic form whose
internal order is determined by the existence of a privileged center. This conception, as
Rodolphe Gasché has argued (1986, pp. 144-145), faces two major problems. The first
one, connected with the closure of structure, consists in the recognition that the passage from one structure to another may only take place by way of a catastrophe or pure
chance. The second one, linked with the existence of the center, concerns the change
which may effectuate within a structure: it will always be the result of its internal logic.
The fusion of these two topics clearly points to the contradictory nature of the idea of
the structure and calls for its deconstruction, as Derrida tells us.
In the Letter to a Japanese Friend Derrida states that deconstruction is not a demolition, nor is it an analysis or a critique. It is not dismantling and destruction. In “itself”
deconstruction is nothing in the sense that all attempts to predicate deconstruction are
doomed to failure. That is why it needs to be understood as that which takes place
“where there is something” (Derrida 1988a, p. 4). Taking into the account Derrida’s
contention that “there is nothing outside the text”, deconstruction can be conceived
of as textual labour in the form of a double reading. The first reading is a faitful attempt to follow the dominant interpretation of the text, its assumptions, concepts and
arguments. The second reading consists in tracing its excluded, repressed and inferior
interpretation that forms an undercurrent in the text. Establishing the textual hierarchy
1
Lévi-Strauss confided to having feelings of “envy” and “melancholy” at the success linguistics had
achieved presumably in comparison with ethnology. Let us quote his opinion on the phonological method
and the idea of “system” which were to become the pattern for him to follow: “in the first place” – he writes
–“phonology passes from the study of conscious linguistic phenomena to that of their underlying unconscious structure; it refuses to take terms as independent entities, on the contrary, in takes relations between
terms as the basis of its analyses; it introduces the notion of system (…); finally, it aims at the discovery of
general laws either found by induction or deduced logically” (Lévi-Strauss 1963, p. 33).
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LOTAR RASIŃSKI
of two interpretations can demonstrate that the dominant interpretation is dependent on
what it excludes. Consequently, the relation between the two interpretations becomes
more important than the dominant intepretation. Derrida argues that it is so because of
the supplementary character of the second interpretation which fills in the original lack
in the dominant one. However, deconstruction is not content with a simple reversal of
textual hierarchies of intepretations by privileging the supressed one over the dominant
one, but “seeks to account for the undecidable oscillation between the different textual
strategies that the inscription of a metaphysical hierarchy must necessarily presuppose”
(Torfing 1999, p. 66).
The idea of “undecidability” is one of the more important aspects of the deconstructive “analysis”. The existence of the “undecidables” in language that are “false units
of sense” attests, according to Derrida, “to the fact that no interpretation can claim to
be the dominant one”. However, “undecidability” – argues Derrida – has nothing to do
with “indterminacy”:
undecidability is always a determinate oscillation between possibilities (for example, of meaning, but also of acts). These possibilities are themselves highly determined in strictly defined situations (for example, discursive-syntactical or rhetorical but also political, ethical, etc.). They are pragmatically determined (Derrida
1988b, p. 148).
It can be argued that deconstruction is a strategic intervention into metaphysics
whereby an attempt is made to confront metaphysics with its “other”. Metaphysics
manifests itself in a series of philosophical ideas based on the category of the “center”,
“ultimate ground” or “source” such as eidos, arche, telos, transcendental, consciousness, God and man whose task is to determine Being as “fully present”. In Writing and
Difference Derrida argues that the fully present center governs the structuration of the
structure but itself evades the process of structuration. It follows then, that the center
has somehow to be located both within and outside the structure. The source of this
paradox, as Derrida puts it, lies in the “power of desire” to lessen the feeling of insecurity that accompanies a certain way of being inscribed in the process of structuration.
This never fulfilled desire brings about numerous displacements and replacements of
the idea of the center. As a consequence we never deal with its full presence but only
with its substitutes. Therefore, one is led to think rather of the “absence of the center”
or a blank space opened for other substitutions. As Derrida concludes: “in the absence
of a center or origin, everything became discourse” (Derrida 2001, p. 354). Discourse is
conceived here as a system of differences within which the play of signification extends
infinitely in the absence of the transcendental signified.
In light of this argument the point of Derrida’s attack on the idea of the structure’s
“closure” becomes clearer. The closure of the structure is the result of an effort to “totalize” and exhaust the field of identity leaving no space for that which may enter it
from the outside. This idea can easily be challenged from the empirical point of view
13
refering to the infinite richness of the reality which cannot be bound into one, finite and
cohesive discourse. It can also, as Derrida argues, be criticized from the point of view
of a free play of signification:
If totalization no longer has any meaning, it is not because the infiniteness of a field
cannot be covered by a finite glance or a finite discourse, but because the nature of
the field – that is, language and the finite language – excludes totalization. This field
is in effect that of play, that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions only because it
is finite, that is to say, because instead of being an inexhaustible, as in the classical
hypothesis, instead of being too large, there is something mising from it: a center
which arrests and grounds the play of substitutions (ibid., p. 365).
In other words, the impossibility of totalization or closure results from there being
no determined center which in turn extends the process of signification ad infinitum.
Thus understood structure becomes a field of signification in which a temporary order
is established by the presence of many mutually substituting centers. This establishment of a relative structural order is conditioned by the exclusion of the “constitutive
outside” that threatens the order of the structure and prevents its ultimate closure (see
Torfing 1999, p. 86).
Lacan and the discursive foundation of subjectivity
Another important thinker on the historical map of the discourse theory is Jacques
Lacan in whose works the problems of discourse are inextricably connected with the
reflection on the nature of human subjectivity. As Marshall W. Alcorn observes, there
are two ways of interpreting the relation between subjectivity and discourse in Lacan.
The first interpretation – the post-structuralist one – regards subjectivity as dependent
on discourse and puts emphasis on the examination of the discursive systems in which
it is involved, claiming that they play an essential role in the constitution of the subject’s identity. The second interpretation, appreciating Lacan’s psychoanalytical practice, contradicts the post-structuralist stance and asserts that it is the subject – construed
in opposition to the essentialist philosophical tradition – that plays the essential role in
the constitution of the discursive system. Alcorn argues that in the end both lines of
interpretation are legitimate:
In some respects Lacan’s account of the subject follows the lines of a rhetorical
analysis. Lacan is interested in figures of speech and how speech, creating systems of desire and identification, moves the subject. On the one hand, this analysis
is highly theoretical: Lacan is fully engaged in all the conceptual resources formulated by post-sructuralist thought. But on the other hand, Lacan’s analysis is
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LOTAR RASIŃSKI
highly practical. As an analyst, Lacan confronted subjects who resisted, denied and
displaced linguistic effects. This forced him to formulate a description of a subject much more active and resistant than the subject imagined by post-structuralist
thought (Alcorn 1994, p. 29).
Mark Bracher explains the Lacanian conception of discourse as follows:
Discourse, Lacan emphasizes, is a necessary structure that subsists in certain fundamental relations and thus conditions every speech act and the rest of our behavior and action as well. These fundamental relations are of several different orders:
intrasubjective or psychological relations, intersubjective or social relations, and
relations with the nonhuman world. Discourse, according to Lacan, plays formative
and transformative roles in each of these orders (Bracher 1994b, p. 107).
Lacan argues that the constitutive role of discourse in our relations with the external
world is perhaps most visible in the example of science. Science involves not a better
understanding of the world but rather the construction of realities that we previously
had no awareness of. What science constructs is not just a new model of the world, but
a world in which there are new phenomena. Furthermore, this constructed world occurs
solely through the play of a logical truth, a strict combinatory: the system of signifiers
that constitutes scientific knowledge (see ibid., p. 108). Discourse is similarily constitutive of the social order which is the consequence of a more general assumption that “it
is on discourse that every determination of the subject depends” (Lacan 1991, p. 178,
quoted in Bracher 1994b, p. 108) including thought, affect, enjoyment and one’s sense
of life.
J. Lacan often emhasized how important Freud’s discovery of the unconscious was
for modern psychology and philosophy. The discovery turned out to be more radical
in consequences than the Copernican or Darwinian revolution in that the latter ones
have maintained the belief in the identity of human subjectivity and the conscious ego.
Psychoanalysis, says Lacan, is “at odds with any philosophy directly stemming from
the cogito” (Lacan 2006, p. 93) and thus objects to linking ego to cogito. Developing
and partly modifying Freud’s theory particularly by accentuating the role of language
in the organization of the unconscious, Lacan formulates his theory on the grounds of
the idea of three orders: the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic which remain in
“circular interdependence”.
One of the possible points of departure in outlining Lacan’s theory of subjectivity
and discourse – one that proves quite helpful in explaining the meaning of the three
“orders” – is the analysis of the experience of the child undergoing the so-called mirror stage (6-18 month of life). The moment the child joyfully recognizes its image in
the mirror is of paramount importance for the later development of its identity. Prior to
this experience the child’s self does not exist as a separate entity. It is only by way of
perceiving and identifying itself with the mirror image that the child recognizes itself
as a functionate, separate whole or, in other words, acquires identity and unity. This
15
experience is naturally disturbed later on by the child’s realization of the distance that
separates it from the imaginary wholeness represented by the mirror self. The mirror
reflection remains something alien, reversed, magnified, reduced or deformed which
increases the actual feeling of fragmentation and lack of coordination of the child’s
body and proves further that it cannot be reconciled with the imaginary unity. Stavrakakis is correct to say that “the ego, the image in which we recognise ourselves, is always
an alien alter ego” (Stavrakakis 1999, p. 18). Lacan emphasizes this ambiguity of the
imaginary resulting from the child’s constructing its identity on the grounds of what
he or she is not, that means – its “other”. “The ambiguity of the imaginary is primarily
due to the need to identify with something external, other, different, in order to acquire
the basis of a self-unified identity” (ibid., p. 18). In that sense, every purely imaginary
equilibrium or balance with the other is always marked by an element of difference
which subverts the whole idea of a stable reconciled subjectivity based on the conception of the autonomous ego.
If the imaginary representation of ourselves, the mirror image, is incapable of providing us with a stable identity, the only option left for acquiring one seems to be in the
field of linguistic representation, the symbolic register. As Lacan argues, the symbolic
is already presupposed in the functioning of the mirror. The passage from the imaginary
to the symbolical order is a theoretical abstraction pointing to a certain logical and not
strictly speaking chronological order. From the time of its birth, and even before that,
the infant is inserted into a symbolic network constructed by its parents and family. The
infant’s name is sometimes chosen before it is born and its life is interwoven, in the parents’ imagination, with a pre-existing family mythology. This whole framework, while
the new-born is not aware of it, is destined to influence its psychic development. Even
the images with which we identify in the mirror stage derive from how our parents see
us (thus being symbolically sanctioned) and are linguistically structured. Lacan explicitly points out that the articulation of the subject to the imaginary and the symbolic Other
do not exist separately. What changes though, is the power with which they influence us.
While the image equally plays a capital role in our domain [a role dominant, although
not absolute, during the mirror stage], this role is completely taken up and caught up
within, remoulded and reanimated by, the symbolic order. “If the ego emerges in the
imaginary, the subject emerges in the symbolic” as Stavrakakis comments (ibid., p. 19).
In this context Lacan’s statements such as: “the subject is the subject of the signifier – determined by it”, “it is the symbolic order which is constitutive for the subject”,
“the signifier is pre-eminent over the subject” gain clarity. The Lacanian understanding
of the notions of the “signifier” or “language” is strongly connected with de Saussurian
theory of the sign which I outlined earlier. Noteworthy though, is that the Lacanian
conception of the relation between the signifier and the signified transcends de Saussure’s alleged “representationism” (the conception whereby the signified is rendered
the paramount importance in the process of the construction of meaning) and thus concurs with the post-structuralist critique of de Saussure. In question here is precisely the
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LOTAR RASIŃSKI
isomorphism retained by de Saussure. Lacan is clear from the beginning that there is
no isomorphism between the two domains, that of the signifier and that of the signified. Their relation is not a relationship of two equivalent levels. According to Lacan,
if no natural bond exists between the signifier and the signified, then it follows that the
signified belongs to the sphere of that which is non-linguistic, that is – to the real. The
signifier is only attributed a role of a transient vehicle of meaning.
Thus in Lacan’s theory it is the signifier that receives the primordial position in the
process of signification which he presents with an algorithm S/s.
Here, the signifier (S) is located over the signified (s), this ‘over’ corresponding to
the bar separating them, a barrier resisting signification. This barrier is exactly
what makes possible an exact study of the connections proper to the signifier, and of
the extent of their function in the genesis of the signified. If the dominant factor here
is the bar which disrupts the unity of the Saussurean sign, then the unity of signification can only be an illusion. What creates this illusion (the effect of the signified) is
the play of the signifiers: the signifier alone guarantees the theoretical coherence of
the whole as a whole (ibid., pp. 24-25).
In Lacan’s scheme then, meaning is the product of the signifier and not the reverse2.
What the signifier represents is only “the presence of difference”, rendering impossible
any connection between signs and things. The signified thus becomes, as Lacan once
put it, the “result of a transference”. We speak about it only because it is convenient
for us to believe in it. The world of signifieds is none other than that of language where
the signified is never to become a full presence constituted outside language. Every act
of signification only refers to another act of signification. Signifiers refer only to other
signifiers. In this way the signified simply disappears. It vanishes because it is no longer
associated with the concept, as in de Saussure (see Marini 1992, p. 51), but is conceived
as belonging to the order of the real; that is why the bar dividing signifier and signified,
instead of constituting an intimate link between them, instead of creating the unity of
the sign, is understood as a barrier resisting signification, as a limit marking the intersection of the symbolic with the real (Boothby 1991, p. 127).
Lacan accepts from the beginning what de Saussure denied but was forced to introduce indirectly into his work In Lacan, however, this relation between the signified and
the real is accepted but then only to be located at the limit of signification and not at
its kernel. The signified disappears as such, that is to say as the epicentre of signification, exactly because it belongs to the real dimension situated beyond the level of the
symbolic. The locus of the signified is retained and is now designated by a “constitutive
lack”. This locus is empty, although it surely exists since the subject does not cease to
2
To illustrate this thesis Lacan uses the famous example of toilet doors. The ladies’ and the gentlemen’s toilets in themselves are signifieds treated as an external reality. In this sense they do not differ. Two
doors exactly the same lead to exactly the same rooms. The difference in meaning is only produced by the
signifying element – the signs on the doors.
17
grasp the lost and impossible signifier in ever new – though still illusory in their being
the effects of the play of signifiers – attempts. One is led to conclude that the signified
indeed belongs both to the order of the imgainary and to the order of the real. “According to Lacan, the signified, what is supposed to be, through its links to external
reality, the source of signification, indeed belongs to the real. But this is a real that
resists symbolisation – this is the definition of the real in Lacan; the real is what cannot
be symbolised, the impossible. Surely, if this real is always absent from the level of
signification it cannot be in itself and by itself the source of this same signification. Its
absence however, the constitutive lack of the signified as real, can” (Stavrakakis 1999,
p. 27). What emerges in this way is the signified transferred to its imaginary dimension.
There is, however, the third dimension to this signifying play, one that governs it. It is
the symbolic – the dimension that Lacan attributes the decisive role to.
On the discoursive level these considerations have crucial consequences for the
theory of the subject. The fullness of the identity that the subject is seeking is not possible, according to Lacan, neither at the symbolic nor at the imaginary level. Every
process of symbolization introduces with it the “constitutive lack” of the signified and
thus dooms the subject to the ceaseless symbolization in the Other in search for his/her
true identity. Thus in Lacan we should rather speak of the infinity of “identifications”
and not of the subject’s identity, it being an impossible condition.
Symbolisation, that is to say the pursuit of identity itself, introduces lack and makes
identity ultimately impossible. For even the idea of identity to become possible its
ultimate impossibility has to be instituted. Identity is possible only as a failed identity; it remains desirable exactly because it is essentially impossible. It is this constitutive impossibility that, by making full identity impossible, makes identification
possible, if not necessary. Thus, it is rather misleading to speak of identities within
a Lacanian framework. What we have is only attempts to construct a stable identity,
either on the imaginary or the symbolic level, through the image or the signifier. The
subject of lack emerges due to the failure of all these attempts. What we have then,
if we want to be precise and accurate, is not identities but identifications, a series of
failed identifications or rather a play between identification and its failure, a deeply
political play (ibid., p. 29).
Foucault: the discursive and non-discursive
Many of the themes outlined above are present in Michel Foucault’s theory of discourse (the relation of subject and discourse, the problem of the unity of structure/discourse). Its specificity consists however in the delimitation of the sphere of discourse
and the social sphere as two distinct domains which influence one another retaining at
the same time certain autonomy.
18
LOTAR RASIŃSKI
Foucault defines the subject of his investigations as “an area of discursive events
which constitutes a discursive formation”. Two things need to be emphasized here:
Foucault stresses the historicity of the discursive configurations, discourse being for
him a certain historical a priori, and his vision of history is contrary to the traditional
approach based on the idea of a long duration allowing a historian to depict grand political events and persons and indicate long causative chains. Primarily he is interested
in “a pure description of the facts of discourse”, composed of the sum of “all the real
statements (spoken or written) in their eventual dispersion and in the instance that is
specific to each of them” (Foucault 1968, p. 16). The basic unit is for Foucault a “statement” (l’énoncé) which in The Archeology of Knowledge is defined as “a function of
realization of the verbal performance” (Foucault 2005, p. 228).
What Foucault wants to emphasize is that everything a “statement” offers to read is
in a way “outside” – there are not hermeneutical senses or notions whose comprehension
we can gain if we follow the procedures of Verstehen. Foucault treats the statement as an
event which is to suggest that it is something material, empirical, and also something that
evades traditional historical durations. The field of discourse consists thus of dispersed
statements-events having their own specificity and entering mutual relations. The archeological analysis searches among these clusters of statements for “a similar system of
dispersion”, for certain regularities between statements allowing the description of what
Foucault calls “systems of formation”. A discursive formation is a system of coexistence
and mutual influence of heterogenic elements: institutions, techniques, social groups,
relations between discourses that are finally formed by the “discursive practice”.
The discursive formation is not to be identified with a given science or “hardly scientifized disciplines” or, contrary to this, with the forms that exlude any scientificity.
The relations that govern it are certainly less strict than in science but this does not mean
that they are simply gatherings of heterogenous masses of information derived from
multiple domains, experiences and traditions. One can say that archeology describes
the intermediate level between the everyday non-discursive practices and formalized
disciplines which Foucault calls knowledge. The elements of the discursive formation
“are that on the basis of which coherent (or incoherent) propositions are built up, more
or less exact descriptions developed, verifications carried out, theories deployed. They
form the precondition of what is later revealed as and which later functions as an item
of knowledge or an illusion, an accepted truth or an exposed error” (ibid., p. 200).
Knowledge is thus understood as a group of elements, formed in a regular manner
by a discursive practice which are the basis for the constitution of a science. It does not
only include demonstrations but also fictions, reflections, relations, institutional regulations and political decisions. Archeology enables one to capture the moment in which
science only begins to take form, when there exists no exact rules for the selection of
statements, when different contents are mixed together under no rigor of truth: archeology allows a description of “immature sciences”3.
3
The term introduced by Ian Hacking (1991).
19
Under the category of immature sciences fall, according to Foucualt, the human sciences4 which are for him the working material that serves the purpose of showing the
effectiveness of the archeological method. A successful archeological investigation depends on whether the archeologist has managed to describe and analyse a given domain
as an autonomous realm free of common sense beliefs. If we bracket the truth and the
meaning of the statements that comprise this domain, we will not be able to systematize
with the use of traditional means focusing for example on the intellectual processes in
the minds of great scientists or on a science’s progress in search of truth. None of these
means, Foucault argues, withstands the test of time. In no discipline is it possible to
point to one, distinctive feature that has remained unchanged in the course of transformations and changes which occur in it. Consequently, Foucault has to offer a new way
of describing, one that does not deform the discourse by empirical or transcendental
analyses. In order to resolve this problem, he comes up with four categories on which
analysis of the discursive formations is to focus. These are: object, subject, concept,
and strategy. In the concluding fragment of Réponse au Cercle d’épistemologie Foucault states that
there exist four criteria that allow the recognition of the discursive units but are not
at the same time traditional units (such as text, work, science, domain or form of discourse, the terms applied within it and the choices thus revealed). These four criteria
are not only coalescent with each other but they constitute one another: the first one
determines the unity of a discourse through the rule that governs the formation of
all its objects; the second one through the rule that governs the formation of all its
syntactic types; the third one through the rule that governs the formation of all its
semantic elements; and the fourth one through the rule that governs the formation
of all its operational possibilities. In this way all these aspects of discourse overlap.
And when in a given group of statements one can mark and describe a referential
system (un référentiel), a certain type of arrangement of statements, a certain theoretical net, a certain field of strategic possibilities, one can be sure that they belong
to something that can be called the discursive formation (Foucault 1968, p. 29).
The major role in the constitution of a discursive formation is played, according to
Foucualt, by a “discursive practice”. By this Foucault means “a body of autonomous,
historical rules, always determined in the time and space that have defined a given
period, and for a given social, economic, geographical, or linguistic area, the condiitons of operation of the ununciative function” (Foucault 2005, p. 131). Apart from the
rules (practices) specific only for discourse Foucault distinguishes also a set of other
4
It is important to remember that Foucault understands this term unconventionally including (in The
Order of Things) in the human sciences, biology and economics. Here Foucault has in mind what is generally understood as disciplines that make human beings and the social manifestations of their lives – their
“doubles” – such as life (studied by biology) and work (studied by economics) the object of their study.
In this sense we can say that other disciplines that Foucault was interested in: psychology, penology and
medicine can also be conceived of as human sciences.
20
LOTAR RASIŃSKI
influences forming statements that a discursive formation consists of. He writes about
the relations that discourse enters with the non-discursive elements and emphasizes
their relevance5. He specifies the primary relations that can be determined independently on every discourse or object of discourse that take place between institutions,
techniques, social forms, etc. and the secondary relations which can be located in the
discourse itself and encountered in the ways in which the acting subjects determine
their own behavior. It is however the most illusive and misleading point in his theory.
Indeed the relations connected with the non-discursive play a subsidiary role when
compared to the discursive relations6:
when one speaks of a system of formation, one does not only mean the juxtaposition,
coexistence or interaction of heterogenous elements (institutions, techniques, social
gropus, perceptual organizations, relations between various discourses), but also
the relation that is established between them – and in a well determined form – by
discursive practice7 (ibid., pp. 80-81).
As Dreyfus and Rabinow have argued, the thesis on the primacy of discursive practices over other components of the discursive formation – “composing them into relations” as Foucault states – is one of the most important, although seldom noticed,
themes of The Archeology of Knowledge (Dreyfus & Rabinow 1983, p. 63). If discourse has its own, distinct rules that determine the shape, object and choice of the
thematics of the statement and also who and from what viewpoint they are formed,
then Foucault’s discursive formation becomes not only independent on the rules of language or logic, but consequently it escapes subordination to the non-discursive reality.
Now, it is obvious that such an approach may raise many doubts. One may ask how the
5
In Réponse à une question Foucault distinguishes three main criteria that individualize the discourse:
formation, transformation and threshold, and correlation. The criterion of correlation consists in “defining
the set of relations which define and situate it [a given type of discourse, in this case medical discourse –
L. R.] among other types of discourse (such as biology, chemistry, political theory or the analysis of the
society) and in the non-discursive context in which it functions (institutions, social relations, economic and
political situation)” (Foucault 1994, p. 676). In the same article Foucault emphasizes that “what is important to me above all is to define the play of dependencies between all these transformations: a) intradiscursive dependencies (between the objects, operations and concepts of a single formation); b) interdiscursive
dependencies (between different discursive formations (…)); c) extradiscursive dependencies (between
discursive transformations and transformations outside of discourse, for example: the correlations studied
in Madness and Civilization and Birth of the Clinic between medical discourse and a whole play of economic, political and social changes” (ibid., p. 680).
6
The discursive relations are, in a “sense, at the limit of discourse: they offer it objects of which it can
speak, or rather (…) determine the group of relations that discourse must establish in order to speak of this
or that object, in order to deal with them, name them, analyze them, classify them, explain them, etc. These
relations characterize not the language used by discourse, nor the circumstances in which it is deployed,
but discourse itself as a practice” (Foucault 2005, pp. 50-51).
7
Foucault states that the discursive relations are neither objective nor subjective and “the autonomy
of discourse and its specificity do not give it the status of pure ideality and total historical independence”
(Foucault 2005, p. 182).
21
non-discursive relations are to influence the discursive ones maintaining at the same
time relative autonomy of the letter? In what way do they unite into one discursive formation, if they are subject to the discursive practice? Should we not consider discourse
to be a certain common ground on which one can analyze the social? And if so, would
it not lead to the necessity of renouncing the division into the discursive and the nondiscursive? Following this lead, we would take a position quite similar to that of some
post-structuralist thinkers (especially that of Laclau’s). On the one hand, many claims
by Foucault encourage us to follow this way, since it is discourse, as he envisions it,
that unites the whole system of practices and it is only on the grounds of the unity it
produces that disparate political, social and economical factors can converge and function. On the other hand, Foucault thinks the society to be something more then only discourse which is evidenced in his particular interest in primary and secondary relations.
In Réponse à une question Foucault speaks of their “direct relations” with discourse:
If indeed there is a link between medical practice and political discourse, it is not,
it seems to me, because this pracitice first changed men’s consciousness, their way
of perceiving things or conceiving of the world, and then finally the form of their
knowledge and its content; nor is it because it was initially reflected, in a more or
less clear and systematic manner, in concepts, notions or themes which were subsequently imported into medicine. The link is much more direct: political practice
did not transform the meaning or form of medical discourse, but the conditions of
its emergence and functioning; it transformed the mode of existence of medical
discourse (Foucault 1994, pp. 689-690).
Therefore, the extradiscursive contributes significantly to the discursive. Why then
emphasize the autonomy and specificity of discursive relations that are to decide upon
the form of a discursive formation? Foucault does not provide a satisfactory answer
to this question. This point in his theory to the present day remains a major difficulty
for his interpreters. In the end one is led to conclude that the “system of formation” in
which both the truth and the meaning of a statement are “bracketed” becomes merely
an abstract creation suspended in a vacuum, which brings us back to the solution proposed by structuralists. Foucault’s structuralism consists in isolating and objectifying
a given domain of theoretical investigations and in a way attribute to it full legitimacy.
If in structuralism this domain was anticipated for language, for Foucault it will be
discourse, even though his whole theoretical framework was aimed at showing the
distinctness of the phenomenon of discourse from the linguisitic system8.
Translated from Polish by Wojciech Kruszelnicki
8
All the methodological difficulties resulting from the idea of archeology are instructively described
by Dreyfuss and Rabinow (1983) in the chapter The Methodological Failure of Archeology.
22
LOTAR RASIŃSKI
References:
ALCORN M.W., 1994, The Subject of Discourse: Reading Lacan through (and beyond) Poststructuralist
Contexts, [in:] M. Bracher (ed.), Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure, and Society, New
York University Press, New York–London.
BOOTHBY R., 1991, Death and Desire: Psychoanalitic Theory in Lacan’s ‘Return to Freud’, Routledge,
New York.
BRACHER M. (ed.), 1994a, Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure, and Society, New York University Press, New York–London.
BRACHER M., 1994b, On the Psychological and Social Functions of Language: Lacan’s Theory of the Four
Discourses, [in:] M. Bracher (ed.), Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure, and Society,
New York University Press, New York–London.
DE SAUSSURE F., 1986, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Roy Harris, Open Court Publishing Company,
Peru
DERRIDA J., 1988a, Letter to a Japanese Friend, [in:] D. Wood, R. Bernasconi (eds.), Derrida and Différence, Northwestern University Press, Evanston.
DERRIDA J., 1988b, Limited Inc., Northwestern University Press, Evanston.
DERRIDA J., 2001, Writing and Difference, Routlege & Kegan Paul, London.
DREYFUS H. & RABINOW P., 1983, Michel Foucault. Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, University
of Chicago Press, Chicago.
DUCROT O. & TODOROV T., 1979, Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Sciences of Languages, John Hopkins
University Press, Baltimore.
FOUCAULT M., 1968, Réponse au cercle d’épistemologie, Cahiers pour l’Analyse, vol. 9.
FOUCAULT M., 1994, Réponse à une question, [in:] D. Defert, F. Ewald (eds.), Dits et écrits: 1954–1988,
vol. 1, Gallimard, Paris.
FOUCAULT M., 2005, The Archeology of Knowledge, Routledge, London.
GASCHÉ R., 1986, The Tain of the Mirror, Harvard University Press, London.
HACKING I., 1991, The Archeology of Foucault, [in:] D.C. Hoy (ed.), Foucault: A Critical Reader, Blackwell, Oxford.
LACAN J., 2006, Écrits, transl. B. Fink, W.W. Norton & Company Inc., New York.
LACLAU E., 1995, Discourse, [in:] R.E. Goodin, P. Pettit (eds.), A Companion to Contemporary Political
Philosophy, Blackwell Publishers Ltd, Oxford.
LÉVI-STRAUSS C., 1963, Structural Anthropology, transl. C. Jakobson, B. Grundfest Schoepf, Basic Books,
New York.
MARINI M., 1992, Jacques Lacan. The French Context, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick.
PHILIPS L. & JØRGENSEN M.W., 2002, Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method, Sage, London–Thousand
Oaks–New Dehli.
POTTER J., WETHERELL M., 1987, Discourse and Social Psychology, Sage, London.
STAVRAKAKIS Y., 1999, Lacan and the Political, Routledge, London–New York.
TORFING J., 1999, New Theories of Discourse. Laclau Mouffe, and Žižek, Blackwell, Oxford–Malden.
2011
ADELA KOŻYCZKOWSKA
The University of Gdańsk
The borderland as an artefact
of a (homogenous) centre; the geopolitical,
economic, cultural and symbolic context1
The subject of the borderland in literature is not limited to scientific works, and
is frequently written about by authors who do so from the perspective of their own
disciplines. Their perspective determines the manner of description, the understanding, and the interpretations of issues of importance in this subject. The problem of
the borderland, examined in this paper, concerns the recognition of the relationship
between the centre and the borderland and the effects of focusing on the borderland,
which may be observed in/on the centre “territory”. Although this way of interpreting
the borderland is a revelation to me, it has been presented in John Rex’s works for example. He observes that multicultural areas (here the borderland) significantly disturb
the functioning of the state (here the centre), causing specific economic, social, political and cultural reactions (Rex 1994, p. 3 and following). A multicultural borderland
qualitatively changes the sense of action and the sense of understanding of the centre,
both in relation to itself as well as to the borderland; thereby it also changes the sense
of action and the sense of understanding of the borderland itself.
This text is an attempt to sketch an interpretative perspective of the borderland,
exposing it as a disruption/artefact. The borderland, according to Bakhtin’s interpretation, becomes the real centre. For a pedagogue, such a change of the meaning offers
the opportunity to ask new questions about the educational dimensions of the world of
many cultures.
1
For inspiration and critical comments on the text, I would like to thank to Prof. Dr Hab. Kazimierz
Kossak-Główczewski from the University of Gdańsk.
24
ADELA KOŻYCZKOWSKA
The problem of the borderland is also important from the point of view of the circumstances of the emergence of an identity and in this context, this text refers to an
identity policy problem, although it is not the main theme of the paper. It was important
to examine identity in this paper as well as writing about the political, geographic, symbolic and cultural aspects of the centre-borderland relations. I also write about people
and the essential question of the shaping of their identity through practices and ideas,
which the centre imposes on the borderland.
Ulrich Beck and Edgar Grande point out the political dimension of collective identity construction because of the political definition of the nation. Modern collective
identity is nothing but a political invention and a political construct. It can therefore be
concluded that modern collective identity is not an effect of a sequence of historical
and cultural events that “would create a man”. It concerns particular selection procedures, which result in an assortment of historical and cultural facts linked with their
imposed interpretation that create a certain man. Zygmunt Bauman describes identity
as a response of the community to a threat to its existence – in such an extraordinary
situation; a community undertakes an effort to seek its own identity. In this meaning,
proposed by Bauman, identity is also a result of the dynamic interaction between a human and the world, where telos is both established and cancelled at the same time.
Consequently, identity policy is a project impossible to achieve and yet impossible to
abandon. Identity can be defined as, that which is fluid, variable and dynamic, and that
which is established and maintained by a series of political and educational actions
(Beck, Grande 2009, p. 34 and following; Bauman 2004, p. 30 and following; Bauman
2008, p. 25 and following, Kosowska 2004, p. 70).
This text is a result of research on the “local – global” relationship, which was
undertaken by the author, together with Małgorzata Lewartowska-Zychowicz in the
project: Local – global. The constituent identity ambivalences in the plan of the local
culture and the global market – projects and practices. Many of themes discussed in
this article I researched and developed in the aforementioned project.
Borderland as a geopolitical artefact
The idea of the borderland seems to be particularly promising for the project of
multicultural Europe – it provides the opportunity for constructing in theory and accomplishing in practice a concept of interculturalism as metanarrative, opening space
for attempts at descriptions, understanding and interpretation, allowing meeting, coexistence, and exchange of diversity and difference. Interculturalism seems to be an opportunity for fulfilling the postulate, not of the fragmentation of the world into a space
of own people and the strangers, but rather of making real potential displacements
“from-to”, without the neurasthenic anxiety of a community regarding a threat to their
Borderland as an artefact of (homogenous) centre. Geopolitical, economic, cultural and...
25
identity. Interculturalism also appears to be linked with the dialectic of opening and
closing of borders (Beck, Grande 2009, p. 406), which is reflected in seeking agonistic
solutions for simultaneously maintaining and overcoming old identities. It turns out that
constructing metanarratives of multiculturalism and creating within them political and
educational projects can support static equilibrium and closing to the inside of cultures,
while at the same time there is a recognition of the idea of many cultures existing side
by side. The experiences of the Balkan countries show that this may also be a hiding
place of nationalism (see Čolović 2001, 2007; Donna & Wilson 2007; Herzfeld 2007).
In geopolitical terms, borderland can be described in two ways: the first involves
the place where the boundaries are clearly marked, and their protection is strongly reinforced by those who are specially trained (selected) for guarding them. The second
meaning of borderland is linked with the dissolving of boundaries; their weakening and
the possibility of free exchange (see Beck, Grande 2009). In both cases, the borderland
is the highlighted place: it is the possibility, already mentioned, of moving “from-to”
(see Wróbel 2008, p. 39 and following).
It seems that it is concerned particularly with what happens outside the centre, so
in the “place” which opens up the possibility of going beyond one’s own culture and
where that occurs, then there is the need to learn how to “act in the borderland” (Nikitorowicz 2007, p. 39). In the literature there are two views of it; the first, by J. Nikitorowicz, (amongst others), discusses that the logic of the borderland is because it is the
area between the centers.
Between:
(…) what is on the border and may belong to both centres, overlapping each other.
Leaving the centre, which is usually rigid and closed, we enter the area of diversities, otherness and differences, where we can compare, discover, express surprise,
negotiate, etc. However, the dominant group should create conditions to facilitate
leaving the centre and to look at itself and its own ideas from the other side, taking
into account other reasons, there have to occur favourable situations (Nikitorowicz
1995, p. 11; see also Nikitorowicz 2007, p. 39, and following)2.
Jerzy Nikitorowicz’s perspective of borderland as that which is outside the centres
reveals a particular educational aspect: the borderland as a place of meeting of cultural
otherness gives/creates opportunities to discover and build an understanding of another
person. It concerns the potentiality of discovering one’s own difference and consequently, this allows a man to create (the oppositional) possibility of necessity of having
conformed to one’s own community. The specificity of the borderland allows one to
2
In the handbook of regional and intercultural education, Jerzy Nikitorowicz describes borderland as
the area lying outside the centre and at the same time the area of diversity, in which it becomes possible
to compare, express surprise, negotiate and conduct a dialogue. The category of the borderline becomes
crucial for the author, because it allows the construction of a paradigm of co-existence (Nikitorowicz 2009,
pp. 125, 134).
26
ADELA KOŻYCZKOWSKA
perceive the individuality and the particularity of cultures residing there, and thus allows one to “tame” the difference rather than to colonize, to eliminate or to depreciate it
Nikitorowicz describes this “taming” of the difference in the epistemological passage
as from what is strange to what is interesting (Nikitorowicz 2005, p. 16 and following).
The educational value of the borderland is also linked with the possibility of understanding oneself, one’s views, behaviour, reactions, and one’s relationship with the
difference. The borderland teaches not tolerance exactly, but rather makes one aware
of the need to find some other position than the rejection of different views and values
(ibid., p. 20). The borderland, therefore, would be a place for the identity construction
of a new man, who actively and consciously participates in the construction of a new
quality of culture as a place of choices, and collective building of reality, observing
respect and appreciation for one’s own and other’s diversity (Nikitorowicz 2000, p. 12).
Jerzy Nikitorowicz contends that the purpose of education is to prepare a human to
leave both the border and the centre and simultaneously to leave the semantic and cultural borderlands (Nikitorowicz 1995, pp. 14-15). It becomes important to re-read and
to re-define the reality in which a man is situated and in which he acts. Alina SzwarcAdamiuk, after Antonina Kłoskowska, defines the borderlands as something obvious
for the social functioning of a human, but notes at the same time that borderlands
are definitely something more than just a social space (see Szwarc-Adamiuk 2006).
As Kłoskowska writes – the borderland should be treated as a social situation, which
is historically variable. The borderland’s variability as a situation is primarily linked
with the quality of the relationship between the communities living on both sides of
the border and in an international context. The historical situation of the borderland determines the quality of these relationships and affects the reception of the differences:
the borderland is essentially a neighborhood of cultures (Kłoskowska 1995, p. 18 and
following).
It seems that the essence of the borderland pedagogy proposed by Jerzy Nikitorowicz is based on two pillars: 1) cultural appreciation and 2) conversion (spatial, of
identity and symbolic) of a man of the border and centre to the man of the borderland,
assuming that the centre is constant (it does not move spatially or symbolically) and
is homogenous and likewise, assuming the borderland is constant (it does not move
spatially or symbolically) but is heterogeneous. Such an understanding of pedagogy
generates educational practices by which a man acquires the faculty of tolerance and
competent communication skills, as well as curiosity and interest in other cultures. One
may also – by comparison – acquire knowledge about one’s own culture and/or deepen
it. In the author’s handbook, prepared for students of regional and intercultural education, a great deal of attention was paid to communication competency in the perspective of education and multiculturalism. This combination of practices – in the author’s
opinion – can lead to the creation of a political community based on the existence of
differences, which should in turn support the construction of human identity by getting a person entangled in the multi-level relationships of communities: family, local,
27
regional, religious, national, continental, cultural, global and planetary. Life (and the
construction of identity) in the outlined perspective does not appear a simple matter,
hence the constant need and necessity for man’s struggle with conflicts resulting from
the existence of differences. In addition, they are generated by the complexity of social
structure (Nikitorowicz 2009, p. 279 and following).
Michaił Bakhtin, amongst others, outlines a different perspective and interpretation
of the borderland and the centre, after whom one can cite the thesis that the borderland
is a place of interweaving boundaries and, as such, it tends to establish itself as the
“centre”, i.e. the place of actual consideration and actual decision-making. In this context, the borderland is what is natural and inherent in the culture (Bachtin 1983a, p. 54).
In some sense, a person’s life is focused on the borderland. It is in the borderland where
tension appears resulting from people looking at each other (“face to face”) and awareness develops of one’s own capabilities and limitations. The borderland tension and the
need for continuous learning for how to exist in it, emphasize the important landmarks,
as it is due to them that new knowledge is constructed, new forms of thinking developed and therefore, ambivalence and new evaluation (Bachtin 1983b, p. 136). There
also appears the problem of borders themselves, that after Hegel, can be described as
“places” of differentiation (Hegel 1963, p. 10) and “places” that the centre authority
tries to reach out to and wishes to colonize, legitimizing itself by the creation of an
homogeneous territory. The homogeneous property of the territory, which is inside,
can take pride in being “the same” or “identical” (categories after Bauman 2004, p. 30)
and opens up the possibility of constructing an identity, for example, a national one.
The borderland – as a place of territorial contact – contains within itself potentially
dangerous characteristics, which can threaten the “purity” of the identity emerging and
sustained inside the territory. Thus, in a political sense it concerns the emergence of
a certain type of man who should be tied to the territory (see Ossowski 1984) which is
occupied by a given community. Geographical conditions will be favoured by what is
accepted and approved by the social group (a community which gains political characteristics), which in consequence translates into approved (or not) socialization practices. In this sense culture as the product of a community is connected with the Land
(Čolović 2001, 2007), so in a geographical sense, it would concern the principle of
jus soli, thus constructing a community based on the rule of the land. However, if it is
joined here with the “genetic” culture core, it will become the more important principle
of jus sanguinis, whereby the community will be constructed on the rule of the blood.
Thus making it impossible in practice to keep the promise of co-citizenship for others
coming from the outside (Rex 1994, p. 6; Bauman 1995, pp. 102-106).
It is notable that the greater the desires for “purity” of identity, the more rigid are
the boundaries, there are more “warriors” on the border and the transition “from-to”
becomes more difficult. We are dealing here with radicalisingt the space occupied by
a community, resulting in the annihilation of reality (that differs from an established
pattern) in the name of an idea, which may be either rational or irrational. Nevertheless,
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ADELA KOŻYCZKOWSKA
it always appears as infinite: it concerns the destruction of everything what seems to be
imposed on it because of its material dimension. That which is substantial (“tangible”)
is dangerous because it allows one to sense the depth of the spiritual, immaterial and
symbolic (Plessner 2008, p. 12).
Thus, if one views the borders from the perspective of a radical community, it becomes clear that Hegel’s thesis that the borders are a moment of the end of a thing
(here a homogeneous community) and the beginning of a distinctiveness. From the
static orders perspective this is a moment of change and therefore it is dangerous to the
centre. While territorially the borderland is a spatial distance from the centre, it seems
to occupy a space close to the centre politically. After all, it is a kind of buffer and its
goal should be protection. Moreover, this is why the best warriors – the “cleanest” in
the matter of identity – guard the place. This reveals the other aspect of the borderland’s
nature: it is easy to convert it into a territory into which a state of emergency can be
introduced. Thus, it seems for radical communities, a metaphor of borderland has an
important meaning: it is the place – geopolitically – in which the use of violence has
a justification.
Aristotle wrote that violence is pre-political and acceptable only in the private
sphere. Politics – which takes up public space – despises violence and should deal only
in words (Arystoteles 2001). In modern politics, the principle is certainly respected
and observed, but its power ends when a state of emergency is called. It concerns an
extreme situation, in which ordinary legislation proves to be inadequate and helpless,
and this makes it necessary to define such a situation so it is perceived as extraordinary.
From there it is only one-step to granting the authorities extraordinary powers (Schmitt
2000, p. 38). From that moment, everything that is different, distinct and strange is
marked by the stigma of the enemy, which almost becomes a historical threat – and
this implicite builds a moral basis for action. The state of emergency – writes Carl
Schmitt – cannot be equated with chaos and anarchy. It is still, on law terms, a form of
order – though it differs from the old law: in that, the hitherto existing legal and moral
norms are no longer applied. It is changed not only in a legal sense but also in an ethical order, which sets the rules for moral behaviour. In fact, this is a situation in which
authority breaks with the old law, and gains absolute power (see ibid., pp. 38-41), and
in its absolute power it becomes cruel, inhuman and able to the use physical violence
against the human body and spiritual and intellectual violence against the human spiritual nature (Plessner 2008). Schmitt reveals here the fundamental meaning of the state
of emergency: Normality proves nothing, exception proves everything, the rule exists
only because of exceptions that confirm it (ibid., p. 41).
The borderland justifies the breaking of normalcy, and forces the centre to fight
against opponents of their idea – which is treated as sacred and inalienable for a political community. In some sense, man is freed from the guilt about the violence committed
29
against the strangers3 and the gained right of action is associated with gained legislation, which needs to be called a levelling (over) power (Plessner 2008, p. 14).
The borderland as an immanent geopolitical space in a given territory is nothing
but an artefact of this community and its (apparently) homogeneous order. Because of
this, it may (which seems to be a paradox in this fight) really affect the status of the
community and its understanding of its own identity. The borderland as a threat to the
community’s peace, forces the community to ask questions about its own identity (Bauman 2008, p. 25 and following), and thus starts it searching for an answer to the question: “who am I?” The sense of the borderland reveals itself when we start to see it as
a place for the constant creation of boundaries (geopolitical, symbolic, etc.) and a place
in which the community’s identity can be produced, which, in this case, is nothing more
than a consequence or by-product of an endless (often frenetic and brutal) process of
creating the boundaries (Friedman 1999, p. 241, quoted after Bauman 2008, p. 26). The
borderland is also a place in which strangers – both those inside and those who lurk on
the outside of community near its borders – unwittingly become allies: they consolidate
the community, make its authority stronger, open the gates for a new legal order and
create a framework for a new morality.
The borderland is also a space, in which as I have written above, – there occurs
a simultaneous recognition of and challenge to the old/own world with concerns about
the state of emergency which continually spreads through the borderland, and thus the
borderland itself may become the beginning of a new rule and creating of a new world
(Plessner 2008, p. 17).
3
Strangers – that is these, who are different from members of the community and thus are a threat to
its homogeneity. It also concerns a danger that is attributed to strangers due to lack of knowledge about
them; a stranger is far more dangerous than a defined enemy or foe. This group of strangers includes foreigners from outside the community who decide to settle down in its territory. There is also another group
of strangers who are already living in a place, and are unfamiliar to those who come, settle down and
start to rule the territory. Such situations are evidenced by for example the wars that shook the twentieth
century world, and political decisions – in form of international treaties. They often resulted in displacements of national states’ borders which “took place” in the offices of politicians, without any concern for
those who lived in the territory for decades or even centuries. A good example illustrating this situation is
post-colonial Africa – a continent that has been split into “states” because of political actions. Examining
the map of Africa, it is hard to resist the impression that its internal design was created using a ruler. The
logic of the new countries seems to be based on the European meaning of the nation with a disregard for
ethnic, tribal communities. This in turn, gave rise to ethnic wars, the objective of which was to achieve
dominance over the territory and construct a political and military predominance. A human being is very
important in this context as he is willing to fight enemies, and to sacrifice his life. It is worth noting that
an interesting procedure is the frequent use of the term “civil wars” in place of ethnic wars. It seems that
the action – clearly bearing a political stamp – is aimed to change the political status of what in reality has
(or had) taken place.
30
ADELA KOŻYCZKOWSKA
The economic and cultural borderland and the troublesome
presence of difference. An artefact culture in its essence
The combination of economy and culture seems to be a problematic procedure. If
economy – is understood, not as a science, but rather as part of a social practice and is
thus linked with management in a wider sense. Both in the general and scientific understanding of the issues of culture and economy one can encounter two opposing views.
The first is connected with the tradition of the understanding of economics as both part
of, and the product of culture, an example of this idea may be the views of Georg Simmel, amongst others. The second position is associated with the opposition of economics and culture as that which is opposed and disjoint, and this theory was probably most
fully developed in Fromm’s deliberations on having and being.
Erich Fromm excludes the economy (management practices) from the space of culture. He argues that the development of capitalism led to a particular kind of liberation
of economic behaviour from the values of humanistic ethics. Therefore, the economic
reality was separated from the cultural reality within which there are still present ethics
and humanistic values. Fromm maintains that (…) the economic machine seems to be
an autonomous entity, independent of human needs and values, a system that functions
by itself, according to its own rules (Fromm 2009, p. 19). The consequence of the opposition is distinguished by Fromm in two models of human’s functioning: the first is
focused on having (economic model) the second on being (cultural model). This analysis may, surprise the reader, however, the author, despite the exclusion of economy
from culture, argues that economy as a social reality is an external factor, which has
a real impact on human activities (ibid., pp. 104, 109, 120, 149 and following, 194),
and yet modern humans cannot comprehend the essence of an economically oriented
society (ibid., p. 35). Any social changes lead to changes in human functioning (ibid.,
p. 147) and the consequences of economic practices form the basis of constructed and
experienced human identity (ibid., p. 155). Economic changes can lead to interpersonal
or international conflicts because of the economic disadvantage of individuals or communities (ibid., p. 156).
The separation of economy and culture can be a serious obstacle to the diagnosis of
the actual condition of the borderland for it does not allow one to see its whole matter.
The separation of management from culture affects what is available to us: 1) either
a tool to view the economical status of the borderland and consequently its claim for
economic appreciation, 2) or as a tool to view the cultural status of the borderland and
subsequently its claim for a cultural appreciation. The practice reveals, however, that
the choice of one of the options is insufficient to describe the actual condition of the
borderland. Therefore, the optimal solution is to describe the economy as an immanent
part of culture.
31
Georg Simmel writes that although culture is the area in which the internal complement of human development can be achieved, not every complement will stem from
culture. Cultural development cannot be a process, which is “purely immanent” to
a man. Here it concerns seeking a compromise between subject (subjectivity) and object (that which exists objectively) in the undertaken teleological act and of necessity
the inclusion of what is objective (external) to subjective (internal) process of human
development. Hence, the objective works of artistic, moral, scientific or economical
character can be described as cultural, but only if they are perceived as something
important for human and community development. When these works are perceived
as indigenous values, inherent to their own territory of occurrence and happening and
considered important only for themselves, then they cannot enter into the area of culture (ibid., pp. 18-19). In this situation, the product is not recognized as a significant or
decisive for human development, but as, for example, the most profitable effect of the
production process. The process of excluding the effects of human activity from the
area of culture does not necessarily involve economic goods; it can be concerned as
well with the consequences of artistic or scientific actions.
Economy – as a management practice – is thus nothing more than a part of cultural
development, and yet it determines this development. The objective results of economical actions are important for both human and community development. Economical development – as well as the more widely perceived cultural development – is associated
with the historically observed forms of production in humanity. The crucial moment is,
when in a given stage of development, a form of production ceases to be a form capacious for itself and to fulfill its purpose – which is the production of goods – it must
destroy the old form and create a new one (Simmel 2007b, p. 23). Simmel, analyzing
changes within individual areas of culture, indicates that they are always of “some”
relevance to human life: they change after all something on the objective and subjective level. Cultural development contributes to changes within management, and they
consequently induce changes in the deepest layers of culture (Simmel 2007a, p. 150).
It also changes the subjective and objective condition of a man himself: the economical
change causes a man to become someone else, different than he was before, it changes
his relationship with other people, and he may gain freedom or lose it (Simmel 2008,
p. 101 and following). It seems, therefore, that a sudden change in one area of culture
induces subsequent changes in the whole of its realm. A good example here would be
what Marx and Engels wrote about capitalism. Capitalism was this crucial moment in
management practices that changed not only the human in an individual sense, but also
caused changes in the entire social fabric (Marks & Engels 2006).
The modern western world is a world of new borderlands, which are no longer
located solely within national borders, as territorially distant and oppositional to the
centre. Labour migration, amongst others, contributes to exploring the new borderlands’ problems that vividly accentuates the importance of understanding the economy
(management practices) as inherent to the culture. Although for the purposes of this
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ADELA KOŻYCZKOWSKA
article I emphasize the economic category, I do so only in order to highlight its immanently cultural nature. New borderlands – constructed and operated by immigrants
– are usually located at the peripheries of urban areas and result in a commonly held
opinion, which equates ethnicity with poverty. In these peripheries are certain categories of people who live in such “ethnourbia” and who become perplexing to the settled
inhabitants of an agglomeration (Krzysztofek 2001, p. 25; see also Bauman 2005).
From the centre perspective, all symptoms of anomie become evident, and these greatly
complicate the management of social and administrative spaces. It allows the centre to
treat the borderland as a social problem, which masks its essence, which is a national or
ethnic difference, not an economical difference. Social problems inherent to the borderland empower the centre to take action against poverty, but which, in fact, appear to be
a special educational and political projects for foreigners. The real goal of these actions
is assimilation. The centre – apart from the social problem – has much more serious
problem to solve, that is the cultural difference, which is “brought” by migrants seeking
employment possibilities (Szymański 1995; Lewowicki 2000).
The economic and cultural borderlands are a good example of localized borderlands, which are not at geographical distance from the centre, but rather where the
distance is symbolic and cultural. Therefore, it concerns not the borderland area, which
can only potentially acquire the characteristics of cultural borderland. In fact, we are
dealing with the borderland, the cultural aspect of which seems to be located peripherally, but the economical aspect is the centre of political or economic decision-making
(see Szczepański 2001, p. 36).
If we accept that multiculturalism is only a certain articulation of culture and recognize that culture is nothing but a form of a plurality of possible “to be” forms of a man
(Woroniecki 2005, p. 9), then multiculturalism is the reality in which a man operates
out of necessity and in constant conflict related to the fact that one culture claims to be
“better” than another, and one economy is considered “more efficient” than another.
The conviction of superiority of one culture over another may indicate an interest in
what happens in borderlands and what is far outside – at a safe distance from the centre.
And yet, the same implicite accepted assumption claimed
(…) the need for spreading the standards of European civilization and culture
amongst the uncivilized that would have resulted in declining superstitions, ending
the cruel rule of local caciques and in a more efficient fight against the consequences of natural disasters or epidemics (ibid.).
A good and historically safe example of this type of practice is provided Robert
D. Kaplan, who quotes Winston Churchill’s opinion on British colonialism in the Nile
valley. Its goal was to
(…) to give peace to warring tribes, to administer justice where all was violence, to
strike the chains off the slave, to draw the richness from the soil, to plant the earliest seeds of commerce and learning, to increase in whole peoples their capacities
33
for pleasure and diminish their chances of pain--what more beautiful ideal or more
valuable reward can inspire human effort? The act is virtuous, the exercise invigorating, and the result often extremely profitable (Churchill 1899, pp. 18-19, quoted
in Kaplan 2008, pp. 51-52).
The quoted passage is good, although a nineteenth century one, example of creating hegemonic relations between one (a higher and better – whatever that means),
culture and economy and another (lower and worse – whatever that means) culture and
economy. An analysis of the history of colonialism reveals the real cause of cultural and
economic connections as a place for designing and implementing hegemonic practices.
The economical looting and exploitation of the colonized lands was carried out under
the cover of cultural concern. Similar practices can be observed in relations between
a homogeneous centre and a heterogeneous borderland. What does it mean in practice?
In practice, it means taking actions related to the cultural recognition of minorities
and at the same time ignoring the question of economical recognition. One may risk
a thesis that the struggle for cultural recognition can mask economic and political issues. It would concern a cultural policy, which disconnects cultural and the economic
recognition, and therefore the issues of cultural acceptance and equality and economic
equality and justice. If cultural equality is emphasised, that might particularly involve
political and economical practices aimed at (amongst others) the conviction that immigrant worker should identify himself with the dominant identity of the worker in
a given culture, yet disregarding his cultural difference in the economical view. At the
same time, it appears that left-wing parties are cautious and suspicious of ethnic policy,
with the result that in difficult situations they are on the side of the endangered interests
of non-immigrant workers (Rex 1994, pp. 7-8). It seems that supporting one’s “owns”
links with a sense of communal, cultural and historical ties. It is obvious that what
allowed a party to support the interests of all workers, that is to undertake the political and economical fight on behalf of both non-immigrant and immigrant workers, is
a particular social beneficiary: the working class. In addition, and at the same time,
what allows it to abandon the interests of immigrant workers is the need to advocate
for this social beneficiary, who is characterized and linked to the party by historical
interests (Laclau & Mouffe 2007, pp. 128-129). It has been shown, for example in
the Polish-British experience associated with the current economic crisis, in case of
an economic emergency of non-immigrant workers’ interests, those who are not from
“the land” or “from the blood” are removed from the area of work competition. In this
context, immigrants as well as settled ethnic and national minorities become a cause
of real political and economical conflicts. The problem, however, is a conflict between
the worker’s exposed identity and the unsupported and in a sense the depreciated identity of the citizen-participant of the socio-political reality of a given dominant culture
(ibid.). One gets the impression that citizenship becomes a solely private matter and
is masked by class status (Rex 2004; Kożyczkowska 2007b). It seems that focusing
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ADELA KOŻYCZKOWSKA
exclusively on meeting the economical, material needs by identifying with a social
class and its ideology reduces/destroys the possibility of constructing such a cultural
and social capital, which would allow the recognition of the binding citizenship project and the implementation of it. From this perspective, the borderland appears to be
a place of identification with social class and the development of the identity of an
employee, a worker, a businessman, a merchant, a doctor, etc., with the closure of access to recognition and implementation of a citizenship project. Here another problem
emerges, the focus of people living in the borderland on issues of cultural recognition
(speaking about their culture) with the closing of access to the areas of work and education and as a consequence of this (again) a latency in the real project of citizenship.
From this point of view, the borderland can play the role of the cultural and economic
buffer that will separate the “real” citizens from those who will never become the “real”
citizens due to their lack of cultural and/or economic recognition.
The (post) modern world in its intellectual premise declares the abolition of the
“centre – borderland” opposition and proclaims the principles of equal access and
equal value of cultures. Hence the need for the redefinition of what may happen on the
edge of cultures but with the extension of the cultural perspective, the recognition of
geographical proximity-distance and political and economical interests. I wrote earlier
that multiculturalism as a metanarration may hide separatist tendencies, which are the
consequence and a cause of closing off cultures. The basis of this metanarration will
become an ideology that will be implemented by creating theories and will become
the principle of doctrinal premises, which in consequence will be put into educational,
economic and political practices. If, however, multiculturalism is to be understood as
the co-existence of many cultures, if a claim of equality and parity may be realized and
at the same time linked with the question of recognition and redistribution (as justice
in the broadest sense) a theoretical proposal may be the idea of interculturalism. Interculturalism as a metanarration creates the possibility for the recognition of different
cultures on the basis of theory as well as in educational, economic and political projects
and, in the first place, at the level of practice.
Multiculturalism, as the co-existence of many cultures, and interculturalism as
a way of understanding, existing, and acting – and thus the perspective for both the
theory and the practice – they cease to contest the value of a human in relation to the
centre as a symbolic and a real place of dominant culture and economy. In this sense,
the professional and personal opportunities of a man of the borderland are no longer
exclusively tied to the level of assimilation of the norms and language of the dominant
culture. The logic of the dominant culture is that the opportunity for social advancement is directly proportional to the level of affiliation to the symbolic area of culture4.
4
Woroniecki points out that multiculturalism can be understood in two ways: 1) as a postulate or
an ideology, 2) as the co-existence of many cultures. Nikitorowicz writes about a different interpretation of the category of “multiculturalism” and “interculturalism”. The first links the boundaries with
(…) division, response to diversity, incomprehensibility, far, as well as with expulsion, rejection, stigma,
35
Interculturalism provides an opportunity to create cultural policy as a policy of cultural and economic appreciation. Cultural policy is to be seen as a lesson of cultures and
negotiations. It is also an attempt to conciliate the conflict between the world of public
ownership and the world of private cultural communities. Cultural policy at the level
of a project and in practical implementation appears in the prevention of discrimination in access to social housing, employment, education, social care and acceptance of
language, religion, and the culture sensu largo (Rex 1994, pp. 7-8).
There is a need, therefore, to examine the issue of “difference” from three perspectives: economics, politics and culture. At the same time, it is important to investigate
the problem of the difference in some way from the inside of the constructed social
structure of the borderland. Examining the question of difference in isolation from
the borderland, (the place of co-existence of many cultures) – from the outside – may
result in the borderland itself generating practices, which in essence would be aimed at
the cultural, economic and political ignorance of minorities (Scatamburlo-D’Annibale
& McLaren 2004, p. 184). Educational practices are of special importance here. Education offers opportunities to construct the desired social capital that enables people from
the “minority culture” to achieve high prestige within the dominant culture. Introducing a man to the symbolic culture and helping him to gain the desired cultural capital,
education also makes it easier to acquire well-paid and prestigious job and helps in the
gathering of economical capital. The paradox of education lies, however, in the fact
that this is only a possibility. In fact, education becomes a place of selection and sifting
– it closes access to cultural and economic goods for children from national or ethnic
minorities, and at the same time it belittles their home culture, because the cultural and
social capital is defined and constructed only in relation to the dominant cultural values,
excluding those ones belonging to ethnic or national minorities.
If we assume that an inherent – though paradoxical – feature of democracy is a constant conflict and a need to struggle within and with it, then the problem is not to win
or lose in this conflict. Furthermore, if we assume that one of the conflict areas of democracy is work, the problem is not in fact of winning or losing, for example, but in
the struggle for a job. The problem of cultural significance is opening or closing access
to participation in this conflict (for example the struggle for work) since the participation itself (regardless of losing or winning) is a privileged position: a man who may be
involved in the conflict, takes the winning position in relation to those who may not.
It seems that the real task of school is just preventing access to various areas of conflict
within the democratic reality for future adults (Kożyczkowska 2007a, pp. 366-374).
marginalization, exclusion, nationalism etc. The second category the author links the borderland with (…)
interaction, mutual interest, tolerance, appreciation, an area of diffusion and borrowing and yet defensive
of and concerned with the securing of one’s own core values, a fertile area of exploring and negotiating, of
dialogue and compromise, but also of being rooted, a feeling of proximity and patriotism. The distinctions
introduced by the authors became (amongst others), important elements of investigation and study and
consequently became the basis of the intellectual system I have applied in this work (see Woroniecki 2005,
p. 17 and following; Nikitorowicz 2009, p. 125).
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ADELA KOŻYCZKOWSKA
The borderland as Buber’s between.
An example of a symbolic artefact
Borderland is not only a geographic space and a place of clashing political or economic practices, but also a place of people who – living in the borderland (a man next
to a man, confronting each other “face to face”) –are left to themselves for decades to
develop its practical model. Constructed within its frame the processes of socialization
and education are based on the idea of socialization (education) to the borderland: to
the everyday meeting of man with a man with differences.
The logic of the “borderland” understood in this way seems to stem from a sense
of category “between”. The “between” is a result and also a possibility of “meeting” in
Buber’s meaning. The “between” is an area in which – as Martin Buber writes – I meets
Thou (You) so a man meets a man and also appears in him the readiness to meet those
with differences. Due to this, the basic condition of human existence is fulfilled: a human becomes a human only thanks to another human. Thus the borderland within the
meaning of “between” is a place where the other human becomes the Other5, or the one
who is willing to reveal in the relationship of the meeting his “face” and, at the same
time, to whom the “face” of another met human is revealed.
The “between” is the primary category of human reality and it is where the all the
spiritual work takes place (Buber 1993, p. 128). The borderland has similar importance:
it is the primary category of human reality in which occurs all the spiritual work and
where the symbolic side of human existence may be realized. It is worth noting that
the borderland – like the “between” – is not an auxiliary construct, but something, in
its essence and in every respect real due to its links with human reality. The borderland
is both the place and the medium of relations between people, regardless of (apparent
or real) differences. The borderland should not be described in a linear way because it
is a metaphor of each meeting, which takes place in the space of the differences – and
if this is different, so too are borders. Every time a human meets a human here, he also
meets a need for simultaneously opening and closing the borders that distinguish him.
This situation allows a man to realize that he is stretched between closing and opening but the solution to this conflict cannot rely on simple choice of either closing or
opening. The problem of meeting solved in this way destroys the idea of borderland
that should be constructed for each encounter between men, every time from the beginning (see ibid, p. 129). Each time in the simultaneous opening and closing. As I wrote
above, the “between” determines the possibility of space of a spiritual work (also in
symbolic terms), and at the same time the quality of this spiritual (symbolic) work determines the construction and the existence of the “between”. It seems that borderland
is based on the same principle. The quality of spiritual (symbolic) work undertaken
5
The categorization after M. Buber, J. Tischner, G. Simmel and E. Levinas.
37
here is associated with the cultural value system from the interior from which come
the participants of a meeting (Kożyczkowska 2003, pp. 336-337). However, it appears
that a misunderstood sense of loyalty and devotion to one’s own culture may constitute
a real obstacle in the construction of the borderland. In this case, the borderland will
be a potential threat and may turn into a symbol of betrayal and rejection of one’s own
cultural identity. However, when a man rejects the borderland, he automatically gives
up the possibility of spiritual work and the possibility of experiencing the ideas and
values of it. The metaphor of the borderland represents a kind of a “base” of a man,
where he can realize all that is above human and that which is an encounter, a dialogue
and that which is not worth cancelling, because then also a man will be cancelled (see
Tischner 1990, p. 19).
The borderland (like the “between”) – although real – is also a “metaphor”, a “symbol” of addressing one thought to another thought. Contents, which have been absent
and not visible up to that time, have a chance to become known and give a new meaning
to already existing contents. A new horizon of meanings is created – a new context for
the understanding of events and things (Levinas 1986, pp. 239-240, 242). The borderland is this, what J. Tischner calls the “New World” within the old order, with a peculiar
logic of clashing of various matters and things and opening a real space for a dialogue
(Tischner 1990, p. 19).
The translocation of importance:
The effects of artefactual dispositions of the borderland
The borderland under the control of the centre becomes the place where identity
policy can be realized. The greater the radicalism of the centre, the stronger the pressure on the constitution of the borderland with the qualitatively defined man. In this
sense, it becomes an impossible encounter as an expression of symmetry and equality
but it is realized as an encounter resulting in the shaping of one of the participants by
another according to some pre-defined project. One can say that a subjective relationship I- Thou (You) is replaced by an objective relationship I – It (in Buber’s meaning).
The nature of the latter lies in the fact that the meeting is limited to a cognitive and
engineering act. The identity policy will mean here the practice of positioning another
man in accordance with one’s knowledge about him and one’s authority over him (Hall
2008, p. 165). The gaining of the dominant position automatically excludes a social
conciliation (see Laclau 2004, p. 56). This authority may be further strengthened –
apart from its knowledge – by the acceptance of the existence of a permanent state of
emergency in the borderland. The knowledge about the borderland is constructed using
the categories adequate for the centre, which results in the borderland functioning as an
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ADELA KOŻYCZKOWSKA
idea and – paradoxically – through this image and these categories, the borderland is
seen as distinct and different (see Said 2005) and as such it becomes subject to practices
of exclusion.
It seems the borderland is this distortion of the homogeneous centre’s existence; it
does not allow it to become fossilized and constantly forces it to make an effort to go
beyond its territory but without leaving its own discourse. The recognition of the borderland always takes place from the position of the centre. In addition, it also appears
that the bigger the radicalism of the community, the bigger threat to it – in its rational
or irrational imagination – its own borderland seems to be and frequently the community chooses violent methods for its subjugation. However, the exclusion, which the
borderland undergoes, because of its inherent difference, becomes a particular form for
its appreciation (Laclau 2004, p. 60). It is for this reason that the old order of necessity
is replaced by a new one, just to (still) subjugate the difference6. Essentially, this means
that the radical opposition of the centre to the borderland is associated with the creation and maintaining of the relationship of dependency of the centre to the borderland
because it is the constituted logic of the borderland in relation to the logic of the centre
which attests its (the centre) dominant position.
It should be emphasized that the relationships between the centre (universalism)
and the borderland (particularism) are not ordinary relations of mutual exclusion (ibid.,
p. 54 and following) but relations of mutual dependence. Moreover, although the gap
between them cannot be filled up, the reason is not the dominant position of the centre
but the fact that the centre is nothing more than a type of a borderland (ibid., p. 56)
which is also a place of interweaving and intertwining borders. Thus, what differentiates the centre from the borderland is not only the content revealed to the world, this
has usually a particular nature, but rather the adoption of a universal form of its expression and the adoption of universal functions (ibid., p. 54).
Therefore, the higher thefocusing of the centre on the borderland, the higher the
possibility that the borderland itself will become the real centre. It seems that translocation of importance can be associated with the shaping of the political, cultural and
economical meanings by the borderland according to the pattern of the centre which
seems to result from a need to acquire knowledge about the universalistic form, function and expression. Another relationship revealed between the centre and the borderland is the hidden educational one. Even if it concerns an extreme form of exclusion
and colonization of the borderland, it is also a unique opportunity for the borderland
to explore the universal measures of the function and expression of the centre. In fact,
6
Despite what I have written in this passage about the connection between the centre (universalism)
and the borderland (particularism) as a one-way relationship – that is, I have examined what the borderland
“does” to the centre, I must stress that the centre itself also changes the borderland. Moreover, even if borderland will be emancipated by the rejection of the order and culture of the dominant community (group),
the dominant group still shapes the identity of those emancipated. We are dealing with the inversion that
took place in the ideological (cultural) area of the dominant group (Laclau 2004, pp. 61-62).
39
the borderland becomes the real centre, within which cultural, political and identity
changes take place.
The translocation of the borderland to the function and importance of the centre is
also associated with the fact that it is the difference which determines who is a human
and the possibility of exposing himself (even by exclusion) finally triggers the need to
reconsider the history, tradition, religion and universal values. The translocation of the
borderland to the importance of the centre is also a result of the strength of the borderland’s opposition against conservatism of what previously has been resurrected and
revealed by the centre from its original place (Hall 2008, pp. 167-168).
The conclusion: asking about the borderland pedagogy
The change in the interpretative perspective of the borderland creates new opportunities for viewing borderland pedagogy. Within this pedagogy, we should be concerned
with such actions, which enhances the man of the borderland awareness’ of the core
complexity of the borderland. These conditions could be met by critical pedagogy, the
goal of which is a kind of “waking” of a man and showing him the complex contextuality of his existence. The pedagogues should avoid opposition and confronting the
culture and the economy as contexts of human existence and his determination. They
should be guided by belief that it is necessary to mix both contexts of acting and understanding of a man (Giroux 2004, pp. 32-33).
Cultural policy is as important as it is here the project of identity appears where people’s social status is established and educational practices are constructed. Searching
for a new policy and a new critical language for pedagogy must take into account the
relationship between democracy, ethics and politics as the proper basis of pedagogy.
At the same time pedagogy, should be understood as a moral and political practice that
enables us to recognize and to understand cultural policy as a special project of citizenship (ibid., p. 33).
The pedagogy of the borderland – as critical pedagogy – is, therefore, this type
of moral and political practice which provides the necessary instruments to describe
the situation of a man (the man of the borderland in this case) and enables his critical
citizenship. It is still open to adjustments and changes so that it can project a vision of
a man and his future. This project should also be equipped with the instruments necessary to recognize the authority and its relationship with the spaces of human existence.
In this context, the project of pedagogy cannot be a constant and closed set of principles, values and practices that will describe the “desired” man. This project should be
contextually defined and ready to respond to specific conditions and needs. Its ethical
side should be associated with the necessity of opening to the other man and the implementation of the “policy of possibility”. It also concerns the need by pedagogues to
40
ADELA KOŻYCZKOWSKA
reconsider the cultural and political heritage with which they enter the area of pedagogy
as it significantly determines their educational encounters and for that, the pedagogues
should take the ethical and political responsibility (ibid., 36-38).
It seems that it is necessary to extend the nature of the borderland pedagogy and to
base it on broader foundations: 1) cultural and economic appreciation and 2) conversion (spatial, symbolic and of identity) of the man of the borderland to the man of the
centre; assuming that the borderland – as a heterogeneous symbolic, geographical and
cultural space has a tendency for continuous displacements – in its essence it is the
centre itself. Such an understanding of the sense of pedagogy associated with the generation of moral and political practices that result in acquiring the critical perception
of reality skills by a man who becomes aware of his own cultural heritage for which of
necessity he must take a moral and political responsibility.
The problem of the borderland as examined in this paper poses many questions,
especially in the context of the project of Europe of many cultures and many languages,
which is expressed in quitting national states and heading towards, perhaps, a state of
regions’ community. A peculiar human perplexity (split) between what is global or at
least European, or central, and what is local or of the borderland, forces us to seek new
answers to the old questions and to seek such solutions that allow a man to have the best
existence for him and others. Certainly, it does not concern an antagonistic man who
must choose between what has so far seemed to be the centre and what the borderland
was. Because as this short argument shows – one cannot exist without the other and
the centre itself – like the borderland – is floating and changeable, with a tendency to
translocate. Perhaps, the issue here is to live with ambivalence and in ambivalence and
the permanent conciliation, the answers to the questions asked one time from the centre
position and another time from the borderland position. Alternatively, the issue is to
ask from different positions about living with ambivalence and in ambivalence of the
borderland and the centre at the same time.
Translated from Polish by Tomasz Borkowski
41
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2011
ALICJA KARGULOWA
University of Lower Silesia Wrocław
On the counselling of a network society
The network character of phenomena:
generating human problems
In descriptions of today’s social world, such terms as variability, ambivalence and
the unpredictability of events dominate. In descriptions of industry there is talk of an
information age, globalisation and networking. In reflections on culture it is terms such
as mass, intercultural and transnational culture which are mentioned, along with the
cultures of individualism, fundamentalism and speed. All the terms are employed to
convey an image of contemporary reality, to emphasise to a greater or lesser extent
both the appearance of new phenomena and the emergence of various variants of these
and also the connections being created not only on a local/community scale, not only
in individual states or territories, but also on a global scale. The applied terminology
draws attention to the kind of relations present in contemporary reality which on general examination – in the opinion of the Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells –
are undefined, and sometimes indefinable. These are networks of capital, production, communication, crime, international institutions, supranational military apparatuses, non-governmental organisations, transnational religions, movements of
public opinion and social movements of all kinds, including terrorist movements
(Castells 2004, p. 357).
The aforementioned networks intersect and create nodes which eventually give
shape to the processes occurring in them and reinforce their influence but at other
times are in conflict with each other, leading to situations experienced by nation states
and communities in various ways, but most importantly, they impress themselves in
46
ALICJA KARGULOWA
different ways on the day to day experiences of individuals. For day to day life – as
Piotr Sztompka figuratively remarks – is both the originary source and mirror of everything else that exists in society – systems, organisations, structures, culture (Sztompka
2008, p. 215). It is in this daily life that, just when the world becomes too large to be
controlled, social actors aim to shrink it back to their size and reach. When networks
dissolve time and space, people anchor themselves in places, and recall their historic
memory. (Castells 2004, p. 69). The reconstruction of the world of everyday life completed by individual human beings thus expresses itself in an attempt to fathom and
reduce a complicated networked reality, by a return to cultural community and by the
pursuit of a definition of their own identity. This is often a turning in on themselves,
towards their “internal lives”, towards their subjectivity and answers to the question of
“Who am I?” constructed through their relations with other members of the community.
These psychological processes were recognised as fundamental in counselling and
psychotherapy by Carl Rogers as early as the 1940s. It is predominantly these which
are found as the root cause for seeking help from others and have become the impulse
for the creation of different kinds of therapy, coaching sessions and relaxation exercises, and have also initiated the provision of counselling aid in the form of “the helpful conversation” and “meeting groups” in specially generated structures. Nowadays
these structures are subject to “blurring” and the commonly observed concentration on
oneself, the search for support in identifying oneself and above all making use of the
help of others at critical moments and times of transition are defined by Małgorzata
Jacyno (2007) as therapeutic discourse. This is neither unitary in character nor is it
something that is completely organised, coherent, uniform or realised in specially created institutions. On the contrary, it is a dynamic, multi-stranded discourse proceeding
in the private sphere of individuals and in the public space of social life. It is one of
the processes of social life involving various people, associations and local, national
and international organisations as well as a diverse media. A process whose flexibility
and intensity in a large measure results from relations which are established between,
on the one hand, “dispensers of knowledge” and “problem experts” or individuals who
are considered to be such and were employed by various institutions, sometimes people with missionary instincts rushing to help others who voluntarily make a concerted
effort to unravel the complexities in the fates of the contemporary world and people
who aim to find a way out of problematic situations; and on the other hand, with people
whose hopelessness, doubts, uncertainties and fears have become so severe that they
desire, or need, to enlist the help of the first group of people. It is precisely these events,
in the form of the passing on/receiving of counselling, advice, signs of understanding,
empathy and support and also information and instructions which are created by people, who influence each other and which come into play at various levels of social life
but leave their stamp on daily life, which together comprise the social process which is
described as counselling.
47
A full grasp of the scope, directions of development and factors deciding the trajectory flow of the processes of advice giving, psychological support, counselling and
empathetic togetherness is impossible. Nevertheless occasionally the temptation occurs to take a closer look at their component parts, explain the forces they exert and
understand their roles in the lives of individuals, organisations or society. In such quests
one repeatedly finds oneself turning first to the institutional actions and descriptions
of institutions practising professional counselling which are committed to “imparting
a sense of order” to helping actions. Initiatives appearing at the beginning of the last
century, the epoch of early modernism are revisited and attempts are undertaken to find
explanations for the usefulness and adequacy of counselling in response to the needs of
individual and those of society, i.e. search for the sources and causes of the creation and
development of institutionalised counselling in particular, but also the exploitation of
“natural” counselling. The results of these undertakings do not however always deliver
answers which would be satisfactory and useful at the present time.
The inadequacy of systemic counselling in the new reality
The organised system of counselling at the beginning of the 20th century carried an
unambiguous message: the support of helpless people through the provision of clear
directions on how to live, what to do, what to avoid and what to prevent. As I have
written elsewhere (Kargulowa 2009), the first period of modernity often called “simple
modernity”, expressed itself – in Zygmunt Baumann’s view – as the realisation of two
principles, presented synthetically by Zbigniew Bokszański:
(1) a human being should be a disciplined person; his/her activities should be regulated, predictable and susceptible to regulation. (2) a human being in him/herself
does not constitute a self-sufficient “whole”, “capable of survival”, so (s)he has
to engage with others, conforming to the general requirements that are laid down
(Bokszański 2007, p. 39).
The social order at the onset of modernity was internally cohesive and durable. The
identity of the individual residing in it was supposed to be a lifelong project constructed
according to a plan established from above. The individual was supposed to realise her
“calling” – referring at that time, not only to the clerical lifestyle but also the secular –
by incorporating essential, commonly shared values into her biography. Counselling, as
one of the institutionalised forms of social life, contributing to the maintenance of the
social order through diagnostic and advisory1 action, was supposed to make it easier for
1
Counselling and advice work are often incorrectly identified with each other. By counselling, I understand an interpersonal relationship between advisor and client entailing the provision of help to the person in need of it by the reflexive working through of her problems, the provision of counselling and help,
48
ALICJA KARGULOWA
individuals to both discover that calling and to progress more smoothly through transitions and to find their place in the social structure in the spheres of production, culture
and the distribution of goods and services etc.
Therefore, directives were given to people, exhibiting helplessness either in their
lives, in choosing a profession or in seeking work, by qualified counsellors employed in
counselling centres opened by the state or local charitable, industrial, trade or religious
associations, among others. As Tadeusz Aleksander describes in his analysis of the
practices of one of the occupational counselling centres of this period, these specialists
conducted observations of social life and academic research, constructed tools for the
measurement of people’s opportunities and skills, delivered lectures on the significance
of a suitable choice of profession and even conducted courses preparing former psycho
technicians and occupational counsellors, but above all provided counselling on the
basis of psychological and psycho technical researches. The significance of the presented diagnoses and provided recommendations was affirmed by an organised system
of “guarantees”, for… in many environments, certificates confirming the suitability of
students accepted onto occupational studies courses had to be made out at counselling
centres (Aleksander 2009, p. 118). Even from this example it can be seen to what extent
the interlinked systems of education, employment and production represented a distinct
unified whole – oriented towards the gaining of predictable results that were expected
and achieved by a community of “producer-executors” – and also how the occupational
counselling embedded in this system fulfilled the task of optimising the whole complex
system, while being a strongly united element of the whole, integrally linked with it and
not straying beyond it when reaching practical solutions.
Nevertheless, this state, which is characteristic of “simple modernity”, is becoming
impossible to maintain in the conditions of the significantly more complex “second
modernity”, in the epoch named “fluid modernity”, “late modernity” and “reflexive
modernity”. The fragmentation of reality, the changeability and ambivalence, characteristic of modern times have blurred the boundaries that were earlier fiercely adhered
to by emerging systems and have called into being fluid structures that adapt their form
and practices to the requirements of the moment and frequently of almost immediate
use in the world of “purchaser-consumers”, even when they support specific organisations like a workplace. Whereas earlier a unit was created in large manufacturing plants
known as a “personal counselling” unit, currently counselling is practised in these by
different services, more often than not as an activity supporting or accompanying educational processes or tailored to the form, time and place of production, especially
when this is based on new technologies and IT. Examples of this include teleworking,
and consultations and psychological support. Sometimes counselling is called the activity of a counsellor,
the activity of a complete counselling institution or even a complete system or network of counselling
centres. Advice giving is a narrower concept and denotes activity in general limiting itself to the provision
of straightforward advice, pointers, directions or tasks to complete. It is closer to what is known as directive counselling.
49
staff, leasing, outsourcing, mentoring, coaching and outplacement as new forms of
non-standard employment which to a varied extent entail counselling help (see Wołk
2009) in accordance with the concept of human relations (HR).
Castells thinks that the whole of contemporary reality is constructed from flows, by
which he understands purposeful, repetitive, programmable sequences of exchange and
interaction between physically disjointed positions held by social actors in economic,
political and symbolic structures of society (Castells 2010, p. 412). Counselling, while
it remains within the sphere of personal and social services, is also one of these flows,
which locates itself in various social structures of a local, national and international
character2.
Whereas counselling in the epoch of “simple modernity”, by taking up helping
activities, was able, to a large extent, to determine the shaping of the identities of the
people benefiting from it, since it took into account the desire of people taking part
in social life to find their place in the social structure and supported their efforts to be
included in the established system and their attempts to adhere to principles and activity that complied with socially accepted models. Contemporary counselling must take
into account that we are faced with the need to continually make new choices from
among multifarious propositions relating to values, lifestyles, work, ways of spending
free time, even kinds of identity and also that we are trying to meet the requirements
of reflexive participation in the pulsating and dynamic world of life and must be aware
that all of these choices carry with them the risk of uncertainty, because they may turn
out to be misguided, since by adopting them we are not automatically guaranteed lasting benefits.
Currently, counselling increasingly seems to be in the form of help sought by marginalised or psychologically weak, helpless people and also resourceful people, confused by a profusion of propositions: people putting forward their own proposition
or undecided with regard to which to choose or make use of. The changes described
earlier mean that counselling cannot crystallise into the form of an optimal system
gathering together enlightened “experts on life”. Those advice workers that practice
counselling have to depart from the traditional role of diagnostician, prognostician
and expert, drawing from a bank of verified, documented, irrefutable knowledge and
2
It is evident that the first conceptualisations of the tasks of occupational counselling as a service
on an international scale were contained in a EWG Council Decision from 1963 that laid down general
principles for the execution of occupational counselling. In subsequent years, three forms of cooperation
in this area were adopted by the Community: from 1967 the drawing up of periodic reports on the state of
occupational counselling in separate countries; from 1978 the realisation of programmes and initiatives
indirectly and directly supporting the realisation of occupational counselling’s aims; from 1987 the development of occupational counselling for the long term unemployed. A key moment was the decision by the
Council of the EU on 6th December 1994 to establish a European Community programme of activity in the
field of education and training policy which is called the Leonardo da Vinci programme into life, which is
completely devoted to the development of occupational counselling (cf. Paszkowska-Rogacz 2001, p. 7;
Siarkiewicz R. 2004, pp. 141- 142).
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ALICJA KARGULOWA
instead assume the difficult role of partner: sometimes a patient interpreter, sometimes
a doubting guide through the various complexities of life, sometimes an irony-equipped
companion through the wide-ranging territory covered by “existential consumption”,
sometimes an educator and even a therapist (Minta 2009). This has numerous consequences as evident in the organisation of counselling on a global and national scale
as well as in the vision of the counsellor-client relationship (see Czerkawska 2004;
Drabik-Podgórna 2009; Malewski 2003; Mielczarek 2009; Wojtasik 2009).
The network character of modern counselling
In a fluid reality, counselling has become – to use Castells’ terminology – a flow,
a stream created from human problems, emotions, knowledge, action and behaviour as
well as material and symbolic products (associations, organisations, equipment), a flow
which is global in character yet possible to grasp in day-to-day life, even anchored in
daily reality and retained through it. It has become an extremely diverse process of
social life to a large extent “undefined and indefinable”, as Castells would describe it,
which does not mean, however, that all the specialised forms developed earlier have
been renounced in it or that the actions of qualified counsellors formulated within the
area it covers have been replaced by the advice of friends and “well-informed people”
or that deeper reflection on its meaning, significance and practice methods or results is
in decline. It might even be said that the complete opposite is the case3.
Powerful specialist consultancy and counselling firms which attempt to advise on
the resolution of global problems are familiar throughout the world, the advisory bodies of representatives of national governments at various grades of administration are
expanding and the role of counselling in the resolution of problems of migrating populations, in the struggle against exclusion and the marginalisation of people not keeping
pace with the development of civilisation and the struggle against terrorism and crime4
3
An example is provided by the IEAVG International Conference which took place on 3-5 June 2009
in Jyvaskyla in Finland, whose title alone, Coherence, Co-operation and Quality in Guidance and Counselling, is indicative of the continual search for a scientific basis for counselling and advice work activity
that would guarantee coherence, cooperation and a quality of service provision on a global scale. Cf. also
Wojtasik (2009a); Szumigraj (2010).
4
A role of this kind is fulfilled by such bodies as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, whose Committee on Education and Committee on Employment, Labour and Social Affairs,
on the application of representatives of the 2000 Lisbon Summit, undertook a review of policy in the counselling field. The review was initially embraced by 14 European countries and also Australia, Canada and
Korea. Whereas counselling policy within the EU had been focused on the passage of young people from
school into the workplace, the proposed review was concentrated on lifelong learning among young people
and adults (Watts 2003). This may attest to states passing over responsibility for their careers to individual
people, the shrinking of the political apparatus of caring nations and the development of a neo-liberal
51
has been elevated in the global economy. The most diverse advice and counselling are
also transmitted by the mass media and Internet. The dispensed diagnoses, expertise
and prognoses are honed down to prescriptions, directives and recommendations and
these in turn are submitted to a social consultation processes, a procedure which is supposed to provide proof of the reflexive relationship of the organisers of social life to
global problems, common concern over the social order and the bolstering of people in
their attempts to cope with the dynamics of change through the development of counselling, among other processes (see Watts & Sultana 2005).
Common features of the aforementioned firms, consortia and advisory bodies are
their openness, dynamism, adaptability and the short term nature of the activities they
engage in. These bodies are not, in general, discrete elements simultaneously built into
the structures of power, production, administration or defence, as was once the case.
Very often they are groups of people employed to complete specific tasks, groups composed of competent people who function in several different groups interlinked with
a network of connections with a parent firm and other organisations producing knowledge, processing information and distributing it among different clients5. Thus the components of the network are both autonomous and dependent vis-à-vis the network and
may be part of other networks and hence other media systems aimed at different targets
(Castells 2008, p. 179). Besides this, each of the elements in this network, both internal
and external, is rooted in specific cultural-institutional environments (nations, regions,
cities) which influence the network to a varied degree (ibid., p. 196).
In such a network of ties it is difficult to unequivocally and definitively point to one
source of knowledge from which advisors draw, or to determine one kind or discipline
of science which predominates in its production, or identify one group steering the flow
or to give all the conditions reinforcing or weakening the dynamics of counselling’s
development on a global scale. Counselling’s fluid structure leads to it eventually assuming the form of specialised, organised actions executed by large institutional groups
committed to the provision of counselling, not only in private matters affecting individual clients, but also often advising within a wider arena on national or international
affairs; on other occasions it simply comes down to a two-person counsellor-client
relationship. Sometimes this is an intimate face to face dialogue between the person
seeking help and a person committed to providing it, while at other times it is a virtual
meeting through the agency of the mass media between an anonymous receiver and
anonymous counsellor.
culture. National policy changes with regard to counselling and the changes in career counselling itself
since the changeover of power in 1989 are presented by Marcin Szumigraj (2011).
5
A good example in this case would be the renowned specialist Prof. Tony Watts, who is employed as
a visiting professor at the University of Derby and Canterbury Christ Church University, he is a Knight Order of the British Empire, has co-founded and worked at non-governmental organisations in Great Britain
and is an expert on various organisations but is best known in Poland as a World Bank expert.
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ALICJA KARGULOWA
Counselling as a process “happens” not – as was once the case – in individual isolated institutions or groups but in the wide space of flows which grants it material support and links what is occurring in it at the same time. In Castells’ opinion, the space
of flows is material organisation of concurrent social practices which operate through
flows (2010, p. 412). It is comprised of three elements: (1) a place which could be both
a physical space like a nation, city or region, even a specific counselling institution, or
a technical infrastructure, i.e. equipment which currently often relies on microelectronics, telecommunications, computer processing and information technology; (2) nodes
and concentrators (nodes are sequences of actions and organisations locally grouped
around key network functions, while concentrators coordinate the fluid interactions of
elements integrated into the network).
Every network defines its sites according to the function and hierarchy of each site,
and to the characteristics of the product or service to be processed in the network
(ibid., p. 444).
As far as counselling is concerned, the nodes could be both research groups trying
to determine areas of helplessness and the possibility of help being provided by counselling, higher education establishments that train counsellors, groups of “help specialists” developing new work methods, counsellor associations and also individual counselling centres and incidental counselling situations occurring on a micro-scale and
often assuming the form of a conversation between and counsellor and client; while the
concentrators could be congresses, academic seminars, joint publications, conventions
and specialist discussions assessing counsellors’ work methods and drawing up directives, acclamations and recommendations on a local or international level.
The spatial organisation of the dominating interests specific to a given social structure is the last (3) element of the space of flows. It is not structural, but “is enacted, as
a matter of fact devised, decided on and implemented by social actors” (Castells 2008,
p. 415). It could rely on the preferences of specific counselling actions which could
be taken up in order to solve the problems of individuals and local, national or global
problems in such counselling fields as educational, occupational or career counselling
or by counselling for people at risk of social isolation or marginalisation (see Plant
2003). The domination of individual tasks (interests) over others might be determined
by organisers of social life (power elites) calling on the services of various counselling
centres or advisory groups, local social activists, representatives of individual groups
awaiting help from counselling centres, counselling researchers or other bodies. The
real social domination – as can be read in Castells –
stems from the fact that cultural codes are embedded in the social structure in such
a way that possession of these codes opens the access to the power structure. For
in practice… the space of flows is made up of personal micro-networks that project
their interests in functional macro-networks throughout the global set of interactions in the space of flows (Castells 2004, p. 416).
53
The organisational space of the dominating interests can thus influence the opening or closing of specific counselling institutions, the introduction or discontinuation
of directions of study at higher education establishments preparing counsellors, the
level of funding directed at academic research important for counselling, the purchase
of materials, books and research tools, the participation of counsellors and researchers
in conferences and even counselling’s content. Counselling, as can be seen, belongs
to that kind of social flow whose aims and change of targets are continually shaping
and constantly revamping the structuring of resources (Castells 2008, p. 179). And
these phenomena can have a personal, sometimes local, character but are increasingly,
together with the globalisation of the economy and policy in the field of social services,
assuming an international character (Watts 2003). For example, at the IEAVG International Conference in Finland mentioned earlier, a final declaration directed at politicians throughout the world was prepared in which attention was drawn to the significance of counselling during an economic crisis, its role in the maintenance of a highly
qualified workforce and the high economic level of society as well as its involvement
in the maintenance of social stability through the provision of help to individuals in the
rebuilding of their shaken self-confidence. Hence we can read that the
AIOSP/IAEVG, as the largest worldwide guidance practitioners association, appeals to providers, practitioners and policy makers, to increase their efforts to provide a service that helps people overcome the impact of the current crisis, adapt to
the rapid changes in the labour market and to contribute to the long-term societal
and economic outcomes of economically focussed guidance (after Szumigraj 2010).
Similar appeals, suggestions or points of emphasis can also be put forward or applied by other bodies.
“Personal” counselling – participating in a micro-network
Considering counselling on a global scale through the prism of fluid modernity, it is
far from working through all the changes which have occurred in it as a social life process, a social activity and as an interpersonal relationship. Whereas counselling’s fluid
character, so typical of “reflexive modernity”, when perceived on a national or global
scale, appears to be something new which is characteristic of modern times, it has been
a familiar phenomenon in people’s daily lives for a long time, completely natural, especially when we have in mind non-professional counselling in the form of advice from
devoted and sympathetic people, those who are better informed and more competent or
loved ones. However it is worth reflecting whether the fluidity of this “natural” counselling has not undergone some kind of change in the epoch of “fluid modernity” and
whether it is the very same traditional counselling practiced in interpersonal structures.
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ALICJA KARGULOWA
The researches of Elżbieta Siarkiewicz (forthcoming), among others, on fragments
of daily life deliver partial answers with regard to this and to some extent reveal the
changes which counselling, rooted in everyday life, has undergone (see also ZielińskaPękał 2009a; Trębińska-Szumigraj 2009). It is also clear from the debates which are
in progress on the subject of identity, ways of shaping it among modern people and
getting through the problems connected with it. In the modern world, identity – in the
opinion of some –
is an energetic dialectical force opposing the dislocating dynamics of the network
society. (…) it appears as the alienated “other” of globalisation, “timeless time”
and the “space of flows” devoid of a concrete location, in other words it is proof of
opposition to the pressures of the network society.
In the opinion of Anthony Giddens, it is something else, a “reflexive undertaking”
each of us complete in our daily choices. However, in the opinion of postmodernists it
is something practiced “upon” people in the process through which they are inserted into social relationships, and something practiced by people in the appropriations they accomplish in the generation and circulation of social discourse. Identity
is a lot like a network (Barney 2008, pp. 169, 175-176).
Depending on the way identity is presented, the problems which link it with its
shaping or expression can be defined in various ways and other challenges can appear
before counselling.
Already resonating in this debate are the changes which have taken place on a global scale and in the private sphere, changes visible in the evidence of the growth of social
consciousness which are more often than not demonstrated publicly and physically
present in various areas of life. They are perceptible in this case in the organisation of
professional work and the attitude to it which has been brought about by international
commercial exchange, the appearance of new technologies and the growth in the employability of women; it is clear how they are linked with the transformations emanating from the development of an increasingly globalised popular culture; and that they
are linked to the growth of diverse risks – both health risk tied to the poisoning of the
environment and those emerging from social inequalities, crime and social deviation
(see Giddens 2009). The phenomena implied by the large changes in daily life on the
whole appear imperceptible yet are evident enough to resonate with the researches of
sociologists. As Piotr Sztompka (2008, p. 214) notes;
(…) sociology is striving to go beyond what is obvious, to probe more deeply into
ordinary experienced events, to analyse them, construct classifications and decode
them; it is enough to browse through the catalogues of the largest international
publishers of recent years to notice how many books are being published about
seemingly obvious and sometimes trivial matters: the sociology of conversation,
of love, friendship, the body, health, travel, shopping, money, play, humour and
55
laughter, of dignity or some kinds of regularities providing the basis for theoretical
generalisations. The sociology of daily life applies the “hermeneutics of suspicion”
(…), it hauls out into the daylight all these fragments, these small scale situations,
these banalities which, by establishing themselves, create the essence of existence.
Counselling cannot escape from the effects of these changes and clearly remains under their influence, because – fundamentally, from the point of view of its development
– the emerging sense of loss, a certain disorientation and the trauma of change – direct
people’s interest towards the daily sphere of life (ibid.) and strengthen the demand for
help in setting it in order. Counselling studies researches confirm that these changes
are reflected in the forms of work engaged in with counselling clients, and even in the
content of conversations between the counsellor and person seeking advice (Kargulowa
2009a; Siarkiewicz 2010) For one of the indicators of the new situation is a changed
language, the appearance of a whole new vocabulary for denoting the new forms of
behaviour which become possible due to new technical equipment and new organisational forms (Sztompka 2008). Above all, it is possible to note a marked growth in
mediated counselling. The researches of Daria Zielińska-Pekął (2009) indicate that this
kind of counselling often encompasses progressively wider circles of people in a manner beyond its own control, irrespective of their sex, age, level of education or pursued
profession. For the advice contained in the mass media, and especially on television, is
often conveyed unintentionally, not only through the media, but also, alongside other
media, and also in the media, when it is “given” by some of the protagonists in films
and television serials or news reporters to their co-protagonists. Viewers become recipients of this advice in a planned manner or en passant. Counselling received in various
ways is sometimes passed onto others through informal contact situations as part of
what is known as chance counselling, “doorstep counselling” (Siarkiewicz 2009) or
“corridor counselling”, by means of the Internet or a mobile phone (Zielińska-Pękał
2009a), or in other “places” – to use Castells’ language – facilitating the functioning of
micro-networks. Its presence in daily life has markedly altered the form of “personal
counselling”. A person seeking advice need not leave her house to receive counselling
from specialists or sympathetic people such as those surfing the Internet, involved in
discussion forums or in a television studio. In fact, she might have already turned to
a guide in book form or the advice contained in a magazine (Zierkierwicz 2004), but,
nevertheless, she currently has access to a significantly wider spectrum of “nodes and
concentrators”, which stimulate self-reflexivity and even identity transformations.
The changes also affect direct counselling conducted by professionals. This is in
fact evident in the evolution of Carl Rogers’ views. This therapist and researcher is
the famous creator of “client-centred therapy”. It was the diagnosis in the first stage of
therapeutic work of a client’s internal experiences, her aspirations, desires, feelings of
anxiety and lack of self-acceptance that was most important for Rogers and determined
the course of therapy in accordance with the humanistic concept of supporting others.
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ALICJA KARGULOWA
For aid in the definition, extraction and disclosure of problems in a safe therapeutic
environment was at that time the aim of helping activities and the basis of the provision
of counselling6. In his later works, however, Rogers began to appreciate much more
the value not only of the psychoanalytical but also the social aspect of the counselling
situation and directed the majority of his attention towards the course of the relationships which formed between himself and the client, the client and other members of the
group and also between all the members of the therapy group. These established relationships, which facilitated reconciliation with and acceptance of oneself, represented
nothing other than the client’s redefinition of her identity and the achievements of the
intended aim of therapy (Rogers 1991).
As can be seen, Rogers’ visionary foresight was grounded in the fact that, when
beginning his work in the 1940s, he found to some extent a remedy to the problems of
people of this period, the period known as simple modernity. At the time, the problems
that individual people were experiencing resulted from their desire to adapt themselves,
as far as possible, to social requirements while concurrently fulfilling their life missions. These problems underwent a change at the end of the century, when the main
problem became the desire to be in a community and the need for people to maintain
(in spite of this) their own individuality and autonomy.
Questions of the choice of values or redefinition of one’s own identity currently
appear in the work of the counsellor on a daily basis, yet the responsibility for the
choices made and decisions taken is transferred to the person seeking advice. For the
client of the modern counsellor is increasingly a greater specialist in the area of her
own problems than anyone else and the task of the counsellor supporting her is not to
define these, but to cooperate with her in the reflexive contemplation of the;, to offer
help with the understanding of their significance from a biographical perspective and
the examination of their diverse causes, contexts and effects; to offer help not so much
with the resolution of these problems as with coping with them (Straś-Romanowska
2009; Szumigraj 2009; Teusz 2009).
Hence the counsellor can be a specialist in some field, a close person connected by
blood ties, a devoted person deriving satisfaction from simply participating in a counselling situation or a “bought friend”, i.e. a counsellor professionally involved in the
provision of counselling satisfying the needs of her clients (see Trębińska-Szumigraj
2009). Counselling can be given in a specialist’s consulting room furnished with the
clients’ sense of well-being in mind and also in a place certainly not arranged for it,
a somewhat “virtual” counselling centre symbolically assigned to the space of school
corridor, kindergarden hall, library, café or park bench (E. Siarkiewicz 2004; Z-art.
2009). But the real novelty here is most often not the helplessness of the person seeking
6
The term “counselling” refers here not to the text of the spoken words conveyed by the counsellor to
the person seeking help, but encompasses the whole situation in which it comes into being and the whole
emotional-mental-behavioural context in which it is created as well as the wider socio-cultural conditions
of counselling as a form of help.
57
help so much as the relative incompetence of the counsellor and her helplessness in
the face of the help-seeker’s problem, which results from the unpredictability of the
world, the ambivalence of values and the profusion of information flowing from various sources in which both the help-seeker and counsellor are embedded.
In counselling, to a large extent, the focus of the counsellor’s attention is being
transferred from the search for resolution techniques to the ethnical aspect of the relationship (see Czerkawska & Czerkawski 2005; Drabik-Podgórna 2007; Malewski
2003). This changes the way in which narratives are conducted, transforms “counselling language” and modifies the circumstances of the encounter (Wojtasik 2009). These
days, it is not just a question of the giving of advice, but instead the joint construction of
counselling; it is not about choosing a career for a client but the analysis of the client’s
career, crucial from her biographical point of view; it is not about the solution of some
problem but about possible methods of coping with a problem etc. Therefore, as can be
seen, the changes in counselling are expressing themselves through an emphasis on the
development of the partners’ reflexivity, an increase in independence and responsibility and the ability to construct and reconstruct narrative identity, whatever that might
signify (see Gołębniak 2009).
For, as Manuel Castells notes,
in the world of global flows of wealth, power and images, the search for identity –
collective or individual, ascribed or constructed – becomes the fundamental source
of social meaning. (…) People increasingly organise their meaning not around
what they do but based on what they are, or believe they are (Castells 2010, p. 3).
Counselling, through modifying its aims, modes of action and organisational forms
and through “melting” into the space of social life and becoming one of the flows hidden in everyday reality, participates, as it were, in the process of the construction of the
identities of counselling clients or those participating in other social interactions established in various circumstances and having as their aim the support of certain people
by others (Malewski 2003). The analysis of one’s own biography and social reflexivity,
which “refers to the fact that we have constantly to think about, or reflect upon, the circumstances in which we live our lives” (Giddens 2009, p. 100), are the main processes
which characterise contemporary counselling examined as a type of flow both in the
global network of international institutional and interpersonal ties and in the micronetwork of social life and individual people.
Bożena Wojtasik (2009a), when depicting the personal micro-network, uses the image of a spider web for which individual nodes created from the intersection of family
“activities”, school, people in the immediate environment, peer and social groups and
also the mass media and influences of counselling institutions of various grades can – at
successive life stages – be the dominant “place” – in Castells’ understanding – for the
shaping of identity. The use of the professional or non-professional help of a counsellor
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ALICJA KARGULOWA
is, in this case, nothing other than the insertion of yet another network society node into
its own micro-network, a node representing help through counselling.
When analysing network society from a counselling science perspective, it can
therefore be noted that there is such a space of flows, such a “place” in which counselling explicitly loses its definite “format” and form, a place in which it becomes a flow,
and by adopting a structure, whether that be one of “natural” interaction or one of
a helping relationship established in organised systems or networks, expresses itself in
the fluid connection and disconnection, by people in their daily lives, of various forms
of help provided by the diverse counsellors supporting them in the difficult process of
identity construction and the challenge of coping with the problems linked to this.
Translated from Polish by Philip Palmer
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A. Kargulowa (ed.), Poradoznawstwo – kontynuacja dyskursu, Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN,
Warszawa.
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Wydawnicza Uniwersytetu Zielonogórskiego, Zielona Góra.
STRAŚ-ROMANOWSKA M., 2009, Doświadczenia graniczne w rozwoju człowieka: wyzwanie dla poradnictwa,
[in:] A. Kargulowa (ed.), Poradoznawstwo – kontynuacja dyskursu, Wyd. Nauk. PWN, Warszawa.
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E. Narkiewicz-Niedbalec, M. Zielińska (eds.), Co nas łączy, co nas dzieli?, Oficyna Wydawnicza Uniwersytetu Zielonogórskiego, Zielona Góra.
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SZUMIGRAJ M., 2010, Coherence, Co-operation and Quality in Guidance and Counselling, Jyvaskyla, 3-5
czerwca 2009. Sprawozdanie z konferencji Międzynarodowej IEAVG, Teraźniejszość – Człowiek –
Edukacja, Nr 1(49).
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TRĘBIŃSKA-SZUMIGRAJ E., 2009, Współuzależnienie matek narkomanów, GWP, Gdańsk.
WATTS A., 2003, The OECD Career Guidance Policy Review: a Progreress Report, [in:] E. Kalinowska,
A. Kargulowa, B. Wojtasik (eds.), Counsellor – profession, passion, calling?, Wydawnictwo DSWE
TWP, Wrocław.
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2011
PIOTR STAŃCZYK
University of Gdańsk
Tacit agreement, the culture of silence
and the politics of voice1
Discussing traditional school, Paulo Freire states that education is suffering from
narration sickness2 (Freire 2005, p. 71). The reverse of “narration sickness” is “culture of silence” (cultura do silêncio) (Freire 1970, pp. 26, 34), which constitutes the
condition for managing pupil’sattention in school. This article takes as its staring point
some empirical findings on regulation of the voice in school. One can identify coercive
silence as one of the elementary forms of compulsion experienced by pupils in the
Polish education system. This compulsion itself, which actualises at the level of order
and discipline in classrooms, is the basic dimension of teachers’ jobs (Piwowarski &
Krawczyk 2009, p. 39). Polish school rests on principles that are far from democratic
ones and constitute a space for introducing students to authoritarianism rather than
preparing them for participation in a democratic, political community as suggested by
Dewey (see Dewey 1966).
Three categories delineate the thematic field of the present article: “tacit agreement”, “culture of silence” and the “politics of voice”. The question of “tacit agreement” appears in debates concerning social and educational processes, but I would like
to turn to its origins, John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government. This will allow trac
1
The article was financed by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education within the scheme of the
grant no N107 02632/3637 titled Discursive construction of subject in selected areas of contemporary
culture.
2
The vivid metaphor of “narration sickness” [in a Polish translation of the second chapter of Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire in: Blusz 2000, p. 67) words “narration vomits” are used – translator’s note]
is more the result of translator’s work than of Paulo Freire himself. While the English edition introduces
the expression “narration sickness,” the Portuguese edition does not contain anything that would indicate
either narration “sickness” or “vomits.”
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PIOTR STAŃCZYK
the role of tacit and express agreement in the process of creating social order (Locke
2003). The aforementioned “culture of silence” developed by Freire belongs among
the basic elements of oppressive pedagogy and is both an objective as well as a part of
traditional schooling systems. Finally, the politics of voice, which is an integral part of
critical pedagogy and negates “spheres of social muteness”, constitutes a tool of emancipation (Szkudlarek & Śliwerski 2009, p. 19).
From the above combination of the key categories, it should be clear that the subjects of my reflections are relationships between politics and power on the one hand
and education on the other, that is, my focus is on seeking the answer to the following
question: how does school facilitate subjugation? One can give the following general
answer: by propagating the culture of silence, Polish schools produce tacit consensus
over an alienating social order. The following six topics/arguments? are dealt with in
this paper (1) to discuss an intriguing notion of the culture of silence and “narration
sickness”, which are expressed in pupils’ narratives on meaning of school experience;
(2) to analyse the “narration sickness” metaphor; (3) to reflect on possibilities of a communicative relationship with authorities; (4) to attempt to adapt John Locke’s conception in education; (5) to reframe this conception in the Althusserian notion of ideological state apparatuses and the principle of “purely material sincerity” that pertains in
relation to them; (6) finally, to present the politics of voice, or, more precisely, to claim
that having one’s voice heard is a “materially sincere” move towards emancipation.
(1) I presented partial results of my research elsewhere (see Stańczyk 2009a;
2009b)3. I shall not discuss the empirical data in detail, since my respondents’ words
are only a pretext for reflecting on the proposed subject. What is striking, at any rate,
in the narratives focused on the meaning of school, is a certain grammatical inability
to speak about time spent in school and about lessons in terms of possibility. In all the
stories told by students about their classes, there is the theme of coercion reflected in
collocations, which they use, with verbs such as “must” or “ought to”. School breaks,
in turn, are described through collocations based on the verb “may”, together with the
reflexive pronoun “oneself.” Answering a probing question, one of my respondents attempted to explain the difference between breaks and lessons:
During breaks, one can rest after classes (…). After the entire teacher’s babble, one
gets tired – too much gets into my head (GKPU16).
One can say that resting after classes means taking a rest from “teacher’s babble”. It
is worth adding that if the teacher had not “babbled”, the lesson would have been less
tiring, and certainly, it would have been thus, if not so much or, simply, less “had gotten into one’s head”. Moreover, taking into account that resting between lessons means
breaking the silence (according to respondents’ expressions – “chatting”, “talking”,
3
The articles present the results of a fenomenographic study of 44 respondents from four secondary
schools (gimnazja) in Gdańsk, twoof which got low scores and the other two scored better than average in
a test of maths and natural science.
Tacit agreement, the culture of silence and the politics of voice
63
“conversing” – indicate the meaning of resting), keeping silent becomes the major effort required in the learning process. The effects of the demand that students keep silent
are expressed below in empirically and logically intriguing way:
Well, I listen to the teacher, so that she doesn’t say that I don’t listen to her. – Well,
if I don’t listen and the teacher notices that I chat with someone, then she asks me
questions, you know, about the lesson, about what she was talking I don’t want to
get a fail mark, so I listen, and I would get one for not listening and for activity in
the classroom (GKPU16).
Here we can see the effectiveness of methods of voice regulation and pupil’s attention control, which are at a school’s disposal. The major problem here is not even
the “getting a fail mark” or that the student wants to avoid it, but the fact that breaking
the requirement of silence results in repression of “narration sickness”. Furthermore,
“getting a fail mark” for breaking the silence is a form of grading for “activity in the
classroom”, what suggests a paradoxical conclusion that the required form of pupil’s
activity is… silence. Indeed, it seems there is some kind of terribly twisted logic in Polish schools, though not only Polish ones, I think.
An ear, as Paul Willis’s research shows, constitutes an organ of conformity. Students
who keep a distance from schooling institutions (the leds) coined the word ear’oles to
refer to their conformist peers as those who give themselves through the ear (etymologically the word ear’ole comes from ass-hole) (Willis 1981, p. 14). Speaking and
listening mark daily reality at school, which is in turn marked by authority, and results
in domination as well as subjugation shared to varying degrees by both teachers and
students. Combining what the quoted respondent said with Freire’s and Willis’s arguments, one can say that too much of “narration sickness” comes into one’s head through
the ear. To probe beyond the metaphorical sense of this statement, we will dissect it and
analyse its components.
(2) Let us begin our analysis of the “narration sickness” metaphor from quoting the
relevant passage:
A careful analysis of the teacher-student relationship at any level, inside or outside
the school, reveals its fundamentally narrative character. This relationship involves
a narrating Subject (the teacher) and patient, listening objects (the students). The
contents, whether values or empirical dimensions of reality, tend in the process of
being narrated to become lifeless and petrified. Education is suffering from narration sickness (Freire 2005, p. 71).
The statement education is suffering from narration sickness refers to the communication relationship between a sender (teacher) and a student, where the latter stays so
passive in this relationship that one can call him or her a “listening Object” – an object
of action or, importantly, the object of a school’s operation. On the other hand, the
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“narration sickness” metaphor functions to determine the content of narration in relation to structure of norms and values as well as to judgements about reality.
If we want to determine how the “narration sickness” metaphor – or, for that matter
any other metaphor – works, we have to identify ways of creating meanings of those
collocations, which become redefined and lose their literal sense. The first level of
meaning in the “narration sickness” metaphor concerns “immediate proximity” in the
literal meaning. The question, then, arises: what do “sickness” and “narration” have in
common; what is the constitutive element in the definitions of both words? The common element that determines the very possibility of inventing the “narration sickness”
metaphor is the content expressed through the mouth. Indeed, the content – chyme, to
be more specific – is that what gets out because of vomiting (sickness). However, the
content is what narration contains. Thus we can say, “it gets out” during narration. In
this sense, if we follow Freire in his characterisation of the speaking subject, we can
coin a synonym – the notion of “vomiting subject” or the subject that vomits with text
during narration.
There are problems, however, with determining how the “narration sickness” metaphor works with respect to the student’s role. We know that students are only passive,
or (in Freire’s words) “patient, listening objects”. What is “narration sickness” for the
students? The following statement by Freire clarifies this question well:
Words are emptied of their concreteness and become a hollow, alienated, and alienating verbosity (ibid., p. 71).
Initially, from the perspective of the pupil, the content of “narration sickness” is
meaningless. The lack of concreteness means not only that the teacher speaks an almost foreign (alienated) language, which makes alienation deeper. Freire continues his
argument and vividly describes pupils as “containers” (…) “receptacles” to be “filled
by the teacher (ibid., p. 72). Drawing on A. Schaff’s work, one can say that education
is a force, which eliminates aspirations of the objectified subject, namely the student
(Schaff 1999, pp. 97-98). More importantly, however, in the context of the relationship
between education and social order, is that
The outstanding characteristic of this narrative education, then, is the sonority of
words, not their transforming power (Freire 2005, p. 71).
The key issue is the lack of transformative power of “narration sickness” and the
fact that it dispossesses one of such power. In this sense, when we expose the “narration sickness” metaphor, the content provided by the teacher is empty and has no value
from the perspective of the development of both pupil and society. Simply, while this
knowledge fills the student, it is by no means nutritious.
Here, reaching the next level on which the “narration sickness” metaphor operates,
we are leaving the classroom:
65
The capability of banking education to minimize or annul the students’ creative
power and to stimulate their credulity serves the interests of oppressors, who care
neither to have the world revealed nor to see it transformed (ibid., p. 73).
Furthermore:
Indeed, the interests of the oppressors lie in “changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them”; for the more the oppressed can be
led to adapt to that situation, the more easily they can be dominated (ibid., p. 74).
If, initially, knowledge taught at school is meaningless, then introducing obligatory education and an examination system is sufficient to make “narration sickness”
learning meaningful and determine the individual lives of pupils. That is, the meaning
can be constructed through structural violence instrumental in a school’s functioning
(see Kwieciński 1992, pp. 119-129). Nevertheless, this does not reverse the fact that
the pupils’ potential for development is wasted and knowledge loses its transformative strength. Although students are full of and filled with “narration vomits”, they are
forced to continue receiving these contents, in spite of and contrary to the individual
needs in the process of development.
It is necessary, however, to note that while the “narration sickness” content is meaningless for the pupils, the opposite is true for the social order. In other words, in every
social system based on asymmetry between the oppressors and the oppressed there is
a tendency to use the “banking” concept of education. Such structural conditions of
social practice in general and educational practice in particular find their expression
in “narration sickness”. The contents produced by the teacher’s speech are not meant
to explain the world, even less so to explain the reality with categories exposing social conflict. Therefore, pupils cannot perceive world, compatible with the content of
“narration sickness”, as a reality prone to a change. Through consuming the “narration
vomits”, students are mislead into believing that “if things are as they are, it means they
should be this way”. Stimulation of credulity allows a dialectical combination of an act
of change with an avoidance to act for change, as the school functions to reproduce the
existing order.
Let us now return to the task of dissecting the metaphor. The sense of “narration
sickness” lies in its consistence. To use an expression characteristic of “transmission
mythology” (see Klus-Stańska 2008), well-distilled and digested content turns the
school narration into a smooth substance, which cannot be absorbed. To phrase it in
a more colourful way, the content of narration vomits does not require problem-oriented thinking because knowledge takes a form of easily edible mash.
(3) We must now face the question of students’ attitude towards “narration sickness”. If we focus on voice and silence as well as approval and disapproval, it is possible to produce a matrix presenting communication attitudes to dominant discourse or,
merely, authority:
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PIOTR STAŃCZYK
Table 1. Communication attitude towards authority
Silence
Voice
Agreement
Tacit agreement
Articulate agreement
Resistance
Tacit resistance
Articulate resistance
As the present article focuses on issues of tacit agreement and articulate resistance,
I will not develop here the well-researched problem of tacit resistance (see BilińskaSuchanek 2000; McLaren 1986 1989; Rutkowiak 2009; Szkudlarek 1992 2002; Willis
1981).
(4) Our basis is the question of tacit agreement, which was developed by John
Locke and constitutes his interesting contribution to political philosophy. In his Two
Treatises of Government Locke devotes the first treatise to polemic with Robert Filmer,
who was an adherent of absolutist rule and this is quite relevant to our further argument.
The second treatise has been Locke’s positive contribution to reflection on origins of
government and social order.
Though the first treatise of government contains only some speculative interpretations around biblical text, one may use it to make a synthesis of both positions. Locke
disagrees with Filmer on the question of deriving the nature of authority from children’s
submission to their parents and to fatherhood’s authority, from biblical Adam’s rule and
its inheritance, and finally from the law of god or privileges it implicates, which can be
defined as an arbitrary use of force upon subjects (Locke 2003, pp. 7-99). Claiming that
authority does not derive from God’s grace nor rests on force and violence, he reaches
the following conclusion:
§ 1. (…) so that he that will not give just occasion to think that all government in
the world is the product only of force and violence, and that men live together by no
other rules but that of beasts, where the strongest carries it, and so lay a foundation
for perpetual disorder and mischief, tumult, sedition, and rebellion, (things that the
followers of that hypothesis so loudly cry out against) must of necessity find out
another rise of government, another original of political power, and another way of
designing and knowing the persons that have it, than what sir Robert Filmer hath
taught us (ibid., pp. 100-101).
First, we can observe that a descriptive-explanatory discourse entangles with a discourse of obligation – absolutist rule derived from god and based on violence cannot
originate there and enjoy such privileges because it lays “a foundation for perpetual
disorder”. The second significant issue is an obvious reduction of violence to manifest
violence, which is a tool of authority. In any case, authority, in Locke’s view, needs
another origin and when it becomes so, the cause of “mischief” will vanish, but that
requires simultaneous understanding of power in a minimalist way and introducing the
principle of “public good”:
67
§ 3. Political power, then, I take to be a right of making laws with penalties of death,
and consequently all less penalties, for the regulating and preserving of property,
and of employing the force of the community, in the execution of such laws, and in
the defence of the commonwealth from foreign injury; and all this only for the public good (ibid., p. 101).
Locke’s main proposition (and his contribution to liberal thought) is that agreement
constitutes the origins of political government. He derives this thesis from the concept
of the state of nature:
§ 171. (…) political power is that power which every man having in the state of nature, has given up into the hands of the society, and therein to the governors, whom
the society hath set over itself, with this express or tacit trust (ibid., p. 176).
Interestingly, human beings must be free by nature, since only in such circumstances they can resign from their freedom – they could not do it if they were not free (ibid.,
p. 136). More importantly, however, one can demonstrate trust either expressly or tacitly. In the first case, we deal with a tautology of express expression, and in the second
case with an oxymoron of tacit expression. We already know that agreeing to submit
to authority results from freedom that one has at birth as well as from the necessity
to establish social order, and it is an expression of trust. Here one must ask how tacit
expression is possible. It is not, unlike express trust, precisely defined. Nonetheless,
one can define tacit expression in opposition to an ardent act of express trust – “solemn
agreement” (ibid., p. 106). This means that any act of trust in authority, which does not
take a form of solemn agreement, is tacit expression.
It might seem that it does not make us go any further in reflection on the nature
of tacit expression, but, actually, the opposite is true. We can resolve the puzzle when
we become aware that, as Locke says: he, who attempts to get another man into his
absolute power, does thereby put himself into a state of war with him (ibid., p. 107).
However, he gives us no explicit definition of tacit agreement; he specifies the term
in a way that enables us to determine empirically the fact of tacit trust in authority. In
other words, the absence of the state of war, or, to put it less archaically, the absence of
an open social conflict, must imply people’s tacit trust in authority. With the absence of
ardent acts of consensus, the state of peace is an observable measure of tacit agreement
– here is the “political of daily life” (Szkudlarek & Śliwerski 2009, p. 47), of authority’s
daily operating that merges with the politics of voice (Szkudlarek 2009, pp. 109-110).
In other words, what is political is an individual’s daily activity, not only solemn occasions, such as elections or referendums. What we can see as political are daily practices
of power and subjugation, where the lack of resistance implies tacit agreement.
(5) Let us, however, go beyond the somewhat old-fashioned views of Locke. Though
we may owe to him a very interesting notion of trust in authority, and while he at the
same time, founded the idea of agreement on individual will, he provides no reflection
on how tacit agreement over the existing rule is organised. Indeed, the concept of the
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culture of silence directly implicates an instrumental aspiration for constructing tacit
agreement over domination.
We can now ask why is tacit agreement a sufficient expression of trust, while tacit
resistance is an insufficient articulation of mistrust and lacks its transformative potential. We may explore this issue by employing the principle of “purely material sincerity” first formulated by Henri Bergson and recently used by Slavoj Žižek to explain
Althusser’s concept of Ideological State Apparatuses (Žižek 1997, p. 6).
In his text, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Althusser 1971), Althusser analyses the conditions for durability of the capitalist social formation. He begins
with the question of how the system reproduces itself. As befits a Marxist-structuralist
thinker, he gives a very concrete answer. Reproduction takes place within the productive forces and the relations of production (ibid., p. 128). When it comes to the reproduction of the productive forces, we are interested not so much in the reproduction
of the means of production as in the reproduction of labour-power, which takes place
essentially outside the firm (ibid., p. 130) and can thus become a subject of pedagogical analysis. Why is it so? It is because reproduction of labour-power is not merely to
ensure the material conditions of physical reproduction. Wages are seen as a condition
that will enable the wage earner to present himself again at the factory gate the next
day – and every further day God grants him (ibid., p. 131), but one must take into account the production of attitudes/temperaments, indispensable for taking paid jobs by
new members of society:
I have said that the available labour power must be ‘competent’, i.e. suitable to
be set to work in the complex system of the process of production. The development of the productive forces and the type of unity historically constitutive of the
productive forces at a given moment produce the result that the labour power has
to be (diversely) skilled and therefore reproduced as such. Diversely: according to
the requirements of the socio-technical division of labour, its different ‘jobs’ and
‘posts’. (ibid., p. 131).
The durability of the capitalist social formation results from the shaping of historically appropriate set of competences learned in the process of education. Althusser asks
What do children learn at school? He, then, gives the following answer:
To put this more scientifically, I shall say that the reproduction of labour power
requires not only a reproduction of its skills, but also, at the same time, a reproduction of its submission to the rules of the established order, i.e. a reproduction of
submission to the ruling ideology for the workers, and a reproduction of the ability to manipulate the ruling ideology correctly for the agents of exploitation and
repression, so that they, too, will provide for the domination of the ruling class ‘in
words’. (ibid., pp. 132-133).
69
At this point Althusser brings up the issue of some kind of universality in the way
school operates – although with the growing complexity of the system of division of
labour in society individuals become more specialised, their subordination remains the
universal characteristic of labour that education process forms. Education is a particularly distinguished sphere of society’s reproduction, because – though Althusser argues
that social relations are “determined in the last instance” by an economic base – the formula of economic “determination in the last instance” means it is not the first one (ibid.,
p. 135). Therefore, ideology or, more precisely, its institutional functioning through
ideological state apparatuses, becomes a social lubricant that enables the smooth operation of society divided by class conflict. Nevertheless, it does not replace the principle
of determination in the last instance, when one thinks about the state, is reduced to the
functioning of the repressive state apparatus (ibid., pp. 137-141). The latter rests on
bare violence launched only as a last resort, and leaves initiative to ideological state
apparatuses:
What are the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs)? They must not be confused
with the (repressive) State apparatus. Remember that in Marxist theory, the State
Apparatus (SA) contains: the Government, the Administration, the Army, the Police, the Courts, the Prisons, etc., which constitute what I shall in future call the
Repressive State Apparatus. Repressive suggests that the State Apparatus in question ‘functions by violence’ – at least ultimately (…). I shall call Ideological State
Apparatuses a certain number of realities, which present themselves to the immediate observer in the form of distinct and specialized institutions (ibid., pp. 142-143).
Althusser lists particular ideological state apparatuses: religion, school, legal system, politics (system of parties), trade unions, media, culture (ibid., p. 143). However,
ostensive reference to the subject of ideological state apparatuses does not explain
much. The key point is that the Repressive State Apparatus functions ‘by violence’,
whereas the Ideological State Apparatuses’ function ‘by ideology’ (ibid., p. 145). Yet
we know that also the operating of ideology can be seen as functioning by violence,
though a concealed one, which Althusser calls “symbolic repression” (ibid., p. 145).
As we have already said, the educational system is a particularly privileged ideological state apparatus, coupled with the Family to replace the Church-Family couple
(ibid., pp. 153-154):
Nevertheless, in this concert, one ideological State apparatus certainly has the
dominant role, although hardly anyone lends an ear to its music: it is so silent! This
is the School.
It takes children from every class at infant-school age, and then for years (…) it
drums into them, whether it uses new or old methods, a certain amount of ‘knowhow’ wrapped in the ruling ideology (French, arithmetic, natural history, the sciences, literature) or simply the ruling ideology in its pure state (ethics, civic instruction, philosophy) (ibid., p. 155).
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Furthermore:
(…) no other ideological State apparatus has the obligatory (…) audience of the
totality of the children in the capitalist social formation, eight hours a day for five
or six days out of seven (ibid., p. 156).
The privileged role of education means that while it is obviously – “silent”, in
a sense that it is indispensable and undisputed, it has an “audience”. It ensures that
pupils are equipped with ideological patterns of thinking, which enable pupils to adapt
silently to their adult lives marked by their positions in social division of labour. To describe relationships between school, pupil and ideology, Althusser uses the verb “provide”: Each mass ejected en route is practically provided with the ideology, which suits
the role it has to fulfil in class society (ibid., p. 155).
Was ideology merely an illusion, the problem would be trifling. This is, however,
not the case, since ideology produces real effects. Althusser employs the notion of
ideology as a ‚representation’ of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real
conditions of existence (ibid., p. 162), what means using imaginary explications of the
actual relations. To put it more simply, a picture of our daily reality is fictitious, but
that does not reverse the fact that we apply our illusory ideas in our common practice
every day. This brings us back to the notion of social relations determined in the last
instance by economy. This conception claims there is feedback between material base
and ideological superstructure – ideas function as tools for ensuring tacit agreement
with domination. Focusing on how ideas function, Althusser emphasises their materiality due to their material consequences. If we ask, why is tacit agreement a sufficient
condition for domination and tacit resistance an insufficient condition for dismantling
domination, the response is in the claim that the subject acts insofar as he is acted by
(ibid., p. 170) ritualised ideological practices. Tacit agreement is a sufficient response
due to its consequences, merely, the lack of change.
Althusser states that: Ideology interpellates individuals as subjects (ibid., p. 170).
Hey, you! Who are you? One cannot ignore such interpellation, the more so because
ideological state apparatuses contain the totality of social relations. In addition, asking
about pupils’ identity, the school at the same time asks about their future – What will
you be? – attempting to allocate the cohort to “proper” social positions thus determining individual identities.
A response to ideological interpellation can be complex, but the most significant is
the simple distinction between agreement and disagreement, which are the elementary
components of “good” and “bad” subject’s identity:
(…) the subjects ‘work’, they ‘work by themselves’ in the vast majority of cases,
with the exception of the ‘bad subjects’ who on occasion provoke the intervention of
one of the detachments of the (repressive) State apparatus. But the vast majority of
(good) subjects work all right ‘all by themselves’, i.e. by ideology (whose concrete
forms are realized in the Ideological State Apparatuses) (ibid., p. 181).
71
Purely material sincerity stems from identity construction – the material consequence of being a “good” subject is a disciplined participation in ideological rituals of
ideological state apparatuses, but most significantly, it leads us through the gate of the
firm and implies tacit agreement with domination. In turn, being a “bad” subject brings
one to the court and to the gate of prison.
The alternative of “good”subject vs. “bad” a subject does not allow other possibilities, indeed, it excludes tacit disagreement altogether, since the latter will lead one either to the prison gate or implies only inner emigration, in which the material sincerity
means no more than tacit agreement, since inner emigration has no external material
consequences. Showing up the next day at the company’s gate means tacit agreement
with being an inferior element in the system of social division of labour. In other words,
work discipline is an indicator of tacit agreement.
(6) We shall now return to our starting point – the culture of silence. Tacit agreement, which comes into being in the process of “narration vomiting” and through the
culture of silence, is possible only under domination and gives domination the form of
the tacit agreement. Therefore, we should end this article with the question: why does
voice pose such a threat to reproduction of the existing relations of domination?
At this point, resistance, which – according to Tomasz Szkudlarek – results from
the possibility of disagreement with symbolic aggression that serves the reproduction
of the dominant culture and culture of domination, becomes the key issue. Resistance
itself (whether tacit or articulate), as it results from the possibility of dissent, constitutes
a premise for negating the indispensability of dominant culture. Once someone disputes the rules, they no longer remain unchallenged and unquestionable. If we consider
the consequences of the principle of purely material sincerity, we can see that articulate
resistance takes a key role in the process of emancipation – each act of speaking (literally) with one’s own voice means a micro-change in public space. It is because voices
of dominated cultures become an explicit deconstruction of the culture of domination,
since it leads to denaturalisation of its “natural”, that is, obvious contents (see Szkudlarek 2009, p. 61). Each act of speaking by members of a dominated culture means an
actual subversive action and opposes “narration sickness”.
***
In the principle of purely material sincerity, tacit resistance does not meet the criteria of dissent. Only articulate resistance, that is, express mistrust, becomes a materially
sincere act of defiance. According to J. Rutkowiak, it becomes socially creative “rebuff” (Rutkowiak 2009, pp. 27-36). School, which imposes the requirement of silence,
violates the very same democratic ideals it officially propagates. Hence, teachers take
the attitude of materially sincere tacit agreement with domination. One can ask about
72
PIOTR STAŃCZYK
reasons, but paradoxically it does not matter. Though one can treat Althusser’s concept
as wholly deterministic, the principle of purely material sincerity actually allows a possibility of expressing dissent easily and, therefore, taking action to change the existing social relations to make them more humane. It seems that today we urgently need
to return to the idea of civil disobedience proposed by Henry David Thoreau (1993).
Yet school, marked by teachers’ “narration sickness” and pupils’ silence, fosters tacit
agreement that stretches far beyond a school’s walls. Pupils will not learn democracy
by keeping silent or giving their answers according to patterns of “narration sickness”.
Translated from Polish by Marcin Starnawski
References:
ALTHUSSER L., 1971, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, [in:] Lenin and Philosophy and Other
Essays, transl. B. Brewster, Monthly Review Press, New York, London.
BILIŃSKA-SUCHANEK E., 2000, Opór wobec szkoły. Dorastanie w perspektywie paradygmatu oporu,
Wydawnictwo PAP, Słupsk.
BLUSZ K., 2000, Edukacja i wyzwolenie, Oficyna Wydawnicza Impuls, Kraków.
DEWEY J., 1966, Democracy and Education. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education, The Free
Press, New York.
FREIRE P., 1970, Pedagogia do Oprimido, Paz e Terra, São Paulo.
FREIRE P., 2005, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, transl. M. Bergman Ramos, Continuum, New York, London.
KLUS-STAŃSKA D., 2008, Mitologia transmisji wiedzy, czyli o konieczności szukania alternatyw dla szkoły,
która amputuje rozum, Problemy Wczesnej Edukacji, Gdańsk, Nr 8.
KWIECIŃSKI Z., 1992, Socjopatologia edukacji, Edytor, Warszawa.
LOCKE J., 2003, Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration, Yale University Press,
New Haven, London.
MCLAREN P., 1986, Schooling as a Ritual Performance, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London.
MCLAREN P., 1989, Life in Schools. An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy in the Foundations of Education,
Longan, New York–London.
PIWOWARSKI R. & KRAWCZYK M. (eds.), 2009, TALIS Nauczanie – wyniki badań 2008, MENiS, IBE,
Warszawa.
RUTKOWIAK J., 2009, O oporze i odporze edukacyjnym: kreatywność oporu realizuje się w odporze, [in:]
E. Bilińska-Suchanek (ed.), Kreatywność oporu w edukacji, Wydawnictwo Adam Marszałek, Toruń.
SCHAFF A., 1999, Alienacja jako zjawisko społeczne, KiW, Warszawa.
STAŃCZYK P., 2009a, Młodzież wobec ideologii merytokracji. Pozytywna socjalizacja oszukanego pokolenia, Forum Oświatowe, No 1(40).
STAŃCZYK P., 2009b, Ocena szkolna i obsceniczność prawa – pomiędzy byciem kimś a byciem nikim. Znaczenia nadawane doświadczeniu szkolnemu przez gimnazjalistów, Teraźniejszość – Człowiek – Edukacja, Nr 2(46).
SZKUDLAREK T., 1992, McLaren i Agata: O pewnej możliwości interpretacji rytualnego oporu przeciw
szkole, [in:] Z. Kwieciński (ed.), Nieobecne dyskursy, pt. II, Wyd. UMK, Toruń.
SZKUDLAREK T., 2002, Tłumacząc McLarena. Globalizacja, postmodernism i rewolucja, Kwartalnik Pedagogiczny, Nr 2(184).
SZKUDLAREK T., 2009, Wiedza i wolność w pedagogice amerykańskiego postmodernizmu, Impuls, Kraków.
SZKUDLAREK T. & ŚLIWERSKI B., 2009, Wyzwania pedagogiki krytycznej i antypedagogiki, Impuls, Kraków.
73
THOREAU H.D., 1993, Civil Disobedience and Other Essays, Dover Publications, Mineola, New York.
WILLIS P., 1981, Schooling to Labor. How working class kids get working class jobs, Columbia University
Press, New York.
ŽIŽEK S., 1997, The Plague of Fantasies, Verso, London.
2011
MIROSŁAWA CYLKOWSKA-NOWAK
Poznan University of Medical Sciences
WITOLD NOWAK
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań
Moral panic over the Romani presence
in Slovakia and Great Britain.
A comparative study
The Roma are a European ethnic group that are presumed to have originally travelled from medieval India. Linguistic and genetic research shows that they left India
not earlier than the eleventh century. In India Gypsies belonged to the lowest caste and
this has influenced their ethnic and national consciousness (Vaceska 1999, p. 48). Their
arrival in Europe dates back to the fourteenth century. Gradually, Gypsies spread across
Europe, reaching as far as North and South America in the eighteenth and nineteenth
century. The initial interest aroused by their outward appearance quickly turned into
hostility and racism, which resulted in their five-century-long enslavement in Wallachia and Moldavia. In other European countries they experienced ethnic cleansing, the
kidnapping of their children and forced labour. In the eighteenth century in the Habsburg Empire during the reign of Maria Theresa, Gypsies were forced to settle down and
register with the local authorities. They were also stripped of the right to own horses
and carts. Moreover, they were forbidden to marry within their own ethnic group. These
policies were further developed by Francis II who penalised Gypsies for wearing their
traditional costume and speaking the Romani language (Krzyżowski 2007, p. 182).
In the twentieth century the Roma came under particularly severe persecution. The
introduction of the Nuremberg Laws in Nazi Germany in 1935 deprived them of citizenship, the protection of the law and property rights, which led to an escalation of
76
MIROSŁAWA CYLKOWSKA-NOWAK, WITOLD NOWAK
violence, mass imprisonment in concentration camps and genocide in death camps.
The extent of the genocide is demonstrated by the number of victims of “the forgotten
holocaust” estimated at 30-50% of the Gypsy population at the time (Dobrzyńska 2007,
p. 250).
The intention of this article is to examine whether the Roma minority in Slovakia
and Great Britain is perceived as a “deviant”1 group; to compare and contrast their situation in these two European countries and to analyse whether “moral panic”2 occurs
in relation to this group. The choice of the countries in question is not arbitrary – in
Slovakia there exists a significant Gypsy minority, which suffers serious discrimination, whereas Great Britain is the destination of choice for many Roma migrating from
Central and Eastern Europe escaping from poverty and persecution. To understand the
current situation of Gypsies it is necessary to look at the history that has shaped this
nation.
Gypsies in Slovakia
Slovakia appears to be the most ethnically heterogeneous country in Central Europe
– it is estimated that national minorities account for 14% of the population. According
to the official statistics, the Roma represent 1.7% of the population; however, unofficial sources have put the figure at 9%, which makes them the second largest minority
after the Hungarians (European Commission 2003, p. 104). The discrepancy between
the two figures can be explained by the fact that Gypsies are reluctant to declare their
nationality in the census and tend to represent themselves as Slovaks or Hungarians.
The proportion of Roma in Slovakia is the highest in the world. How can this ethnic
minority be characterised? How is it perceived and treated by the rest of society? Can
their situation be analysed in terms of moral panic? The following sections attempt to
provide answers to these questions.
Can Slovak Roma be described as deviants?
As stated by Becker, social groups create deviance by making the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance, and by applying those rules to particular people and
labelling them as outsiders. (…). The deviant is one to whom that label has successfully been applied (Becker 1973, p. 9). Are Slovak Gypsies deviants in the light of this
1
2
As used by H.S. Becker. See below (Translator’s note).
As defined by E. Goode and N. Ben-Yehuda. See below (Translator’s note).
Moral panic over the Romani presence in Slovakia and Great Britain. A comparative study
77
definition? The public opinion poll of 1,080 adults carried out in Slovakia in April 2008
showed that 78% of the respondents described the Roma as having a natural inclination
towards crime and 85% believed the problems of the Roma minority stem from the fact
that they do not work. As many as 40% thought that there should be separate entertainment and leisure facilities which Gypsies would be forbidden to enter and 18% thought
that Roma children should attend segregated educational institutions. Only 18% of the
respondents had a positive attitude towards Gypsies, compared with 71% who had
a negative attitude (Centrum Badania Opinii Społecznej 2008). These findings explicitly indicate that the Roma are labelled as outsiders by the rest of Slovak society. This
raises the question – which of the established rules do they infringe?
Finding an answer proves rather difficult. On the one hand, there are some selfevident rules, the violation of which results in Slovak Gypsies being labelled as deviants. The existence of organised Roma groups begging and stealing central and western
European passports has had a negative effect on how they are perceived in Slovakia
(particularly in Bratislava). The practice of stealing documents is linked to criminal
organisations trafficking prostitutes to Western European sex markets. Yet this is only
one of the rules broken by the Gypsy minority in Slovakia. In the early 1990s, when the
statistics concerning Romani criminality became available, it transpired that 28% of the
overall crime rate in Slovakia was committed by the Roma. It was particularly high for
burglaries (40%), and petty theft (36%). They were also responsible for a substantial
proportion of sexual offences (40%) and violent crimes (23%) (Kristof n.d.).
On the other hand, however, it can be argued that the Roma’s infringement of the
fundamental rules of social order has its source in history and the labelling of Roma as
outsiders in the past. Jan Otto’s encyclopaedia from the turn of the twentieth century
describes Cikáni (Gypsies) in the following fashion:
When they were recognized as liars, thieves, and villains, they were persecuted in
Spain at first, then also in other countries. In the 16th century they relieved, here
and there the attempts to change them into a settled nation and uplift them have
been made, but these attempts have failed (Kristof n.d.)
It is a symptom of the longstanding hostility of peasants towards nomads, who were
associated with thieving, frauds, swindles and trespassing in fields and forests. Because
their lifestyle is so unusual and different, they suffered brutal harassment from settled
communities.
In the pre-industrial age, most of the Gypsies made their living as seasonal agricultural workers or travelling craftsmen and traders. The industrialisation of Europe at the
turn of the 20th century made their situation difficult – their services became redundant
and lost their social value. This resulted in their adaptation to the conditions of material
poverty, which, in turn, led to the segregation of the Roma population and their growing criminalisation. Gypsies, who have always maintained their distance from the outside world, were subject to segregation and criminalisation as a result of the prejudices
78
of the Europeans about the colour of their skin and their different culture (Kristof n.d.).
Therefore, historically, Gypsies were marked as deviants on account of racial and cultural dissimilarity. Later, socio-economic factors led to further stigmatisation.
Is the “Romani problem” a moral panic?
At times of moral panic, the behaviour of some members of society is thought to be
exceptionally harmful by others. The wrongdoing they engage in, or are believed to engage in, is perceived as such a large threat to the well-being, to the fundamental values
and interests of society that substantial measures must be taken to control their actions,
punish the offenders and right the wrongs. According to Goode and Ben-Yehuda there
are five crucial elements that define a moral panic: concern, hostility, consensus, disproportionality and volatility. The analysis of the situation of the Slovak Roma in the
light of this theory will determine whether a moral panic is taking place in relation to
this group (Goode & Ben-Yehuda 1994, p. 31).
The first of the crucial elements that define a moral panic is a heightened level of social concern over the actions of a given group and the consequences of these actions for
the rest of society. According to Goode and Ben-Yehuda (1994, p. 33) this concern can
manifest itself in opinion polls, media commentary, proposed legislation etc. The opinion poll cited above demonstrates a negative attitude towards the “Romani problem” by
the rest of the Slovak population. On the other hand, a number of Slovak politicians and
intellectuals are seriously concerned about the situation of the Roma minority. A few
of the Slovak members of the European Parliament described the Roma segregation in
education and housing as a “time bomb” and appealed to the government to take action
to target the problem (Amnesty International 2008).
Some intellectuals warn that when the rapid growth of the Roma population is taken
into consideration, the situation in Slovakia could soon resemble events in the Balkans
in the 1990s.
During the EU candidacy period between 1999 and 2004, Slovak policy towards the
Gypsy minority shifted significantly, which indicates that government officials were
seriously concerned about the situation. As stated by a member of staff of the Slovak
Policy Advisory Body, it is a move from a paternalistic attitude of the state to an integrationist attitude reflecting the need for inclusion of Roma in policy making (Sobotka
2003, p. 7). The Slovak government created an institutional framework for the protection of the rights of minorities and new official posts to oversee its implementation. In
June 2001 Slovakia ratified the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages
and is now party to creating and implementing all key minority rights legislation (Mamon 2003).
79
After joining the EU, the government of Slovakia considerably intensified its efforts to find a resolution to the “Romani problem”. Slovakia is an official participant in
the Decade of Roma Inclusion 2005–2015 and has adopted a number of programmes
targeting the specific problems of Roma communities (Open Society Institute 2007,
p. 405). The programmes focus on four major areas – education, employment, health
and housing, and three related issues – poverty, discrimination and gender equality.
NGOs also want to draw attention to the situation of Roma in Slovakia. They report
that, despite significant changes in government policy, over 80% of Roma are segregated from other communities. They have also noted that there is a correlation between
poverty levels and the extent of segregation i.e. the greater the level of poverty of
a specific Roma community the more profound the level of social segregation that community will experience. It is pointed out in the Amnesty International Report 2008 that
many Roma are caught in a vicious circle of marginalisation and poverty. Most Roma
lack education. This situation is not going to improve as many Roma children attend
special schools even though it is the social deprivation rather than the intellectual disability that is the problem. Special schools provide children with a restricted curriculum,
which gives them little chance of returning to mainstream educational institutions or
accessing secondary education. Other children are placed in the mainstream system but
are kept segregated in Roma-only schools scattered all over the country. In November
2007 the European Commission called on Slovakia to put a major effort into fighting
the segregation and the educational discrimination of Gypsy children. The Amnesty
International Report 2008 says that the future careers of young Roma are restricted by
the government’s failure to ensure their proper education. The social conditions of the
group are not good either – around 80% depend on social welfare and in some settlements the unemployment rate reaches 100% (European Commission 2003, p. 104).
In addition, Amnesty International reports that many Roma experience very poor
living conditions and lack access to running water, sanitation facilities, a sewage system or gas and electricity. Roma settlements are very often physically segregated from
the main town or village. There is no public transport, and where it does exist, many
families cannot afford it. Moreover, as mentioned above, the crime rate among Gypsies
is very high and disproportionate to the number of Roma in the Slovak population (10%
of the population accounts for 28% of crime).
Therefore, it can be said that a heightened level of social concern over the actions
of Roma minority and the consequences of their actions for the rest of Slovak society
exists in that society. On the other hand, a number of NGOs, international institutions,
politicians and intellectuals are concerned not with the actions of Gypsies but with the
segregation and discrimination of this minority in Slovakia and the ineffective government policy employed to deal with these problems. In Slovak society there is no
general consensus as to the responsibility for the growing concern; nonetheless, this
phenomenon does not contradict the criteria used in this analysis. The issue of consensus will be discussed in the subsequent paragraphs.
80
Another element, pointed out by Goode and Ben-Yehuda (1994, p. 33), is an increased level of hostility towards the group creating the moral panic. In this context
the group in question needs to be perceived as a threat to society. The division is made
between “us” – good and decent and “them” – deviants, outsiders and criminals. Such
a distinction is evidenced in the opinion poll described above – 78% of the respondents
believe the Roma to have criminal tendencies. Hostility manifests itself in raciallymotivated police attacks and in forced evictions.
Gypsies, like other ethnic minorities in Slovakia, are subjected to racially-motivated attacks. These attacks are carried out mainly by groups of neo-nazi skinheads.
As indicated by the researchers from the European Roma Rights Centre – a public
interest law organization based in Budapest – the situation of Gypsies has deteriorated.
Between 1998 and 2003 there were more and more frequent acts of violence committed by skinheads and, surprisingly, also by the police. In 2006 official police statistics
recorded 200 racially-motivated attacks in Slovakia. People Against Racism, an NGO,
claims that many victims did not report the attacks (Romano Vodi 2007). It suggests
that, despite the changes, government policies have been ineffective.
A serious problem affecting Roma communities are forced evictions. In January
2007 the NGOs – Milan Šimečki Foundation and the Centre on Housing Rights and
Evictions along with the European Roma Rights Centre – released a report on what
they described as a wave of forced evictions experienced by the Roma in Slovakia
(Amnesty International 2008). The practice of forced evictions of Roma communities indicates a lack of a coherent public policy on the issue. On the one hand, the
authorities succumb to the pressure from NGOs and the EU but at the same time act in
contravention to its fundamental principles. It also points to the disconnection between
central and local administration.
Therefore, the situation of Slovak Gypsies meets the criterion of hostility. This ethnic minority experiences it in both the passivity of the majority of society and in the
brutal actions of certain groups and even institutions.
The third criterion for the occurrence of moral panic, proposed by Goode and BenYehuda (1994, p. 34), is a substantial or general agreement or consensus, that the threat
is real, serious and caused by the wrongdoing group members and their behaviour. The
main social actors are convinced that the threat to Slovak society is real and serious.
However, while the government and the public have no doubt about who is to blame
for the situation (reflected in the belief that Roma have a natural inclination to crime),
NGOs and international institutions point out that the current situation results from
years of flawed and discriminatory policy.
Furthermore, the degree of public concern over the behaviour itself, the problem
it poses, or condition it creates is far greater than is true for comparable, even more
damaging, actions (Goode & Ben-Yehuda 1994, p. 36). Disproportionality is another
defining characteristic of moral panic. In the case of the Slovak Gypsies, the reaction
of society can hardly be regarded as disproportionate. As the proportion of Roma in
81
Slovak society is the highest in the world, and most of them are socially excluded, often
making their living through illegal activities – prostitution, peddling (including drugs)
and crimes against property (Kristof n.d.), the concern over their actions is justified. On
the other hand, it is hard to judge how reliable the statistics are; however, the fact that
they come from various sources allows us to treat them as accurate.
Finally, one last defining characteristic of moral panics is that they are volatile –
they erupt and subside suddenly – although they may lie dormant or latent for long periods of time, and may reappear from time to time (Goode & Ben-Yehuda 1994, p. 38).
Is the situation related to the “Romani problem” volatile in Slovakia? On the one
hand, it erupted quite suddenly at the beginning of the 1990s; on the other hand, however, it existed before, although the communist authorities did not speak about it publicly. It reoccurred when Slovakia was joining the EU. The government of Slovakia
came under pressure to take steps to deal with the problems of the Roma minority and
to end discriminatory policies and actions. These two times were difficult for Slovak
society – political transformation and accession to an international organisation. After
1989 nationalism and hostility towards minorities, including the Roma, escalated rapidly but remained at the same level for the next twenty years. (Gabcova 2006, p. 12).
The “Romani problem” in Slovakia does not meet all the criteria of a moral panic
as proposed by Goode and Ben-Yehuda. Although concern, hostility, consensus and
elements of volatility are clearly present, one can hardly argue for disproportionality.
Gypsies in Great Britain
It is justified to compare and contrast the Roma’s situation in Slovakia and Great
Britain for the reason that a significant number of Slovak Roma moved to the UK to
escape harassment and poor living conditions. Before Slovakia joined the EU the Roma
had come to Great Britain as asylum seekers, and after 2004, when they no longer
had to meet formal requirements, they settled in Britain as ordinary migrants. Unfortunately, the literature on the Roma in Great Britain is very limited. Their situation is
discussed along with Travellers, often without any distinction being made between the
two groups. Therefore, it is necessary to present the British definition of Roma and
Travellers.
A definition of Gypsies and Travellers has always been difficult. Under the 1976
Race Relations Act, the 2000 Race Relations (Amendment) Act and subsequent case
law Gypsies and Irish Travellers are recognised minority groups (Richardson, Bloxom
& Greenfields 2007, p. 2).
In Circular 1/2006 the following definition, also including “settled” Travellers, was
given by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, for planning purposes:
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‘gypsies and travellers’ means persons of nomadic habit of life whatever their race
or origin, including such persons who on grounds only of their own or their family’s
or dependants’ educational or health needs or old age have ceased to travel temporarily or permanently, but excluding members of an organised group of travelling
show people or circus people travelling together as such (quoted in Richardson et
al. 2007, p. 2).
Even if describing the Roma as Travellers is common, most of them are not true
“travellers”, even in Great Britain. Settled Gypsy communities are scattered all over
Great Britain, e.g. in North Kensington or Battersea (RADOC 1984).
According to the Council of Europe, the estimated size of Britain’s Gypsy and Traveller population is 300,000, with approximately 200,000 in settled housing (Crawley,
quoted in Richardson et al. 2007, p. 15). However, it should be noted that there is
no exact figure for how many Gypsies and Travellers live in England or indeed in
Europe.
Are Roma in Great Britain identified as deviants?
Gypsies in Great Britain are marked as outsiders and deviants for two main reasons
– as nomadic people and as asylum seekers or migrants from Eastern European countries such as Slovakia, the Czech Republic or Romania. Firstly, we will discuss Roma
nomadism.
In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s the nomadic Romany in Great Britain were in a difficult position. The following two quotes from 1968 are characteristic of the attitude of
a part of British society towards the Gypsy minority. The first one comes from a speaker in a political broadcast from Birmingham: There are some of these Gypsies you can
do nothing with, and you must exterminate the impossibles; we are dealing with people
whom members of this Council would not look upon as human beings in the normal
sense (Kerswell, quoted in Hancock 1987, p. 76). Secondly, as reported by The Essex
Post from November 24th 1969, the Sundon Park Tenants’ Association Report included
the statement that there is no solution to the Gypsy problem short of mass murder (quoted in Hancock 1987, p. 76). Furthermore, in 1985 the City of Bradford sought a court
injunction to make it illegal for Gypsies to trespass within the city limits – a move
which the press called “a policy of apartheid” (Leeds, quoted in Hancock 1987, p. 76).
At present, Gypsies and Travellers continue to face discrimination and harassment
in England, despite the positive moves towards a more integrationist approach that
affects other Black and Minority Ethnic groups. In October 2003 the Commission for
Racial Equality launched a draft Gypsy and Traveller Strategy. The chair of the Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Philips, said:
83
For this group, Great Britain is still like the American Deep South for black people in the 1950s. Extreme levels of public hostility exist in relation to Gypsies and
Travellers – fuelled in part by irresponsible media reporting of the kind that would
be met with outrage if it was targeted at any other ethnic group (Crawley, quoted in
Richardson et al. 2007, p. 15-16).
Inequality of access to education, health care and employment are serious issues
for the Gypsy minority. According to the report of the Save the Children Fund published in 1983, the infant mortality rate among Gypsies was fifteen times higher than
the national average (Hancock 1987, p. 76). Since then the situation has improved.
However, a number of health reports point to increased infant mortality, low life expectancy and difficulty in accessing health care among Gypsies and Travellers. There is
also a significantly higher chance of long-term illness in this group compared with the
rest of the UK population. The levels of health inequality between Gypsies and the UK
general population are very high (Parry et al., quoted in Richardson et al. 2007, p. 16).
According to the Department for Communities and Local Government, Gypsy, Roma
and Traveller pupils have the lowest attainment levels of any ethnic group (quoted in
Richardson et al. 2007, p. 16).
The situation of Roma and Travellers in Great Britain has improved; however, the
process has been described as slow and inconsistent. The Scottish Holyrood’s Equal
Opportunities Committee’s 2005 report, assessing the progress of different actions
taken since 2001, contained 37 further recommendations covering accommodation,
health, education, social services and criminal justice (BBC 2005).
Moreover, the Roma migrating from the new EU accession countries are seen as
a to British society. In 2004 – before the EU enlargement – some parts of the British
media reported that several tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or even 1.6 million east European Roma are planning ‘to invade’ Great Britain and to spend a life on
welfare on the back of the British taxpayer’s money (Waringo 2004).
The image of the Roma minority in London is based mainly on seeing beggars in
the city centre. At the beginning of the 21st century the police reported that many of
them were Gypsy immigrants from Central Europe. The beggars on the London Underground were well-organised and some of them used children to provoke pity from travellers. Cases of children being drugged with medicines and intoxicants to keep them
quiet and make them look sickly have been reported (BBC 2000). The city authorities
have taken decisive steps to address this issue.
It is evident that the Roma are stigmatised in British society for various reasons.
Those who have lived in Great Britain for generations and lead a traditional, nomadic
life are labelled as deviants because of cultural differences. It seems that for the British a settled lifestyle is the norm and anyone who does not want to conform to this is
marked as deviant. The Gypsy immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe (even if it
84
is only potential migration) are stigmatised for socio-economic reasons. Both groups
are perceived as threat to British society.
Of course, not all of the Roma in the UK are marginalised and face discrimination.
The situation of the settled Roma, who have lived in Great Britain for generations, is
better compared with the nomadic communities and the recent immigrants. According
to Acton, working gypsies in Britain are mainly employed in metalwork, a legacy from
their nomadic days as blacksmiths. Many rural garages and mechanics are on the old
sites of blacksmiths (Rowe 1998). In the past the Roma made their living as seasonal
and agricultural workers. The industrialisation in the 1960s forced many of them to settle down and change their lifestyle.
Is there a moral panic over Gypsies in Great Britain?
As mentioned above, according to Goode and Ben-Yehuda (1994, p. 33), there are
five crucial elements that define a moral panic: concern, hostility, consensus, disproportionality and volatility. The analysis of the situation of Britain’s Roma within the
aforementioned framework will determine whether a moral panic is taking place in
relation to this group.
The concern over the behaviour of Roma is most visible in the press, particularly –
but not exclusively – in the tabloids. In January 2004, on the eve of EU enlargement,
British tabloids sent their reporters to the candidate countries to investigate the possibility of a “Roma invasion” after May 1st. The reporters came back with heartrending
stories about desperate Roma allegedly anxiously waiting to move to Great Britain
following enlargement. “Britain, here we are!” was the headline of a cover story in
a right-leaning tabloid The Daily Express. It displayed a picture of an untidy looking
young man with a child on his back, obviously just on his way to Great Britain (Waringo 2004).
However, it was not only the tabloids that stirred up fear by the way they presented
information to the public. On 15th January 2004, a very respectable magazine, The
Economist, published an article on the potential impact of a hypothetical mass immigration of citizens from the new member states following EU enlargement on the 1st
May 2004. One of the issues raised in the article was the problem of migrants from
Central and Eastern Europe availing of social welfare benefits. The Economist stated
clearly that Central Europe’s Roma minorities … are a particular case for concern
(Waringo 2004).
A few years earlier, in 2000, The Sun organized a campaign under the headline
“Britain has had enough”, aimed at ridding the nation of Gypsy beggars. On Monday,
19th March the tabloid announced a “victory” for the 52,876 readers who supported the
campaign. According to the author of the article, the survey showed that, in the opinion
85
of the respondents, refugee beggars were the third most important issue after health
and education (Fonesca 2000). In order to show other examples of the concern over
Roma migration in the British media, one can refer to some titles of the articles about
this ethnic group: Migrants send our crime rate soaring (Fagge 2008) or How the views
of 3,100 middle England residents on gipsy camps were rejected… because they were
deemed ‘racist in Mail Online (Bracchi 2009).
The reaction of the government was also significant. At the beginning of the twentyfirst century, the UK again imposed visa restrictions or negotiated internal immigration
controls in exchange for visa waivers with countries with large Roma populations (such
as Romania). In summer 2001, the British government established “pre-clearance” facilities at Prague airport, in which people who looked Roma were screened, singled out
and prevented from boarding airplanes to the UK (Waringo 2004).
An important internal issue faced by the British authorities is providing halting sites
for nomadic communities. Many of the traditional caravan sites have been blocked by
the local communities and many new illegal camps have been set up. This provokes
conflicts and intensifies the Romani problem. The central and local governments say
that the situation will improve. Conversely, however, they continue to provoke protests
like the one in London in 2007. Fifteen Gypsy families were evicted and relocated to
new sites in order to free up an area earmarked for the Olympic Games projects (BBC
2007).
The events and phenomena discussed above – alarming newspaper headlines, the
campaign organised by the press and the international and the measures taken by the
British government – indicate that there is a concern over Gypsies.
Another element that defines a moral panic, argue Goode and Ben-Yehuda (1994,
p. 33), is an increased level of hostility towards the group that are the source of the moral panic. The aggression shown in the mass media (the intensity of which has changed
over time) has been discussed above. In addition the Roma sometimes come under
criticism from antagonistic populist politicians looking for votes. As reported in The
Observer: In an outspoken attack on Gypsies today, Michael Howard will insist they
are ‘getting away’ with wrongdoing, as the Conservatives move to exploit rural anger
over illegal encampments (Hinsliff 2005).
Moreover, the Roma are ostracised by British citizens. The Observer, a left-leaning
liberal weekly, described the actions of the latter as outbreaks of hostility towards asylum seekers dispersed across the country (Hinsliff 2004). The clashes between the local
community and Travellers in Cottenham have given birth to a Middle England protest
movement – with threats to picket the then Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott’s
house and warnings of vigilante action (Hinsliff 2004).
Consensus is another pre-condition of a moral panic, as defined by Goode and BenYehuda. There is evidence of consensus within some social classes in Britain. Gypsies
in Great Britain are perceived in two ways. The first one is based on prejudice and racism and fosters a belief that the threat is real, serious and caused by the Roma. Such
86
views are perpetuated by tabloids and – as one can conclude – are espoused by their
target group (mostly working class readers), as well as the residents of rural areas and
the politicians fighting for their votes. The second view is proposed by,some media,
(some?)government institutions and NGOs who argue that the Roma are segregated
and confronted by intolerance and racism (for example the changes towards a more
restrictive asylum policy described earlier). Such opinions seem to be shared by the
press that includes The Observer and The Guardian, and their readers – mainly the British middle-class. This general assumption is supported by the fact that there is sharp
class division in British society. In accordance with Goode and Ben-Yehuda’s theory,
the consensus criterion is met even if the moral panic does not affect the majority of
a given society but creates concern among certain of its groups or categories (Goode &
Ben-Yehuda 1994, p. 34); therefore, in the case of Gypsies in Great Britain this condition is satisfied.
Another criterion for the occurrence of the moral panic is disproportionality – a situation where objective molehills have been made into subjective mountains (Goode &
Ben-Yehuda 1994, p, 36). The disproportionality in the way the Gypsy population is
perceived in Great Britain can be illustrated with many examples. In 2004, before the
EU enlargement, British tabloids wrote about even as many as 1.6 million of Eastern
European Roma planning to ‘invade’ Great Britain (Waringo 2004). In 2008 the Romanian secretary of state presented statistics indicating that Romanian citizens (among
which Roma population is one of the highest in Europe) constitute about 1% of the total
number of foreigners in Great Britain (Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2008).
The reaction of British society against the Gypsies and Travellers also appears disproportionate, as they account for less than 0.5% of the entire population (Crawley,
quoted in Richardson et al. 2007, p. 15). Another example is the attitude of some tabloids towards immigrants. The article that was referred to earlier, Migrants send our
crime rate soaring (Fagge 2008), was based on the opinions of one police officer, and
it not supported by any reliable data and the statistics quoted in the piece were out of
context. By contrast, the research commissioned by the Association of Chief Police
Officers finds that despite the alarming newspaper headlines linking new migrants to
crime, crime rates among the Polish, Romanian and Bulgarian communities are in line
with the crime rates in the general population.Moreover, in some of the years following
the EU accession the annual crime rate in England and Wales fell by as much as 9%
(Dodd 2008).
Finally, as mentioned above, moral panics are volatile – they erupt and subside
suddenly. In the case of Great Britain, such a characteristic of social phenomena connected with the Roma is visible, where concern over the Roma minority in the past
ten years appeared at difficult times for society. The first outbreak of hostility towards
asylum seekers and organised actions against Roma beggars appeared in 2000. At the
same time the American dotcom crisis began to affect the global economy, including
Great Britain. The second wave of press coverage hostile towards potential immigrants,
87
also from a Roma background, came before the EU enlargement in 2004 – at a time of
uncertainty about the potential effects it might have for the British. It was at that time
that racism against Gypsies became so severe that it was akin to the way black people
were treated in the Sixties (Asthana 2004). The fact that in the past year the Roma has
been making the headlines more and more frequently can be connected to the economic
crisis affecting the economies of all European countries.
The analysis of the situation of the Roma in Great Britain within the theoretical
framework provided by Goode and Ben-Yehuda indicates that it meets all the criteria
for a moral panic. Thus, it can be concluded that there is evidence of occasional moral
panics in relation to the Roma within some social classes. If the current tendency continues, the phenomenon may intensify in the near future.
Conclusions
It is difficult to draw a comparison between the situation of Roma in Slovakia and in
Great Britain. The first problem is how to define this minority. Slovak Roma are easy to
identify and there is substantial literature on the subject; whereas in Great Britain they
are associated with travelling groups or with the phenomenon of migration from Central and Eastern Europe. The British definition is based on nomadic lifestyle, and not
on ethnicity, which is not the case in Slovakia. Moreover, a large number of Roma in
Great Britain have maintained their nomadic culture, which is very rare among Slovak
Gypsies. The latter lead a rather settled life.
The British definition also assumes that the Roma who have given up their nomadic
lifestyle for different reasons are still recognised as Gypsies or Travellers due to their
nomadic heritage.
The Roma minorities in the two countries are perceived as deviant but for different
reasons and with different effects. According to the literature, the major Roma group
stigmatised in Great Britain is the one that leads a nomadic life. Their sites are blocked
and they receive no permission to set up new ones; sometimes they are denied access
to restaurants or drinking water. Even though there have been no reports on discrimination against settled Roma, asylum seekers are often treated as a threat to British society.
In Slovakia, Roma are stigmatised even if they are settled. The main reasons why they
are treated as deviants are prejudices and social problems, which are common in Roma
communities.
The governments of both countries are making an effort to improve the situation
of the Roma minorities but their aims are different. Slovak authorities claim that they
take action to prevent discrimination and persecution. At the same time, Roma families
are being evicted, ghettoised and experience violence not only from skinheads but also
from the police. The British government is concentrating on providing services that
88
Gypsies have not had access to before – health care, education, accommodation (setting
up new halting sites in particular). However, their efforts have proven to be ineffective,
slow and inconsistent.
The analysis of the situation in both countries shows that a moral panic is occurring
in Great Britain, where Goode and Ben-Yehuda’s criteria have been met. The situation
in Slovakia is more ambiguous, as the reaction of Slovak society towards the actions of
Roma is not disproportionate.
Translated from Polish by Anna Zajko
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II. Research reports
2011
LUCYNA KOPCIEWICZ, KAROLINA RZEPECKA
University of Gdańsk
The University, women and power – on women’s
presence at the top positions of academic hierarchies
The following text attempts to analyse the conditions prevailing over the duration
of women’s academic careers at universities, concentrating on the particular fields of
education and power. The issue of how women function in academia is described in
English and French literature on the subject, but this research is essentially reduced
to questions concerning the career paths of female academics, and their promotion
opportunities or obstacles in academia (Solar & Ollagnier 2005; Rogers 2004; Husu
& Morley 2000; Brookes 1997; Mosconi 1994). It must be stated that this phenomenon is rarely the subject of Polish academic publications (Siemańska & Zimmer 2007;
Siemańska 2001). Additionally, there is a dearth of information on power issues as an
aspect of an academic career. The inability to draw directly from analyses of power issues in the university system has compelled us to borrow our theoretical bases for the
present study from theories of organisation, marketing psychology and the sociology
of politics. These were the sources for our concept of the ‘glass ceiling’, which, we
believe, can be quite accurately applied to the situation of women in academia.
The ‘glass ceiling’ is an invisible barrier that separates women from the highest
rungs of their careers, prohibiting access to the summit itself (Brannon 2010). This
phenomenon pertains to the obstacles encountered by women that thwart their attempts
to rise beyond their middle-rung positions in a professional hierarchy. The ‘glass ceiling’ effect thus perpetuates the practice of the male monopoly of the upper echelons of
professional hierarchies. Research on American corporations indicates that 52% of the
women they employ have experience of the ‘glass ceiling’ mechanism, whilst 82% of
men working in the very same corporations deny the existence of such a phenomenon.
94
They explain women’s placement in lower positions exclusively through their lack of
necessary experience, leaving the key positions to be held by a small group of men.
We believe that in the school system women have a very concrete encounter with
the presence of the ‘glass ceiling’ that prevents them from scaling to the top, and
from claiming higher positions and functions. The employment structure in the school
system fits perfectly into the pyramid shape – in primary schools, at the lowest level
of education, women are the decided majority of employees (84%), they hold onto
their numerical advantage (though their percentage decreases) in the middle schools
(66%), whilst they become a decided minority in the higher education system (35%).
We find a similar pyramid in our analysis of school management structures – amongst
the primary school directors women account for around 70%, in post-primary schools
(depending on their type) the number dips to 45-55%, and women are rarely encountered in the directorial staff of higher academies and public ones in particular (Fuszara
2007, p. 48).
M. Fuszara’s research shows us that since the 1980s women’s increased presence in
the staffs of higher academies has been accompanied by the feminisation of positions
that are not tied to academic work. It is true that their presence has increased in other
employment groups as well, yet they remain in a significant minority. The least number
of women are found among tenured professors – they make up a mere 19% of employees in this category. The author also noted a very interesting tendency,. underway
since the beginning of the 21st century, that although the percentage of women attaining
doctoral and post-doctoral degrees and the status of professor has been continually on
the rise, the low representation of women in the boards of colleges and universities has
remained unaltered (ibid., p. 50).
An issue that should be covered in the present research is that of higher education
becoming more widespread and the consequences of this for women. One result of the
system change in Poland, the advent of the free-market economy and the rise in unemployment was an increased demand for higher education. New opportunities arose to
enrol in studies, relatively cheaply, in smaller cities. This provided an opportunity for
women who more frequently attended these institutions than men – from 1990 to 2005
the number of women studying grew by fivefold and the number of men only fourfold
(ibid., p. 49).
Another factor was the universities’ increasingly difficult financial situation. Academic work became less (financially) attractive and prestigious, resulting in men seeking out other alternatives on the free market and allowing women to gain a wider field
for developing their academic careers. However, the feminisation of the universities
went in tandem with the devaluation of the academic’s status. Women began to be
perceived as a well-educated, inexpensive labour force. Siemieńska labels this phenomenon as the ‘winners amongst the losers’ (Siemieńska 2001). Corporations were
disinclined to see women as desirable, available and mobile workers, and thus women
had little incentive to leave the higher education system. We might also suppose that,
The university, women and power – on women’s presence at the top positions of...
95
because of traditional gender divisions, many women wanted to have work they could
reconcile with their household obligations.
Interpretations to explain the low representation of women on the rungs of the academic ladder and in the decision-making bodies of schools can be divided into two
groups. The first group of interpretations is tied to the traditional manner of defining
womanhood as ‘lack’. From the perspective of these theories, we ought to focus on
what women aspiring towards higher university positions and functions are missing.
The potential errors in this group of theories include the basically unverified premise
that women are uninterested in power (‘women have no desire for power’), and convictions of the gender neutrality of the organisational culture of universities. The second
group of interpretations concern institutional/cultural perspectives, which – in terms
of our research – allow us to pose questions about where the organisational culture
of universities fall short, given that it so significantly blocks women from holding the
highest positions.
What are women missing?
In attempts to respond to this question, researchers sometimes fall back on the inborn predispositions and attributes of women as a group, calling attention to their inferior inborn cognitive abilities or lesser creativity. In this approach, there is seldom
any effort made to take into account different gender abilities that are shaped during
primary and secondary socialisation (Budrowska 2003, pp. 40-46).
Many researchers point to motherhood as a potential obstacle in pursuing an academic path. It can be treated as a barrier in women’s professional and academic development, and not only for organisational reasons – the amount of time they have at
their disposal and the necessity of devoting themselves to their families – but also for
emotional and intellectual ones. Motherhood is often seen as the only sphere on which
a woman would like to focus (it becomes more important than her aspirations or professional development1). It is thus concluded that men are better equipped for pursuing
a professional career path (ibid., p. 57).
An important matter that constitutes a potential barrier in the development of an
academic career is the academic productivity of women and men. There is a fairly
widespread conviction that women are less productive in professional work than men
are, which is treated as an argument against employing women, or assigning them more
important projects. Academic productivity is measured by the number of publications
and the speed with which one ascends the various levels in an academic career. A great
deal of research confirms the prevailing idea that women proceed along their academic
1
This is reinforced by the language itself, in such statements as ‘losing oneself in motherhood’.
96
careers more slowly than men (Siemieńska & Zimmer 2007, pp. 15). If we compare,
however, the manner in which they develop on a time axis, we note that women’s productivity is not linear as men’s is, but that it changes depending on a woman’s stage of
life. In the early phases, when women often have to divide their time between household duties, raising children and their work, their academic career progresses more
slowly. In subsequent years, however, when their children are teenagers or older, the
quantity of their research and academic publications exceeds those of their male peers.
Another negative phenomenon described by Renata Siemieńska and Annette Zimmer is the earlier burnout of professional women working at universities compared to
their male colleagues. Though the male professors we interviewed confirmed that their
female co-workers were highly valued in their faculties, and were acknowledged in
the academic community, the same female professors disagreed with these opinions.
More often than their male colleagues, they spoke of exhaustion, pressure or anxieties,
and the work overload, in particular administrative tasks. Both the women and men we
surveyed agreed that women in academia had to make a greater effort to advance than
men did. The women also stressed that they had to make more sacrifices in their private
life (ibid., p. 27).
In the context of our research, another vital factor is what motivates women to
strive for higher positions and power, a fact stressed in the literature on the subject.
Many fear power and success, or taking on a leadership role. Frequently, this is caused
by a fear of adopting male forms of behaviour, of showing strength and determination,
which are associated with aggression. Another problem for women is feeling power
and agency. They have little experience in wielding strength and power, and moreover,
feel as though they ought not to use them for their own interests. Otherwise, they are
perceived as destructive and are accused of depriving others of what is theirs. Women
are therefore trained to believe that if they struggle mentally and emotionally for their
own development, they lose the chance to form close relationships. In the 1970s, Martina Horner introduced the concept of ‘success anxiety’ in order to explain the mechanism of women’s cooling aspirations to achieve success. ‘Success anxiety’ occurs because of a dissonance between women’s ambitions and the attributes leading to success,
which are traditionally seen as irreconcilable with their social role or their nature. More
in-depth research into this phenomenon, however, indicates less a fear of success than
a fear of the social consequences of success (Budrowska 2003, p. 48). Amongst the
most painful consequences of success for women is rejection by their community, loss
of male approval, and so forth.
Important personality factors on a career path include possession of a personal
sense of worth and faith in oneself. In specific work situations, evaluations of personal
capabilities in no way differ between the sexes. When an abstract moment arises, however, or the supposition that their hypothetical achievements might be compared to
others’, women rate themselves lower than men. In spite of possessing equivalent intelligence and motivations for their accomplishments, women downplay their abilities. In
97
addition, they seek reasons for their successes in external factors over which they have
no sway, such as luck or coincidence; failures, on the other hand, they not only attribute
to themselves, but also generalise into other spheres of their lives.
The latest concepts in social psychology stress gender differences in our approach
towards social domination. The fact that men are more focused on domination is meant
to explain the sexes’ unequal access to power. People who demonstrate this predisposition strive to fill positions that reinforce the hierarchy, and to occupy prestigious and
elite positions (ibid., p. 51).
What is missing in the organisational culture of university?
The title question may seem a little provocative, but we do have research at our disposal, which identifies and names the mechanisms that create problems in problematise
the development of women’s academic careers. As such, we ought to attempt to explicate the kind of organisational culture that befits a university.
Amongst the predominant views in the academic world are the convictions that it is
both egalitarian (in terms of power) and androgynous (in terms of gender discrimination). These claims are still more pronounced at the summit of the academic hierarchy
– among tenured professors. Joan Acker, a pioneering researcher into the role of gender
in the workplace, calls attention to the fact that at the base of all organisational structures is a gender-conditioned power relationship between men and women (Maddock
1999, p. 90). She points out the gender-specific nature of certain functions and structures, and the expectations deeply rooted in the cultural context that all workers will
adapt to what the men are doing – a direct consequence of which is the stigmatisation
of the female reproductive processes (ibid.).
Because of the way in which men perceive female interlopers into the ‘male world’
of work, the author identified organisational cultures as either hostile to women or
women-friendly (wherein they are treated as guests, as ‘enemies in disguise’ or as newcomers). Another typology, which we see as more adequate, is offered by research
on public institutions in Great Britain. The organisational culture of these institutions
was either based on the premise that women and men were very different, or owed
their existence to downplaying the differences between the sexes and promoting gender neutrality, or even indifference – the meaninglessness of gender in the workplace.
We believe that this latter conviction comes closest to academic rationality.As Hacker
demonstrates, however, both premises are to various degrees removed from reality, and
both lead women into a trap of sorts – in the first case, into the image of the housekeeper, and in the second, into the male manner of functioning on the job, which becomes
genderless and universal. (ibid., p. 82).
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Research on organisational culture opens up an area for a more precise exploration
into the specifics of the university atmosphere. As shown by the results of considerable
research, this atmosphere is only seemingly woman-friendly (though it is not outwardly
hostile). In the relevant literature, one also encounters descriptions of silent discrimination in the academic world, made up of such factors as a ‘chilly climate’, ‘invisible
workmates’ or what is called an ‘old boy network’.
Passive discrimination against women chiefly results in their exclusion from this
‘old boy network’ (Siemieńska & Zimmer 2007, p. 17). Research conducted in Great
Britain shows that there are relationships between men working in the higher education system that are based on mutual support. This is an unwritten presupposition that
need not be spoken, but which occurs automatically – everywhere from staff meetings
to a trip to the pub after work. Men can count on support, advice, or protection from
their elder colleagues/mentors; there is a great deal of solidarity between them, though
this is not to say they have no rivalries or animosities. The old boy network is a place
where information exchange occurs, often of the ‘backroom’ variety, which is potentially useful in terms of developing an academic career (in particular when it comes
to all the hidden mechanisms behind the institution’s functions). Researchers into this
phenomenon have established that members of the old boy network guard entry into
their circles. Women are not only barred from this ‘club’ (thus remaining outside this
sphere of influence and mutual aid), they are also not allowed to ‘form’ a competing
‘women’s network’. Every attempt women make to ‘group together’ is seen as a sign of
their weakness and unsuitability for the role of a real academic.
In the context of organisational culture that is unfriendly to women, it might be
worth examining the phenomenon of women’s lack of solidarity a little more closely
– the so-called queen bee syndrome (ibid., p. 28). We believe that this phenomenon is
unjustly ascribed to female nature as such. It is a phenomenon closely tied to the fact
of women’s under-representation in a given field, non-recognition of its actual mechanisms, and the ‘atypical’ (in this context) success of an ‘exceptional’ woman. This
phenomenon, after all, concerns women who achieve significant career success on their
own, and show hostile attitudes towards other women in the work environment, either
in the open or discreetly. They do not help their younger female colleagues, give them
no support, and sometimes, they are unkind, hostile, and work against them. They see
the reason for their success in their own individual abilities, talent, industriousness, and
individuality. These women often deny the existence of discriminatory mechanisms of
any sort in the workplace. At the same time, they refuse to condone interpretations of
their professional experience as an example of successfully thwarting or blunting the
effects of the discriminative mechanism. They more eagerly concede to the discourse
of the ‘exceptional woman’ (the status of prima donna2), distancing themselves from
‘ordinary’ women, and thus (unconsciously) confirming the logic of the inaccessibility
2
This phenomenon is quite evident in the world of politics (the first female prime minister in history),
big business, and finance (e.g. the first chairwoman of the Central Bank).
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of the profession that this outstanding ‘fortunate one’ has inveigled herself into. This
phenomenon is not, of course, evident in all women who attain the highest positions,
but this vital context cannot be overlooked in researching university culture.
Another aspect of the ‘silent’ discrimination is the protectiveness – virtually tantamount to saying that women, as weaker creatures, should be protected from the harshness of reality. As a result, men take up the harder challenges, while women are ‘shielded’ from them, a fact which has unfortunate repercussions in their careers. Women in
universities often grapple with the problem of being evaluated as representatives of
a uniform group, meaning that their every move is interpreted as typical of the group
as a whole. Women can also encounter hostility based on men’s fear of being replaced
by their female colleagues. Another factor in discrimination, and one that less openly
pertains to competence and to work, is sexual innuendoes, when men focus on women
as sexual objects and not as professionals. We realise, of course, that this group of
factors pertains to the actions of individual men, yet these actions are made possible
by the general circumstances framing male/female power relationships, which can be
replicated in the way an institution functions.
Female professional burnout syndrome is also linked to the aforementioned phenomena, such as the ‘old boy network’ and the ‘queen bee’ syndrome. Women who
decide on a professional career are often forced to function in a patriarchal reality that
is filled with rivalry and provides them with no support network. Nonetheless, the majority of the academic workers we surveyed stressed that the academic environment is
more female-friendly than other professional environments.
Female styles of wielding power
Power is generally considered an instrument of domination and control, exerting
pressure or influence in order to achieve certain behaviour or effects. Power can also
be understood, however, as a unit of exchange, whereby one’s place in a hierarchy is
less significant or essential than interpersonal relations and the quality thereof. Important roles are played here by talking to others on their level, overcoming the anxiety
involved in employing strong individuals, and providing positive feedback. Work – and
teamwork in particular – takes place on a basis of understanding and comradery, and
not arbitrariness.
We find from Cantor and Bernay’s research on female power that the most important factors conditioning it are: a strong (competent) ‘I’, creative assertiveness, and
feminine strength. A powerful ‘I’ is tied to a strong sense of personal value, and an
awareness of one’s own capabilities, which allows one to free oneself from the external
attributes of success, other people, situations and events. A powerful ‘I’ is also tied to
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a particular way of perceiving a situation in which one’s opportunities and capabilities
triumph over the obstacles.
Creative assertiveness, on the other hand, is shown in actions, in taking the initiative, providing creative solutions, leading others, or being persuasive. The concept of
feminine strength, which draws from stereotypical female attributes, combines power
with attentiveness, allowing changes to be introduced while remaining thoughtful towards others (Budrowska 2003, p. 69).
The qualities of the female mind (socially ascribed as typically female) are often
interpreted to be at least disadvantageous, if not negative, particularly for the development of a woman’s professional career. Such attributes as empathy, kindness, involvement in other people’s lives and protectiveness are, in this context, perceived as weaknesses. When these qualities are combined with teamwork skills, in the great majority
of cases, they lead to more constructive work strategies. C. Gilligan’s research confirms
that women are more focused on forging bonds and men on individual accomplishments. It would seem that this research justifies the point of view that the male method
of functioning is more effective in reaching professional success; but from a long-term
perspective, women appear to have a greater predisposition for co-operating and for
wielding power (Gilligan 1982).
Apart from individual predispositions, important factors that might condition a female leadership style are the work environment and atmosphere, and above all the unwritten rules and barriers that women encounter as they climb the professional ladder.
Frequently, women who hold the same position as men receive a lower salary; have less
autonomy and decision-making authority. Moreover, they are surrounded exclusively by
men, who are reluctance to offer support. In order to deal with the burden of expectations (and the anticipation of their failure) women resort to the ‘male style’ of management. Eagle and Johnson’s research, in turn, suggests that leadership styles depend on
work environments, and more precisely, their pervading type of socialisation. According
to their findings, people who have undergone management training in a certain institution and have been chosen for management positions do not lean towards stereotypical
gender behaviour. This sort of behaviour is found in people with no previous management experience. Nonetheless, women are much more likely to apply a democratic management style in any sort of work environment (Budrowska 2003, p. 76).
Our research results
We would like to present one thematic sphere of our research – the results of research devoted to women’s power in universities. Following the principles of qualitative
research, the test group was selected in a deliberate fashion. We surveyed four women
who hold practically the highest positions in the university structure: two women from
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Gdańsk University, one from the University of Ulster and one from Queens University
in Northern Ireland.
The University of Ulster and Queens University are two of three universities in
Northern Ireland. The women who agreed to be interviewed are the only female deans
in their respective universities. The professor at Ulster University in Jordanstown in
Northern Ireland is Dean of the Social Studies Faculty (I1)3. The respondent from
Queens University in Belfast is a professor and Dean of the Social Studies and Humanities Faculty (I2).
The first subject from Gdańsk University is a professor who serves as Dean of
the Management Faculty, as well as rector of a private academy in Gdańsk (P1). Our
second subject from Gdańsk University is a professor who once served as Dean of the
Biology, Geography and Oceanography Faculty; she was also a vice-rector, and is presently rector of a professional academy (P2).
The research method was an in-depth interview with elements of autobiographical/
narrative interview. This method seemed most appropriate in our aim to grasp their
development process, education, their path through various stages of promotion and
so forth. The oral communication of their life stories inclined the subjects to reflect
upon their career in the context of all their experiences to date (Pilch & Bauman 2001).
The questionnaire was composed of 38 detailed questions. They were posed in various orders, depending on the subjects’ narratives. The women were asked about their
understanding of power, and its significance in what they do. The question of whether
these women, holding the highest offices at their universities, define their activities in
categories of power proved particularly interesting. Moreover, it was vital to establish
if they perceived barriers to women’s access to power, and how they overcame these
barriers. Another group of research questions addressed the pursuit of power and how
power was present in their academic careers.
We must also note that collecting empirical materials from the Polish schools was
severely complicated by the subjects’ defensive stances. The female vice-rector of one
faculty refused to be interviewed after reading the questions, which she was given
upon her express request. She explained her decision by stating that the questions in no
way concerned her and that she had not ‘gone far in life’. Another potential respondent
was the female vice-dean of another faculty, who also initially expressed the desire to
participate in the project, but ultimately withdrew without providing any justification.
We anticipated that the cultural differences dividing Ireland and Poland would
make a natural line of division in the results we obtained. It emerged, however, that on
many issues the subjects were almost unanimous in their responses to many questions,
the major differences between them being a result of the types of family structures the
subjects came from. Two of the subjects – I2 and P2 – came from traditional families,
whereas the remaining two – I1 and P1 – came from non-traditional ones. By ‘nontraditional family structure’ we have in mind matriarchal families, where the centre
3
This code signifies the country – I for Ireland and P for Poland – and the interview number.
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point is occupied by women, who are educated, dominant, and guided by the idea of
independence from males (although they did not identify themselves as feminists, they
were not far from a feminist mode of thinking). Subject I1, in turn, is a mother who decided not to remain at home after the birth of her child, but to continue her professional
career, while the father took on the household duties. P1, meanwhile, had the model of
a working and prosperous mother at home (her father died when she began elementary
school). The family structure (for I2 and P2) was the patriarchal style, with the father
singled out as head of the family.
Power
The first issue we ought to emphasise is the clear discomfort our subjects felt in
speaking about power. We have divided the group of subjects in two, based on their
relationship to power. The first group is comprised of the subjects who came from traditional families (I2, P2), and the second, those from non-traditional families (P1, I1).
The latter spoke more openly about the power they held. One of the respondents (P1)
spoke openly about her desire for power, and admitted that she had found power attractive ever since elementary school. However, even she, when asked about her power,
somewhat contradictorily claimed: I have no real power…, and then added: power is
always attractive.
Why are women so hesitant to speak about power? What causes this situation? Is it
possible that it is unbecoming for women to admit that they have power? A very important power-related element for our subjects was its moral aspect. Each of the women
we surveyed was at pains to separate the positive and negative aspects associated with
holding power, stressing that they wielded only the ‘good’ part. They emphasised the
need to gain people’s trust, and the responsibility tied to the possession of power:
(You have power) when people respect you, your personality, knowledge and capabilities. When they see why they are doing something, they aren’t afraid to doubt its
propriety, and generally don’t just follow your leadership (I1).
I use my power to affect the decisions that are made at the university. Obviously
I hold a position that involves power, and I possess that power. But I don’t understand it, and I do not use it in a negative fashion (I2).
I associate power with a responsibility for what one does and what one says. And
with the threat of being accountable, that I do nothing with impunity. It is subject to
harsh evaluation. (…) I do have some kind of power… which is shown in the fact
that I impose my opinion upon workers, students etc., and that is a form of power
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which I could easily abuse – it’s a kind of power that I could use for good or bad
purposes (P2).
The key issue was looking at power in instrumental terms, as a tool for achieving
a higher aim:
I use power on behalf of the good, and the development of the faculty, to present
my ideas. I don’t use it to fire people, I’m not that kind of person. I see it more as
providing the chance to exert influence than anything else (I2).
The possible cause of the approach to power as represented by our subjects is emphasised by many authors on gender psychology – the phenomenon of evaluating female actions by moral criteria. Male actions are chiefly evaluated in terms of effectiveness, meaning that men can go ahead and use power, showing less concern for
the moral aspect of their deeds. Power is also associated with domination, which is
generally ascribed to males. Are there, however, any factors which favour or stimulate women’s need to gain power? Here the subjects were asked about the function
of school in empowering or abetting women’s efforts to gain power. All the subjects
agreed that school – in their cases – in no way advocated power for girls (or for boys).
Even back as a child I thought and felt that in a sense I had power, or authority.
But I did not show it. I had a feeling that I was in control, that people had to count
on me. I think that was important for me. I think it’s a question of personality.
(…) What I studied and where etc. was only a context. I think that whatever I did,
I would feel pushed to lead. I suppose I’m something of a natural leader – whatever
I did, I would feel competent in a leading role (I1).
Interestingly enough, the subjects holding the highest offices on the boards of education (such as p2) were unaware of the fact that they possessed power:
I haven’t really experienced any special power… I associate power with a king or
a queen… (…) I wasn’t conscious of the fact that one comes to hold power in suchand-such a fashion. Right now I don’t feel conscious of power (P2).
When asked if she thought about power in her childhood, one of the subjects
responded:
No! I never liked being in the centre of attention, I was very withdrawn, I never liked
to stand out (I2).
Generally, the subjects did not assign a substantial causative role to their schooling, at least where power was concerned. Although one Polish respondent (P2) did
mention the support and challenging approach of her teachers, these concerned chiefly
education, development of abilities and knowledge acquisition, as well as participation
in school competitions. The same subject stated that studying encourages or at least
causes an awareness of the possibility of possessing power.
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I don’t think that universities abet the development of this awareness in the sense
that they create particularly amenable conditions for passing this on to students. It
happens all on its own, because it is a hierarchy. This whole structure is the power
upon which the student depends in a very serious way, and this perhaps makes him
or her aware of the advantages of holding power (P2).
This subject did not, however, hold any power-related functions during her studies,
she was not involved in the activities of the student council, she focused mainly on her
studies – as befitted a well-socialised little girl.
In summary, none of the subjects isolated school as motivating them to acquire
power. We might even risk the hypothesis that school neither engendered a positive
understanding of power in the women surveyed, nor mobilised them to acquire it.
The subjects’ methods of gaining power carry vital consequences for how this power is wielded, and for how people are managed. Because the subjects place emphasis on
trusting others and, broadly speaking, moral issues, they also favour a soft, ‘feminine’
style of management. As previously mentioned, the relevant literature identifies female
management with a tendency towards co-operation, towards collaboration with superiors and inferiors alike, a lower level of control, and towards problem-solving, drawing
upon intuition and empathy as well as rational understanding (to varying degrees). The
authors distinguish between two management styles: the commanding and control style
associated with men, and the interactive female model (Walsh 2003). In the ‘female’
version, wielding power means co-operation:
(…) if I really think about it, however, I do have power – I could prohibit or give
commands. But considering power in categories of giving commands is rather unpleasant (P2).
This subject chose goodness as most important amongst the attributes needed to
wield power, and put a friendly approach to people in second place – Humanity with
a capital H – a high sense of morality and a responsibility for one’s words and actions.
To her mind, ambition was a characteristic that could be attributed to men, though she
did point out that there were growing numbers of very ambitious women, which could
only help their striving for power.
An Irish respondent, meanwhile, emphasised the differences between women and
men in their attempts to gain power:
I think that women and men have different motivations. There is a model for people
who want power, men are surely more effective in target-based strategies and are
less choosy about the means they use. Everything I have done has been achieved
with the development of the institute, the university and the department in mind,
I have not thought in terms of achieving a certain position. I think that there are
many men who are chiefly driven by trying to achieve a certain goal (I2).
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The subject from Queen’s University indicated personality attributes as determining her people-oriented management style:
To my mind, it’s a question of personality – people know they can trust me, and they
do. That doesn’t mean I always do what they expect, because then I would be perceived as weak, and you can’t be weak. I’m supportive, I help when I can, I’m very
sincere in my contacts with people, but not in a cruel way (I1).
The subjects particularly stressed interpersonal relationships and concentrated on
forging bonds, because they saw them as indispensable in creating a positive work
atmosphere in which the superior was accepted by the workers. This understanding
of power likens them to the definition of the ideal qualities desired for a management
position. Moreover, as one subject stressed (I1), the academic system does not favour
a prohibitive style of management:
The academic system doesn’t work that way, you can’t do that, because then people
won’t like you, and they won’t work for you. This place requires a higher management strategy – it’s not a factory, and you can’t rule by force. Force might work in
the short term, but not for long (I1).
Taking the above into account, it might seem as though women ought to constitute not just half of the university management, but indeed, the majority. Why, then,
is the reverse true? When the subjects were asked why, in their view, so few women
held management positions, they fell back on the traditional division of roles. In their
opinion, women were assigned to the household sphere, and men were meant to be the
professionals. For this reason, it was extremely difficult for women to enter the ‘male
world’ while maintaining their household and family duties:
It seems to me that the traditional division of roles has remained intact, that women
feel no imperative to gain power. And those who do are to some extent an accident,
the result of natural circumstances bringing them to such a place and time… There
are few women who consciously strive for a goal. I’m speaking of the women of my
generation, because I believe that today’s young women, those in-between 20-30,
have their goals clearly marked out (P2).
One of the Polish respondents had quite an interesting approach to these issues, as
she openly stated that men were reluctant to share the power they possessed: because
men don’t give them (women) access. And they only relinquish it (power) when they
have no other alternative (P1).
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The University atmosphere
and how it feels to be a woman
Another important issue is how women who hold senior positions in higher learning
institutions perceive the university atmosphere, and how women have felt and continue
to feel working there. Have they encountered any difficulties? In principle, the subjects
did not indicate any particular barriers in their career paths. They were, of course, conscious of gender discrimination, but they had not encountered it personally. The only
issue that appeared in interviews with all the respondents was the necessity of women
making various efforts to be treated seriously and to reach their goals, something which
they stated men were not required to do:
I have felt fine with being a woman, though for many years I thought it would have
been preferable to be a man, because men’s lives are easier. Seeing what was taking
place all around me… I never allowed myself to be discriminated against. I thought
that things were harder for women, that they had to show they were much better
than men to get ahead. I have always been much better than everyone else, and not
just the men, or at least that’s how it’s seemed to me (P1).
I think that women who hold the highest positions have to be cut from a certain
cloth. They have to work harder, because they have to reconcile more jobs and obligations than men do (I2).
I’ve never felt that someone or something was an obstacle, apart from the objective
factors tied to a lack of equipment… I have even spoken my mind in discussions of
all kinds. Much is made of the unequal treatment of women, and I would even say
that I have felt this, but not in academic circles. Unless someone in a superior position purposefully makes things difficult for another person, but I myself have never
experienced this (P2).
The key to understanding the statements of these women on the subject of their
positive situation in the university is their ability to adapt and to function in the ‘male
world’. In general, the majority of their co-workers are men. The subjects emphasised
that they had a different style of management, communication, and co-operation.
There are different modes of behaviour in terms of a particular male environment,
where there are certain behavioural expectations. You have to know how to adapt,
how to learn it (…). In the nine schools I manage the heads are all male, and generally speaking, I have no problems with them. After all, I was brought up in a male
environment, raised by my father (I1).
In spite of the fact that on an everyday basis the subject (I1) feels at home in a male
environment, this interaction did have its frustrating sides:
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Sometimes I get frustrated because I feel that their style is decidedly male – it has
nothing to do with me personally, it’s just the style they have. When you are only
surrounded by men in a room, their communication style can be rather aggressive.
I don’t behave in a male fashion, I don’t respond to their attacks, I show my emotions and make no attempt to hide them (I1).
You also have to get used to speaking to men – to understand your surroundings
and to deal with them. (…) Men are self-assured, I had an experience while I was
doing my PhD, there were mainly men there, and they really liked to speak, they
liked to hear the sound of their own voices, and there was not much content to what
they said… (I2).
The equal-rights initiatives adopted by some institutions turned out to be a highly interesting topic in researching the atmosphere in universities. There is, of course,
greater emphasis placed on equality in Irish learning institutions than in their Polish
equivalents. This is most evident at Ulster University, where our subject claimed its
effects were felt on an everyday basis. This school has a special equality policy in
its statute. Queen’s University also has a special Gender Initiative unit that promotes
women as a target group. The effects of these activities are not visible, however, in the
university’s power structures. The subject from this university was not convinced of the
merits of this sort of undertaking, claiming that groupings of women (this is, after all,
a support system organised by women for women) are not viewed in a positive light
by the academy community. The subject believes that women and men should not be
separately supported and motivated. In her view, the best solution would be a mixedgender context, so that both women and men could receive assistance and advice from
members of either sex.
I believe it should be joined – women supporting men, and men women, etc. That
would bring about mutual understanding and break down barriers (I1).
The Dean of Ulster University, for her part, often reiterated in our interview that it
was vital to ensure that the recruiting process was monitored so that it proceeded fairly
with regard to either gender, to motivate women and to give them their due chance:
This university has always been gender sensitive. We keep track of how many women are being promoted and how many men. We try to give equal access to promotion, and to the post of senior lecturer (I2).
One of the Polish interviewees (P1) joined the Irish dean in attributing great importance (more than the Dean at Queen’s University) to equal opportunity, and to equal
salaries in particular. The initiatives she has taken are not, however, systematised or
institutionally supported. She is guided by her own views and is not supported by an
equal-opportunity policy run by the institution.
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Conclusions
Analysing the web of factors that favour women’s academic careers, we must
also stress the role of family support (from the husband and children). In researching
this issue, we might come to the conclusion that the requirements of the social role
of mother and wife are so strong and obliging that if the subjects lived in traditional
non-partnership relationships it would be impossible to reach the highest university
positions. The subjects’ husbands helped them in their careers. They were mainly
educated men, some of whom also worked in academia. As such, they understood
their partners’ professional obligations and ambitions. They gave their wives advice
and kind words, shared their joys and successes, organised time outside of work,
and most importantly, took some of the burden of running the household – one even
agreed to take care of the children. It seems that one of the keys to the subjects’ success was that they didn’t have to have ‘two full-time jobs’ (the home and their career),
but one-and-a-half at most.
Our subjects climbed the rungs of the university hierarchy to their senior level not
only because they were born in particular kinds of families, but also because of their
personality traits, which were, largely, conditioned by their upbringings. Analysing the
character sketches of women who rise to high positions in universities, we find people
who are very ambitious and industrious, self-assured and conscious of their own capabilities. These are undoubtedly women whose actions are guided by the desire for
change, development, and challenge. They are determined, independent, and they take
control in order to improve the present reality, without losing sight of the good of those
around them. The image we are presenting is, of course, a little crude, as not all of our
subjects possess the full set of attributes. Yet after our analysis of the career paths of
our female subjects, we have concluded that the above model is a pattern for women’s
success in the academic world.
In the empirical materials we gathered, we found no evidence of either the ‘old boy
network’ or the ‘queen bee syndrome’ in the experiences of our subjects. We have not,
however, been tempted to rule out their absence. On the contrary, we feel that these issues ought to be subject to more in-depth analysis. We shall undertake this task for our
next research project, using a larger group of subjects, while continuing to explore the
issues in the present text.
In the context of the results found herein, we might once again emphasise the role
of the school system as entirely ineffectual in motivating girls and young women to
take up challenges, to be active, and to strive for a professional career path that involves holding power. In the cases of the women researched, we ought more to speak
of success achieved in spite of their schooling. The stress the subjects placed on the
fact that school did not obstruct them from achieving professional success (school was
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no obstacle, but nor was it of much assistance) cannot be interpreted as a sign of its
emancipatory effect.
Translated from Polish by Soren Gauger
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WALSH M.R. (ed.), 2003, Women, Men, and Gender: Ongoing Debates, Yale University Press.
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The sense of political alienation in the thirteen
countries of Central-Eastern Europe
This paper presents the results of research conducted by the Sociology Institute at
the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, in co-operation with Oxford University
in Great Britain, under the framework of a project entitled Social Inequality and Why
it Matters for the Economic and Democratic Development of Europe and its Citizens:
Post-Communist Central and Eastern Europe in Comparative Perspective (EUREQUAL) [European Commission, contract no 028920 (CIT5), Framework 6]. The project was carried out from 1 May 2006 to 30 September 2009 in thirteen countries of
Central, Eastern and Southern Europe, including the Czech Republic, Hungary, Russia,
Bulgaria, Romania, Moldavia, Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania. It dealt with the issue
of inequality (in its widest definition) in the social, economic, cultural and political
spheres. The following empirical reflections set out to make an in-depth exploration
of only one of the research issues: What are the differences in the citizens’ perception
of their own agency in the political sphere in the thirteen countries of Central-Eastern
Europe?
Before I engage in a detailed empirical analysis, it would be useful to mention certain theoretical questions, in order to familiarise the reader with the scope of the issue
under discussion. In the most general terms, this article concentrates on the issue of the
social subjectivity. This category has been variously defined in the social sciences, particularly in the fields of psychology, pedagogy and sociology. We should establish from
the very outset that this article claims no pretensions to synthesise or critically analyse
the complex issue of subjectivity; in any case, this has already been undertaken more
than once by authors such (Cichocki 2003) in sociology and (Korzeniowski, Zieliński
& Daniecki 1983; Korzeniowski 1991) in psychology to mention just some of the many
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works undertaken in this area. The issue of subjectivity or political alienation interests
us as an empirically useful category in demonstrating individual political standpoints.
Korzeniowski (1991, p. 32) differentiates between two basic aspects of subjectivity.
On the one hand, it is
practical behaviour resulting in objective events or changes in the state of objects
(ibid., p. 32),
and on the other hand, and which is a sphere that will be of much more interest to
us from the perspective of the present article, one we might call the reflective aspect of
an action, wherein
man does not merely adapt himself to the world in a practical fashion, but also
thinks about it and evaluates it (ibid.).
Estimating the capacity for personal agency in a political reality as a reflexive element of subjectivity is a category that is more analytically compelling than a mere
focus on practical actions. Ultimately, the political sphere does not entail the immediate, daily subjective control of citizens. A citizen will more often claim to be effective
in a situation where a democratically selected authority is treated as a representative
of private interests and when the person recognises its final and binding nature. Such
a conception of subjectivity has little in common with individual agency vis-à-vis a political system – it is more regarded as the capacity to take action. J. Garlicki follows
Almond and Verba in claiming that an evaluation of personal agency in a political system is a constituent part of the democratic culture of politics. He writes the following:
(…) the subject of the analysis becomes people’s perception of their own situation
as participants in a system, the emotions that accompany contact with the system,
the evaluation of their personal situation and their capability of taking action, and
their inclination to do so (Garlicki & Noga-Bogomilska 2004, p. 43).
At this point I would like to briefly outline K. Korzeniowski’s concept of a sense
of subjectivity/alienation as an approach which has, to a significant degree, allowed
me to construct my own scale of political alienation, used in the subsequent empirical
analyses. According to Korzeniowski, a sense of subjectivity/alienation is composed of
four basic modalities (ibid., pp. 33-34):
● a sense of effectiveness/powerlessness: the individual’s conviction that (s)he
has an impact on reality to an anticipated degree and/or in an anticipated capacity, or a lack of such conviction;
● a sense of meaning/meaninglessness: the individual’s conviction that (s)he cognitively (descriptively) arranges reality to a satisfactory degree and/or in a satisfactory capacity, or a lack of such conviction;
The sense of political alienation in the thirteen countries of Central-Eastern Europe
113
● a sense of eunomy/anomy: the individual’s conviction that (s)he evaluates (performs an evaluation of) reality that is, in his/her private conviction, accurate or
coherent, or is in no condition to evaluate it;
● a sense of identification/alienation: the individual’s sense of belonging to and
integrating with the system, or his/her alienation and isolation from the sociopolitical reality.
The four aforementioned spheres of a sense of subjectivity/alienation bear no direct
relationship to the building of the collective indicator of a sense of alienation which
I will use in the following sections of the article. They have, however, facilitated a narrowing of the field of research for the variables which best render the essence of this
scale. The question therefore arises: What variables have served as the basis for the
conceptualisation of the above category of political alienation?
The construction of the scale of political alienation
The scale of the sense of political alienation we have constructed is a collective indicator composed of the following statements contained in the interview questionnaire:
a) I think that I am better informed than most people in terms of politics and government activities; b) People like me have no impact on what the government does;
c) Sometimes politics seems so complicated that a person like me can’t really understand what’s going on; d) The elected politicians don’t care what people like
me think; e) The main political parties all offer people exactly the same thing;
f) There’s no point in voting, because the government can’t change anything.
The respondents were asked to give their reactions to the above claims, applying the
following evaluation criteria: 1) ‘I strongly agree’, 2) ‘I agree’, 3) ‘I neither agree nor
disagree’, 4) ‘I disagree’, 5) ‘I strongly disagree’.
The collective indicator of a sense of political alienation thus includes a five-point
scale – the greater the numerical value, the greater the sense of alienation.
Afterwards, the accuracy of the scale was calculated on the basis of factor analyses
for each of the countries being researched. In the majority of cases, the results gathered
were within a Cronbach coefficient of 0.6 or above.
The statements comprising the scale of a sense of political alienation partly correspond to the scale of a sense of subjectivity/alienation developed by Krzysztof Korzeniowski in the 1980s. The scale I have developed additionally includes the aspect of
political effectiveness, the understanding of which was in a certain respect, modified
for the purposes of the present analyses. In my opinion, a citizen has a sense of individual political effectiveness not only as a subject functioning in the sphere of politics,
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but primarily in situations where (s)he is convinced that at least some segment of the
political elite represents his/her interests. A conviction of a personal ability to arrange
reality is another form of a sense of subjectivity/alienation also expressed in our scale,
particularly when we asked the respondents to evaluate the transparency of the rules
of the political game, or to evaluate the programs of the various political parties. For
Korzeniowski, one important element in the scale of subjectivity/alienation was a sense
of identification or alienation, which we also tried to grasp in our research, asking our
respondents whether the rulers ‘listen in’ on the opinions of the ordinary citizens.
In the succeeding sections of the article, I will move on to a detailed empirical
analysis in an attempt to reconstruct a sense of the political alienation in the thirteen
countries of Central/Eastern Europe.
Differences in the sense of political alienation
Firstly, I would like to consider whether there are substantial differences amongst
the citizens of the thirteen nations of Central/Eastern Europe in their perception of
personal agency in public life. To better illustrate the results of the five-point scale research I collected on the sense of alienation, I have divided them into three basic parts.
The first had values between 1 and 2.50, signifying a low sense of political alienation,
while a score between 2.51 and 3.50 signified a medium sense of alienation, and the
responses that oscillated in the region of 3.51-5.00 should be interpreted as indicating
a high sense of alienation. The chart below presents the percentage value of a sense of
political alienation using these three divisions (low, medium, high).
Low
Medium
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Fig. 1. Breakdown of the frequency of a sense of political alienation in Central/Eastern Europe
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The citizens of Latvia have the greatest sense of political alienation – 63% of readings fell into the third part of the division (between 3.51 and 5.00), followed by the
inhabitants of Bulgaria (59%), Russia and Lithuania (56%), and then Poland, with 55%
of readings in the third category. Taking a closer look at the case of Poland, we observe
a low sense of alienation in only 4.7% of the respondents, while a moderate sense is
declared by almost 40%. Hungary is the only country in our research where the percentage of readings in the first category – a low sense of alienation – exceeds 10%,
reaching 11.6%. These findings indicate the acute sense of political alienation felt by
the citizens of the countries in Central/Eastern Europe. Unsettling as this tendency may
be, further analyses largely based on correlative links between the sense of alienation
scale and the other variables that interest us here will allow us to explain more precisely
the causes of this phenomenon.
The sense of political alienation and the social position
of the individual
In this part of the article, we shall examine some socio-demographic data that may
have a considerable impact on the differing degrees of a sense of political alienation.
I am chiefly referring to gender, age, financial and cultural capital and the perception
of social position. One might wonder in which of the thirteen Central European countries the above variables will have the greatest significance in terms of the issue under
analysis: individual attitudes towards the political system.
It is notable that in the case of gender, women have a greater sense of political
alienation than men. This variable was not statistically significant in the three Baltic
states (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia), nor in Belarus or in Moldavia (fig. 2). In the
remaining eight countries we researched, gender was an essential socio-demographic
factor serving to qualify one’s sense of personal subjectivity in politics. The highest
level of political alienation among women was noted in such countries as Russia, Poland and Ukraine.
Another link can be noted between age and a sense of subjectivity. The results
showed that the level of perceived political alienation increased with the age of the
respondents (fig. 3). This variable was revealed to a statistically significant degree in
eight of the thirteen of the countries surveyed, including Poland. This relationship can
be partly explained in the context of the historical experiences of the older generation,
who were brought up in a non-democratic system that promoted a submissive political
culture. As J. Garlicki has written:
Authoritarian and totalitarian societies would appear to hold closest affinities with
patterns of political cultures that are submissive and provincial, or the intermediary
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types based on them (e.g. submissive-participative) (Garlicki, Noga-Bogumilska
2004, p. 144).
Moldavia
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Poland
Lithuania
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Fig. 2. Relationship between the level of a sense political alienation and gender
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Relationship coefficient: the level of a sense
of political alienation and age
Fig. 3. Relationship between the level of a sense of political alienation and age
Although the citizens of the Central/Eastern European countries live in democratic
systems, the change in their political cultures, shaped by several dozen years of communism, is an ongoing process, in particular amongst people who were socialised for
many year under the previous political systems.
The financial capital of the individual is another factor that has an impact on his/
her relationship to politics. It is quite interesting to describe how the scale of financial
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capital was constructed. This indicator was developed through a combination of income
variables and variables drawn from the possession of such goods as a car, a washing machine or a summer house. This is confirmed by the common-sense hypothesis that less
affluent people demonstrate a higher degree of political alienation, something which
can mainly be observed in Hungary, Slovakia and Poland (fig. 4). If we also take into
account people’s evaluations of their own financial well-being, then the respondents
who regarded this as unsatisfactory declared a lower sense of agency in politics (fig. 5).
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Fig. 4. Relationship between the level of a sense of political alienation and financial capital
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Relationship coefficient: the level of a sense of political
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Fig. 5. Relationship between the level of a sense of political alienation
and self-identification on a quality of life scale
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An important indicator of the social position of the individual is the cultural capital
that is possessed. In the following research, this was fairly freely interpreted, as apart
from the ‘education’ variable we also took into account a variable measuring access
to modern technologies. The relationship between cultural capital in this meaning and
a sense of political alienation appears to a statistically significant degree in all the countries we researched, excepting Moldavia. The closest links between the above variables
can be observed in Hungary, Estonia and the Czech Republic (fig. 6). It is noteworthy
that, exclusion from digital-era technology is a variable which to a large extent indicates an individual’s sense of alienation from a political reality.
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of political alienation and cultural capital
Fig. 6. Relationship between the level of a sense of political alienation and cultural capital
To summarise, elderly people declare a greater sense of political alienation, and
the gender of the respondent is an equally essential variable. Women are more prone
to view themselves as passive observers of public life than men are. Among the other
socio-demographic variables, one that stands out on the scale of sense of political alienation is the capital possessed – whether it is financial or cultural. Most of the Central/Eastern European countries researched confirmed the hypothesis that the wealthy,
the better educated and those with more access to modern technologies declare a higher
sense of individual agency in a political reality.
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The individual and the system
Another interesting issue in the empirical research conducted was the attitude of
the individual towards the socio-political system. This issue was approached on many
levels. First, respondents were asked to evaluate the changes that were taking place in
their country; then attempts were made to gauge the level of support for the notion of
democracy, or the citizen’s acceptance of the social state, including egalitarianism of
income. The above research issues will be analysed from the perspective of the individual’s viewpoint towards the political system – in other words, this will be a response
to how the subject’s manner of perceiving the system alters the individual sense of
influence and political effectiveness.
In all of the thirteen countries a sense of political alienation was correlated with an
evaluation of changes taking place in the country and within the home. In every case
we analysed that this was an inverse relationship, i.e. the more positive the evaluation
of the changes, the less the sense of political alienation. The strongest tie between these
variables occurs in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and in Hungary (fig. 7).
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Fig. 7. Relationship between a sense of political alienation and evaluation
of changes taking place in the country and at home
The next issue to come under analysis was the connection between the sense of political alienation and the scale of support for the notion of democracy. The indicator measuring attitudes towards democracy was composed of three points in a questionnaire:
What do you think of the opinion that a democracy – i.e. a system where many parties compete for the right to rule – is the best system of government for Poland?
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How would you rate the functioning of democracy in Poland thus far? Is democracy
a good way to resolve social conflicts?
In twelve of the countries there was a correlation between the individual’s attitude
towards the political system and support for democracy. This factor might be presented
in the following manner: the individual’s sense of political alienation decreases in tandem with the growth of support for the idea of democracy (fig. 8). This correlation is
least evident in Belarus and Ukraine. Our research shows that countries with unstable
political systems, as is the case in the Ukraine, or which are lacking fundamental civic
rights (Belarus), do not treat democracy as a system that gives the individual greater
opportunities to take agency in political activities. Hungary and the Czech Republic are
again found among the countries where this correlation is most strongly evident.
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and support for the idea of democracy
Respondents were also asked to state their relationship to the free market economy.
This revealed that a sense of political alienation decreased with a growth of support for
the capitalist system. Citizens of the Central/Eastern European states with more promarket attitudes had a greater sense of subjectivity in the public sphere. This variable
was most strongly evident in the Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Estonia, and the least
evident in countries where the free-market economy is poorly developed: Moldavia and
Belarus (fig. 9).
In considering the individual’s attitude towards the socio-political system, we should
also deliberate whether the level of support for the idea of the social (welfare) state vs.
a liberal one is tied to a sense of political alienation. Our analyses on the correlative
connections prove that a sense of political alienation grows in tandem with support
for the idea of the social state. The strongest relationship between these variables was
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evident in Poland, Russia, Estonia and Romania while only in Moldavia did this correlation have no significant statistical bearing (fig. 10). The collected research results
confirm another correlation between a sense of alienation and the degree of support for
income-based egalitarianism. Citizens in favour of greater egalitarianism also displayed
a greater sense of political alienation, and similar to our previous statistics, the strongest
correlations were evident in Russia, Estonia and Poland, among others. Citizens with
very pro-social attitudes expressed a sense of subjectivity in the public sphere to a lesser
degree. This connection was particularly visible in Poland and in Russia.
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Fig. 10. Relationship between the level of a sense of political alienation and the level
of support for the idea of the social state
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The final issue addressed in this stage was an attempt to respond to whether an antiEuropean attitude correlated with a sense of political alienation. This question is vital
to issues concerning the individual vis-à-vis the system, if only for the reason that the
majority of the countries under analysis now belong to the structure of the European
Union. A factor analysis has been used as the basis for a scale to measure anti-European
attitudes. It was only in seven countries that we observed a significant statistical link
between a sense of political alienation and anti-European attitudes. These countries
were: the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Estonia and Latvia.
In each of the cases analysed, the correlation was a positive one – i.e., anti-European
sentiment grew in tandem with the sense of alienation (fig. 11).
alienation and the level of anti-European sentiment
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and the level of anti-European sentiment
To sum up the findings of the present stage, we could say that it is particularly in
countries such as Hungary and the Czech Republic that citizens express a lesser sense
of political alienation when they also demonstrate a greater acceptance of the idea of
democracy and of the free-market economy, or when they take a positive view of the
changes occurring in their country. In other words, the pro-system standpoint is an
orientation that strongly determines one’s perception of oneself as a subject capable of
acting in the political system. Another indicator of an anti-system attitude is a negative
view of the European Union. This manifestation of discontent towards the reigning
political system also substantially strengthens an individual’s sense of political alienation. The weakest link between a pro-system attitude and an increasing sense of agency
can be found in such countries as Belarus, Moldavia or Ukraine. The citizens of these
countries do not perceive the connection between a sense of their own agency in politics and a positive attitude towards the political and economic system. This fact may
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be explained in the context that weak state institutions are not considered as positive
factors that can change one’s individual attitude towards the public sphere.
Political attitude and behaviour and a sense of alienation
An important element that affects the subjects’ perception of the scope of their
subjectivity in the public sphere is their attitudes and behaviour towards the political
system. Primarily, we shall verify the hypothesis that the perception of an individual’s
agency in politics changes depending on the political views expressed. We shall ascertain whether one’s self-identification on the left/right-wing scale of politics or the
research subjects’ expressed conservatism in some way affects a sense of political alienation. In terms of political behaviour, we shall establish how alienation is linked to
an interest in politics, and if it is linked to the degree in which the subject is actively
involved in civic life.
of political alienation and self-identification
on the left/right-wing scale
Poland
Slovakia
Ukraine
Estonia
Czech
Republic
Latvia
and self-identification on the left/right-wing scale
Firstly, let us investigate how political identification affects the perception of personal agency in political life. The respondents from the thirteen countries of Central/
Eastern Europe were presented with a scale that measured their views from 1 (a leftwing viewpoint) to 10 (right-wing). Each subject was asked to place their viewpoints
on this scale. Only in six of the countries was there any statistically relevant correlation
between the above variable and a sense of political alienation (fig. 12). In the majority of the countries analysed, the following relationship was observed: the further the
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citizens’ orientation to the left, the greater their sense of political alienation. This was
marked in such countries as Poland, Slovakia, Ukraine, Estonia and the Czech Republic. Only in Latvia was an inverse relationship noted, i.e. the more right-wing the
person’s views, the less their sense of agency in the political reality.
In searching for the causes for a greater sense of political alienation amongst respondents declaring their world-view as left-wing, we compared the correlative relationships we researched in Poland, Slovakia, the Ukraine, Estonia and in the Czech
Republic with support for the various political parties in the those countries. To a substantial degree we were guided by our intuition that the low sense of agency amongst
people with left-wing views was caused by the low popularity of parties with this political profile. In the Czech Republic in 2007 the right-wing/conservative Citizens’ Democratic Party (ODS) had the greatest number of supporters among those we researched;
in Slovakia the centre/right-wing Federation of Young Democrats (FIDESZ) was the
most popular, while in Poland the right-wing PiS had the most supporters (9.7%), while
the more left-wing Citizens’ Platform (PO) had 7%, and left-wingers and democrats
with a stricte leftist profile received only 2.66%. It can be suggested that, a low sense
of political subjectivity might arise from the fact that, in these countries, left-wing parties have minimal popular support, whilst the conservative/right-wing or liberal groups
are the most popular. The Ukraine provides us with a counter-example; however, as
there the Party of Regions (social-liberal) had the most supporters, i.e. 29.9% of the
respondents. Nonetheless, citizens with left-wing views had a lower sense of agency in
politics. A sense of political alienation is also tied to the level of support for conservatism, which is established on the basis of respondents’ attitudes to censorship and to
homosexuals. Here we observe a certain incongruity with our previous empirical findings. In the case of respondents, who identified their political views as right-wing and
had a greater sense of agency in politics, support for conservatism itself caused a sense
of greater alienation amidst those researched (fig. 13).
Let us also consider how a sense of political alienation affects the civic engagement
of the research subjects. The potential of self-organisation expressed by the individual
might serve to develop the resources of political culture. On the other hand, it may pit
us against a threat that might be called an amoral collectivism, a point made by Edmund
Wnuk-Lipiński in his Sociology of Public Life, where he claims:
On the one hand, lively social relationships, trust, mutual confidences and co-operation create a basis for the cultivation of civic virtues and for raising the level of
political culture. On the other hand, relationships of this sort can be strictly confined to groups that isolate themselves from the greater community, treating them
as foreign or even hostile surroundings. In this case, we are dealing with something
that has been called amoral collectivism (Wnuk-Lipiński 2005, pp. 174-175).
To respond to the question of the affect of a self-organising potential on a sense
of political alienation, we have constructed a scale of association, which was created
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alienation and the level of support for conservatism
and the level of support for conservatism
through compiling all the organisations, associations and unions to which the respondents belong. It was thus revealed that the greater potential for self-organisation the citizen showed, the less his sense of political alienation. This relationship can be observed
in nine Central/Eastern European countries, including Lithuania, Estonia and the Czech
Republic (fig. 14). We are therefore dealing with a situation where engagement in what
Robert D. Putnam has called “networks of civic engagement” (Putnam 1994, p. 171)
has a positive effect on attitudes towards the political system.
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alienation and the level of belonging to associations
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RYSZARD NECEL
The final issue under analysis is the manner in which an interest in politics affects
the individual’s sense of alienation. We might initially suppose that a citizen who monitors public life and knows the rules of the political game would have a lesser sense
of political alienation than one who does not engage in these activities. On the other
hand, there may be a total justification for the hypothesis that a sense of alienation
and a retreat from public life grows in tandem with an interest in politics. Individual
experiences of the reality of politics – where we are dealing more with confrontation
than with debate, and polemics more than discussion – might lead to a situation where
the message interests us as observers of the media spectacle, but it decreases our sense
of agency in the public sphere. The correlation we discovered between the variable
measuring interest in politics and the level of a sense of political alienation is a positive one – this means that the more attention a citizen devotes to observing politics, the
more his/her individual sense of political alienation increases. This relationship was
found to be consistent in all thirteen of the countries we analysed, while the strongest
ties between these variables were encountered in the Czech Republic, Hungary and
Bulgaria (fig. 15).
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of political alienation and interest in politics
and a declared interest in politics
127
Summary
The decided majority of citizens of Eastern/Central European countries rate their
sense of political subjectivity as low or average. Only in Hungary did over 10% of
respondents – 11.4%, to be exact – perceive themselves as having an active role on the
political stage. In spite of the fairly high measure of political alienation in this part of
Europe, it does fluctuate with regard to the basic socio-demographic variables. Young,
educated people with higher financial capital demonstrate more subjective viewpoints
towards the public sphere. Our approach towards the socio-economic system is crucial
to our feeling of agency in political life. The more optimistically we rate the changes
taking place in the country, and the more accepting we feel towards democracy, the less
a sense of political alienation we experience. Attitudes towards the economic system
also have their impact on our individual relationship towards politics. The more promarket individuals – who are less liable to support the idea of a social state – see themselves as active political subjects. We might also note the fact that, in terms of political
self-identification, citizens with left-wing opinions declare a lesser sense of agency
in politics. It is interesting that in six countries where this relationship was observed,
left-wing parties had very low social support. The potential for self-organisation in the
framework of civic engagement also has a positive effect on our political subjectivity,
a fact which can be noted in the eleven countries surveyed.
Translation from Polish by Soren Gauger
References:
CICHOCKI R., 2003, Podmiotowość w społeczeństwie, Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, Poznań.
GARLICKI J. & NOGA-BOGOMILSKA A., 2004, Kultura polityczna w społeczeństwie demokratycznym, Oficyna
Wydawnicza ASPRA – JR, Warszawa.
KORZENIOWSKI K., 1991, Poczucie podmiotowości – alienacji politycznej: uwarunkowania psychospołeczne, Wydawnictwo Nakom, Poznań.
KORZENIOWSKI K., ZIELIŃSKI R. & DANIECKI W., 1983, Podmiotowość jednostki w koncepcjach psychologicznych i organizacyjnych, Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, Wrocław.
PUTNAM R.D., 1994, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, Princeton University
Press.
WNUK-LIPIŃSKI E., 2005, Socjologia życia publicznego, Wydawnictwo Naukowe Scholar, Warszawa.
2011
DOBROCHNA HILDEBRANDT-WYPYCH
The social construction of life success
among German youth
According to Ferchhoff, contemporary German youth grow up in social conditions
marked by ambivalence and paradoxical ambiguity (Ferchhoff 2007, p. 64). Key developmental processes, necessary for the transformation of all areas of life, are expressed in the shorthand of “labels”, which help us to understand social conditions
in German society at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In an egocentric, individualised and globalised era, they speak of an information and network society,
a risk and knowledge based society, a society of excess, a high stress and a high speed
society and a society of multiple opportunities. These processes have resulted in the
traditional western paradigm of the full employment society (Vollerwerbsgesellschaft)
with a welfare state in the old Europe (ibid., p. 65) being undermined. Diversification,
pluralisation, individualisation, detraditionalisation and destructuralisation – the fundamental processes of modernity – generate ambivalent changes in the current structure
of social inequality. Despite the apparent move towards increased self-determination
and individualisation, the ideas of freedom and justice are being pushed aside. As the
quoted author emphasises,
in Germany, to a large extent due to the disconnection between economic development and labour market development, over seven million people live in the shadow
of prosperity, where poverty, unemployment and social welfare dependency have
long ceased to be confined solely to the lower social classes (ibid., p. 66).
German researchers point to the difficult situation of German youth, who are growing up in the era of “the crisis of working society”, which makes finding employment
130
“a key generational experience” and there is increased competitiveness “in particular
for work and better options for the future” (Münchmeier 2008, pp. 18, 24).
Furthermore, young Germans, especially those socially privileged university students, live in a meritocratic society, where the importance of knowledge and education,
particularly third level education, is steadily increasing. Regarding German unification, what is noteworthy is “the expansion of education in East Germany” where there
are a growing number of people with certificates entitling them to attend universities
or higher vocational schools (Geißler 2004, p. 375)1. In the 1990s, the number of students in universities and higher vocational schools grew constantly2. The increasing
importance of formal education in post-industrial societies (called Bildungexpansion
in German) is reflected in the quantitative data, e.g. the number of students attending
Gymnasium, the most prestigious level in the hierarchy of the three-tier compulsory
educational system, rose from 14% in 1960 to 33% in 2003. German women have
also benefited from the expansion of education. In the same period, the percentage of
women entering university grew from 27% to 48.8% (Scherr 2009, p. 142).
This article discusses the socially constructed “morphology of success” of German
students3, and in particular the ways in which they subjectively understand life success
within the objective social structure in which it takes place. Although their views cannot be treated as representative of German youth as a whole, they offer us insight into
individual experiences. The polyphony and complexity of the reflections of German
students on life success brings to mind the post-modern concept of “crystallisation”,
as described by Guba and Lincoln. They write that “accuracy” in representation comes
through:
a crystal, which combines symmetry and meaning with an infinite diversity of forms,
substances, transmutations, multidimensionality and points of view. Crystals grow,
transform, alter but are not amorphous. Crystals are prisms that reflect the exterior and refract, creating various colours, patterns, matrices radiating in different directions. What we see depends on our point of view (Guba & Lincoln 2009,
pp. 303-304).
1
Between 1992 and 2003, the proportion of 16 to 29 year-olds having or wanting to have a certificate
entitling them to enter third level educational institutions (Fachhochschulereife/ Abitur) increased in East
Germany from 37% to 43% (Sardei-Biermann & Kanalas 2006, p. 36).
2
Between 1997 and 2007, the proportion of first-degree graduates (Erstabsolventenquote) in the whole
population of a given age group increased from 16.4% to 24.1% (Brugger, Stroh & Schmidt 2009, p. 15).
3
This article is an excerpt from research on life success, undertaken as a part of a project funded by the
Ministry of Science, entitled: The social and educational construction of life success: Polish, Czech, German, and Dutch youth: A pedagogical comparative study. The project set out to analyse different aspects of
“life success” in both theoretical and ideological terms and in social consciousness and practices of youth
in the countries in question. 25 students (19 women and 6 men) aged 20-26 (born between 1982 and 1988)
took part in the research in Heidelberg University.
The social constructions of life success among German youth
131
An aspiration to such “a post-structuralist transgression” motivates this dissertation, which tries to reconstruct the meaning of life success on the basis of the personal
experiences of German students at Heidelberg University.
Life success constitutes an intriguing interaction area between our individual and
social experiences. It provokes reflection on the subjective construction of identity,
e.g. defining oneself and one’s aims and identifying the limits to self-empowerment or
reconstructing various autobiographical motifs or fragments of life stories in order to
“understand” them. It confronts us with what is observable, measurable and verifiable
– with the “objective” side of life success, which we experience by comparing (and
being compared) with other people. Thus, life success has an ambiguous nature, and is
more of a social construction than an objective reality, a dynamic concept, rather than
a static truth (Dries, Pepermans & Carlier 2008, p. 255).
According to Pinquart and Silbereisen, young people entering adulthood, so called
young adults, apply three major subjective criteria to judge life success. They are
(1) perceived subjective career progress (success in the professional domain), (2) fulfilling intimate relationships with significant others (success in the domain of affiliation, especially concerning family) and (3) enjoyable and active leisure (success in the
domain of self-realisation concerning highly motivating leisure activities in particular)
(Pinquart & Silbereisen 2010, p. 148). On the other hand, as Meulemann, a German
researcher on life success among young people, points out, life success is measured on
the same ‘objective’ scale: the stages of the occupational career and the private life,
and positions on these scales are institutionally tied with resources – money, respect,
prestige. Furthermore, he emphasises that objective life success is coloured by subjective strategies of evaluation (Meulemann 2001, p. 446).
Satisfaction depends on one’s personal evaluation of success and failure. Therefore,
the evaluation of success, or in other words its explanation, takes place both internally
and externally, and in the process an individual gives success two meanings: what is
defined (externally) and what is made (internally). Life satisfaction depends then not
only on the objective verification of the fact that one succeeded in life, but also (and in
Meulemann’s opinion more strongly) on the personal subjective evaluation that one has
achieved success made throughout one’s lifetime.
Contemporary youth are “educated to succeed” which requires engaging in processes of social identification and the construction of meaning, these in turn are always
involved in power relations. This observation is especially accurate in societies, which
base their fundamental control mechanism – the compulsion to consume – on the compulsion of self-creation (Melosik & Szkudlarek 2009, p. 31). Self-realisation, to a large
extent an American “civilization proposal” to the world, is a highly cherished goal.
A proposal that the world could not reject, as it brought about risky cultural transformations, which were nonetheless quite attractive for individuals:
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from a community-centred approach to an individualistic approach, from social
responsibility to self-realisation, from a focus on occupational work to a focus on
consumption, from openness to people to the pursuit of wealth, from rootedness
to mobility, from social life dominated by equality, justice and cooperation to an
emphasis on freedom, opportunities and competition, from reality to a dream, from
social security to adventure, from the fear of privation to the search for a kingdom
of abundance (ibid., p. 54).
For German students, too, self-realisation is crucial to life success. A sense of having “a successful life” comes from focusing on one’s dreams and the satisfaction from
making them come true. The most vital thing – in the students’ opinion – is to “fulfil
oneself” (sich verwirklichen) i.e. to improve and develop. It is seen as the most important aspect of life success, and sometimes even synonymous with success. A clear
majority of the German interviewees associate success with accomplishing individually defined plans and the satisfaction gained from achieving them. “My personal goal”
(persönliches Ziel) is one of the most frequently used phrases in defining life success
by the students. Success is a feeling that I have reached specific goals that give me satisfaction in the areas of life important to me (N 144). Thus, it is shaped by individual’s
goals and located within the limits of what you want (N23).
This way of looking at success is certainly influenced by the socially and educationally privileged position of the participants (see Tamke 2008, pp. 293-297). If they
spare no effort they can be “the winners of modernity” in an affluent society. For more
and more of them – as one student put it – it is what you like, not the money, that matters (N25). These words illustrate the observation made by Czapiński regarding the
determinants of psychological well-being, according to whom a sense of happiness in
western societies depends more on subjective factors than “the objective conditions of
life” (Czapiński 1994, p. 19).
Internal success, based on post-materialist values such as self-realisation, life satisfaction, creativity, a plurality of ideas and lifestyles is the most important. However,
its realisation demands experimentation, openness to change and flexibility, which German students talk about in the context of choosing their field of study and their future
occupations. Their openness allows them to take further steps towards potential educational and occupational success without hesitation – they change their field of study and
go on work experience abroad. In a situation where formal education cannot guarantee
career success, focusing on predicting and planning their life trajectory helps them to
cope with less and less security in the labour market. Life success takes on the character of “a project here and now”, it requires thinking in terms of immediate prospects
and developing, according to the student quoted earlier, skills such as flexibility and
4
Symbol N with a number from 01 to 25 was assigned to the interviews with students in Heidelberg
University carried out in May 2008. The interviews recorded on a digital recorder lasted on average between 45-60 min. The material has been transcribed.
133
mobility. They are more open to changes as nowadays, there is a lot greater willingness
to change your career plans while in college, compared to previous generations (N05)5.
Arts, Humanities and Social Science students as well as Science students highlight
the approach of the “student-idealist”, who chooses a more creative discipline, reflecting
his or her interests. However, the approach of a “student-pragmatist”, orientated towards
material and occupational “market” success, achieved thanks to the “right” choice of the
educational path – like some sort of an alter ego – often crops up. This is what they have
to say about the connection between their interests and their opportunities on the labour
market and the compromise between idealistic and pragmatic motivation:
On the one hand, you think about the things you can do well, that give you satisfaction, and that you would like to do (…). On the other hand, you think about doing
something that will later allow you to make money. (N01)
I think that both satisfaction and your future prospects in and after college are important. (N04)
First of all, your interests, then – future career prospects, that is whether you can
earn money and, of course, whether there is a demand for your skills on the labour
market. (N06)
(…) your interests play the most important role, but they are often accompanied by
thinking about what you can do afterwards (N23).
It seems that contemporary students, particularly the students on “general” university courses, are faced with the necessity of combining pragmatism and its inherent
prioritising of security and control over one’s career with self-realisation and readiness
to take risks even if it means that their professional relationships are unconventional
and brief and that they have to constantly “search for a place” in the labour market. One
of the students says frankly that the choice of a university course is a mixture of your
own interests, pragmatism in terms of prospects of getting a job in a given profession,
which is linked to prestige and your parents’ influence (N16). This was not an uncommon opinion.
The internationalisation of education, particularly through work experience abroad
(Auslandspraktikum), seems particularly important to German students. They see it as
an integral element of their educational and future occupational success. They stress
the pragmatic “benefits” which follow from time spent abroad. As one student said: an
experience abroad is, indeed, very important, as it shows (…) that you are able to push
5
According to the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, around 20% of students change their
field of study. A higher percentage of university students (22%) decide to change their field of study than
students of higher vocational schools (16%) (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung 2007, p. 23).
The tendency to shorten the time spent in college is enhanced in Germany by the two-stage higher education and college fees for those extending/prolonging education, the so-called Langzeitstudiengebühren
(Statistisches Bundesamt, 2009, pp. 11-12).
134
yourself forward. After all you are a total stranger in a foreign country and you have
to manage somehow (N03). Work experience abroad is another “competitive advantage”, which helps “optimise your career prospects” (Mansel & Kahlert 2007, p. 18).
It becomes “an obvious thing to do” in a situation where – as it was emphasised by one
of the interviewees –
work experience abroad is welcome or required in almost all university courses,
which suggests that the tendency to see work experience as a necessity has been
acknowledged. I think that work experience abroad will come up in job interviews.
And so it is good to have it (N04). Similarly one student said: Here in Germany,
in job interviews, they immediately want to know if you have taken a final school
examination, have a degree and work experience abroad, so practically, you have
no choice but to do it. It is rather unusual if you don’t (N19).
An experience abroad has become an indispensable element of “external” life
success, achieved in an institutionalised system of educational attainment, correlated
with labour market expectations. Moreover, both the “degree” and “work experience
abroad” are subject to devaluation and revaluation. Just like tickets for trains that “are
overcrowded anyway or do not go to the proper destination”, but without them you lose
any chance to set off on a journey in the first place, even if those hopes are illusory”
(Beck 2002, p. 222).
However, ambivalence creeps into their discussion when they observe that the freedom to choose one of the “versions” of success available in an individualised society
is not accessible to everyone. There is a widespread belief among German students
that people from families from poorer socio-economic groups do not have equal access to life success. According to them, success is determined not only by financial
status, but also by cultural capital, especially parents’ education. They also have no
difficulty identifying groups, whose economic, cultural, and educational disadvantages
“exclude them from success”; as one student said: Germans from migrant or working
class backgrounds are excluded (N21). The main obstacle on their path to success is
“educational disadvantage”. The students point out that: the children from immigrant
families or families with low levels of education have less access to education, which is
the key to success (N09). At the same time, despite their criticism of the low levels of
social mobility and the reproduction of the status quo through the hierarchical (threetier) educational model, German students are loyal to the system. This is evidenced by
the way they speak about the non-natives’ access to life success, where they pass over
the question of their “ethnicity” and concentrate on what they understand as individual
defects (e.g. lack of proficiency in the German language or their parents’ lack of higher
education). As a result, the problems immigrants have with integration are perceived
as private and created by their reluctance to integrate (assimilate) rather than systemic
issues. Students express it in these words:
135
The problem of the underclass is that they see themselves as the underclass, which
leads to ghettoisation and the sense that they are victims of social injustice. The society excludes…, no, ausgrenzen is not the right word, it is the groups that exclude
themselves (grenzen sich ab), sticking to their own community, and not taking part
in social life. A lot is said about integration and the little that has been done about
it has been done without genuine commitment. In this situation it is easier to identify
with the group you belong to (N05).
The stress is put on what is understood as individual “defects” (e.g. the lack of
language)6, whereas the cultural factors underlying the issue, existing both in the minority groups and in the majority of society, seem to disappear from sight. It is also
revealed – as another person puts it – that the foreigners
are, in addition, disadvantaged because they are foreign, but, generally speaking,
I would consider them as one of the group with low levels of education and therefore
with less access to education. Both Germans and Turks face these problems (N23).
Success is also determined by the freedom to consume. The freedom to choose the
“version” of success based on one’s dreams and plans is particularly problematic in
a consumption society. Most of the German students admit that they see no way out of
a consumerist lifestyle but only a chance of “minimising” it through being a reflexive
and unostentatious consumer. According to them, there is no alternative because apart
from the freedom to consume there is only economic enslavement and being – in Bauman’s words – a “flawed” consumer. The freedom to consume, despite the fact that it
deprives us of an ability to shape our life independently by managing our needs and
desires from the outside, gives us a sense of security. Life success is determined, then,
by consumers’ freedom to choose and the lack of this freedom means social exclusion.
From the students’ point of view “the freedom to consume” is the antithesis of poverty as economic enslavement. Poverty prevents people from participating in society,
which – in the world of market capitalism – is based on spending money (Szkudlarek
1993, p. 190). A realistic observation that money is the problem, and only some people
can afford certain things; and others have no choice but to go for the cheapest goods
(N06), shows that the social sphere is divided between “haves” and “have-nots”. Only
the latter experience consumer freedom, which one of the students explains like this:
we are trapped in some sort of web because, at the end of the day, everyone needs
money. If I did only what interests me … I definitely wouldn’t be able to earn money
then. You need to make a living somehow. It doesn’t mean that you would starve
6
The most common “explanation” for the inequality in terms of access to life success on the part of
immigrant children is their linguistic “defect”, e.g. “language is the ‘key’ to society. If you don’t have it,
then it is obviously difficult to manage in a German society” (N2) or “German can be a restricting factor;
if children can’t speak German, they won’t do well in school” (N22).
136
to death, but living on the social welfare benefit, Hartz IV7, means having so little
money that you don’t have the freedom to make decisions in life (N13).
Life in “consumer society” (Bauman 2009, p. 61) is particularly hard for the people
living on social welfare benefits (Hartz IV) or the poor, who see things in ads but they
can’t buy anything. For those people it is difficult to use these things and to achieve
life success because they can’t afford it (N07). In the world of symbolic consumption,
which is supported by the symbolic oppression of the people receiving social welfare
benefits (Bauman 1995, p. 84), it is hard to effectively resist “buying”, unless you live
only to survive and you minimize your needs, which is questionable in our society. Such
rebels are few and far between and, in my opinion; even they aren’t free from consumption (N02). Consumers’ subjectivity is made through “shopping choices”, and what is
assumed to be the materialisation of the inner truth of the self is in fact an idealisation
of the material – objectified – traces of consumer choices (Bauman 2009, p. 21).
Belonging to the “haves” is important for the young people who are constructing their identity, especially in a situation where they experience “the crisis of gainful
employment in a welfare state” (Zinnecker 2005, p. 183). In the German welfare state,
whose foundations have been undermined by the global economy, traditional employment relationships are being eroded and replaced with more flexible forms of employment. The nature of work is changing but also there is less and less work. The permanent threat of unemployment combined with the instability of employment conditions
is another obstacle to success discernible in the responses of German students. Students
talk openly about the existential anxiety stemming from discontinuous employment8:
When you look at the labour market there are no secure conditions these days (…).
That is why I would say that we want security but the reality is different. You need
to look for new ways. Nowadays, people don’t have a stable work history (N14).
Viewed together the opinions expressed by German students leads to the conclusion
that they are looking for their place in a world full of opportunities from which they have
to pick the right one, in a world in which, they believe, you cannot remain still, but you
have to actively further your own personal development. The concentration on one’s
needs is pervasive – an attitude that is not surprising if we take into account that the
interviewees grew up in an individualised society, supported by the “pillars” of personal
freedom, choice and a right to limitless personal development (see Bauman 2008).
7
New social welfare benefit for the unemployed, introduced in 2005 as a part of broader reform of the labour market and social welfare system, initialised by G. Schröder’s government. It is named after Peter Hartz,
the head of the Committee for Modern Services in the Labour Market, set up in 2002 to draw up changes to the
German labour market system and, in particular, to counter unemployment (see Behrend 2008).
8
The Shell Youth Study from 2006 demonstrates a growing fear of unemployment, which increased
from 55% in 2002 to 69% in 2006. At the same time, the proportion of people very or quite certain that
they will be able to fulfil their career plans dropped from 68% in 2002 to 64% in 2006 (amongst students
from 81% to 78% respectively) (Langness, Leven & Hurrelmann 2006, p. 73).
137
The internal success “disregarding others” based on stressing one’s individuality,
has its alter ego – external success, which is adapted to the horizon of social expectations. For “life success” is a functional category based on the needs of society and
that is why its dominant “version” is imposed on an individual in the process of socialisation. The image of life success offered by students is surprisingly coherent and
unequivocal. It is based on the priority of material prosperity and, linked with it, a high
position in the social hierarchy of work and consumption – presented as the “flywheel”
of the economy. Materialistic values (ambition, diligence, achievements) appear in different contexts. For example, in a response to a question about personal symbols of
success, which most of them stress – these are defined by professional status and the
material success that goes with it. They also appear in the question about the transnational patterns of success, where students often refer to notion of “the West”, where the
mainstream focuses on earning money which is the purpose of life for the majority of
them (N10) and where you have to earn sufficient amount of money in order to have
a specific standard of living (N19).
German students point out that society puts emphasis on the education of individuals, who aim at a synthesis of the various dimensions of life success: financial
and occupational satisfaction, and prestige with affiliation and self-realisation. From
a wider perspective, the ideal is to combine civic virtues with concentration on one’s
own needs, or to integrate the two value orientations: achievement preferences and
self-actualisation. On the one hand, finding fulfilment in the world, where honour and
duty are valued, and financial security, bourgeois morality as well as great stress on
family (N17) are still crucial. On the other hand, living in a situation where the plurality
of views and lifestyles is growing, free choice is glorified and where – from the point
of view of the ethics of meaning and self-actualisation – an internal sense of subjective
fulfilment (N14) is essential. Social affirmation of the synthesis of the various dimensions of life success is a part of a general characteristic of German society, in which
there is “a paradoxical combination of materialism and post-materialism” (Ferchhoff
2007, p. 310). External material success (“success in the eyes of others”) is meant to
be combined with internal post-material success (“the success perceived through one’s
own eyes”). As early as 1991, the well-known German political scientists – Weidenfeld
and Korte – wrote about a mosaic German society “balancing on a tightrope between
individualisation and security”. About a society, where, although there is a positive attitude towards emancipatory tendencies and the post-materialistic attitude of “living it
up”, “one seeks a compromise”, especially if it gives a greater sense of security (Weidenfeld & Korte 1993, p. 310).
There is pressure among German students to combine the different dimensions of
success in the right way. The maximisation of expectations provides an ideal situation
in life, where you can reconcile having a great family and job with a brilliant social
life and thousands of interests – you simply do everything (N24). Students highlight the
need to balance the two key areas career and family and at the same time to overcome
138
this dualism, which they see as an integral part of life success. The intrinsic “spirit of
self-actualisation” – i.e. making life choices first of all according to one’s needs – hangs
over them. They stress that the knowledge gained in the education process has to be
both useful (which can be applied in professional life) and gratifying; that the future
occupation has to be a source of both material prosperity and personal satisfaction; that
family life, although valued, does not necessarily depend on marriage, and should – as
one student says – reflect the broader social changes (N05). The definition of a successful person, provided by the students, is also a mixture of traditional civic virtues
(secondary) and post-materialistic values.
The road to success needs to be pursued in a pragmatic way. The dreams of a good
life, lead according to one’s own plan, clash with the expectations of the environment
and the socio-economic situation in Germany, which determine the “limits” of one’s
dreams. German students experience a situation where “everything is possible, but
nothing is certain” (Zinnecker 2005, p. 175). They believe that the conditions in which
they enter adulthood are less secure than those experienced by their parents’ generation.
In order to protect themselves against an uncertain future (especially in the labour market), they focus on the optimal use of opportunities, show loyalty to the socio-economic
and political system and maintain a belief in traditional values such as achievement and
security. A few respondents even talk about “a conservative turn” among contemporary
youth. German students are aware that life success in an achievement society requires
a specific attitude based on ambition, i.e. setting goals and aspiring to reach them, as
well as self-restraint and diligence. Simultaneously, they want to be as free as possible
from the patterns of life success forced upon them “from the outside”, which relies on
comparing oneself with others and a race for a higher social position.
Furthermore, students long for a lost “sense of community”, sincere interpersonal
relationships and a moral code based on solidarity and selflessness. When they try to
define life success for their generation, they express the need for “signposts” and talk
about the lack of the so-called straight road (gerade Weg) as an allegory for human
existence. They are drawn to a bygone world, where social relationships are not only
businesslike but also emotional (see Mikołajewska 1999, pp. 190-191), a world, where
mutual love allows us to express our feelings and sorrows (ibid., p. 187). Alongside
external success, which is a part of achievement system in society, and internal success,
determined by personal satisfaction from fulfilling one’s dreams and life goals, they
add an idealistic sense of “being together”, which is important yet not fully realised.
They state clearly: a career without social commitment does not mean anything to me
(N07) and shared success is the most significant thing for me personally (N04).
A nostalgic undertone is clearly heard, when students discuss notions of success
amongst people who believe in God, for whom, according to them, “it is easier” thanks
to the sense of security that comes from being a member of a religious community.
Paradoxically, believing in God and being guided by values that do not fit in with
modern society helps one to succeed, because religion provides a certain view of life
139
success that is more dominant than others (N01). People who have faith in God are
believed to have access to an alternative conception of life success away from the fierce
competition for limited goods. Its greatest value, from the perspective of those involved
in a “fluid” and unpredictable modern existence, is its deterministic and causal nature, as
it is easier for the people who believe in God (…), they aren’t under the pressure to
achieve worldly success (N05), people who have faith in God have something beautiful, they can believe in something and so they have a chance to achieve a different
type of life success (N10).
Religiousness, both in its ideological dimension (the acceptance of a religious doctrine) and in its pragmatic dimension (fulfilment in everyday life) gives you a different
perspective, that material goods and money are not everything in life and that there is
something else worth living for (N13). They talk about the characteristic responsibility of
community in contrast with an individual responsibility for one’s own success or failure.
One of the interviewees points out that people who believe in God have more stable criteria for life success because they are given to them from above (…). It doesn’t mean that
those who don’t believe have no values but they have to work them out for themselves or
find them somewhere else (N11). Another person thinks that people who believe in God
have a different foundation in life. It is easier like that. They…, it doesn’t matter
if something goes wrong, they know, think they aren’t alone. In other words, when
I feel responsible for what I do with my career or private life, and something goes
wrong then it is me who did it and if I did something wrong then it is my problem
and I am to blame if something doesn’t work out, and when I am alone then I am
alone and have to find a way to make my life meaningful (N19).
The force with which they articulate the positive influence of religion and the way
they describe people who believe in God as some sort of “elite in the sphere of values”
(Gensicke 2006, p. 229) is thought provoking. “The religious version of life success”
reveals their yearning to be able to forecast the future and plan life, to have “road signs”
helping them to construct a biography, strengthen families or return to collective values.
Students are aware that the relation between external and internal success is antinomic. Success based only on reaching one’s goals can be inconsistent with life satisfaction measured by objective criteria. On the other hand, concentrating on adaptation in order to fully meet social expectations prevents one from exploring one’s own
roads to success in a creative way. Therefore, “the inner compass” based on creativity,
diligence and ambition as well as flexibility towards society we live in and the opportunities it offers seems to be the only available remedy for the threats coming from the
outside world (e.g. anxiety about economic conditions and the fear of unemployment)
and for the falling levels of optimism among young people about the future of German
society. Balancing these conflicting demands and pressures makes achieving life success an exceptional challenge.
140
The suspension between external materialistic success and internal post-materialistic success resembles an effort to look “in both directions”. Zinnecker and his colleagues observed this tendency in their research. In their portrait of contemporary German youth entering adulthood at the beginning of the twenty-first century they use the
metaphor of the head of Janus (Januskopf) – a figure with two faces looking in opposite
directions. Young Germans are at the same time “pragmatic searchers for order” and
“efficient hunters of the opportunities of modernity” (pragmatische Ordnungssucher
und effiziente Schnäppchenjäger der Moderne) – “neo-traditionalists striving after selfactualisation and making the best of the existing order” (Zinnecker, Beknken, Maschke
& Strecher 2003, pp. 18-19). In their reports from 2002 and 2006, Shell9 researchers divided the socially and educationally privileged students into two groups with different
personality types – “pragmatic idealists” and “confident activists”. The attitude of pragmatic idealism10 prevails among students. It is characterised by the deep endorsement
of values related to self-development (e.g. tolerance, creativity and individualism) as
well as a sense of duty and a desire for social approval (the so-called secondary virtues
such as security, order, diligence and ambition). The latter ones act as a link between
the idealistic and pragmatic attitude (Gensicke 2006a, pp. 191-192).
Gille, the co-author of research carried out under the auspices of German Youth
Institute (Deutsches Jugendinstitut – DJI11) made similar findings. She claims that the
wide range of preferred values of German youth and the concentration on both innovation and adaptation is a response to processes in the outside world. In the face of the
pluralisation of worldviews and lifestyles, the intensification of opportunities for shaping one’s personality, the difficulties on the labour market and social policy changes
(“the shrinking” of the German welfare state), young people adopt a strategy of not
adhering to only one set of values. It helps to overcome a potential sense of confusion
and possible identity crises (Gille 2006, p. 168).
German students at Heidelberg University want to achieve success, which to them is
a combination of tradition and modernity, with extremely diverse goals. They want the
synthesis of family and professional life, social security with creative and changeable
9
Shell Youth Study is a sociological study of the attitudes, values, beliefs and social behaviour of
young people in Germany. It has been funded by the petrochemical multinational Shell since 1953 and
it takes place every 3-4 years. The last two studies (14 and 15 Schell-Jugendstudie) from 2002 and 2006
were carried out by a research group from the Bielefeld University under the direction of the well-known
German professors, K. Hullermann and M. Albert, in collaboration with TNS-Infratest research company
based on a representative sample (2532 people took part in the 15 Shell studies so far) of youth aged between 12 and 25 (Shneekloth & Leven 2006, p. 453).
10
In the typology provided by H. Klages, one of best-known authors of the concept of the “synthesis
of values” developed since the late 1970s, the individuals seek the synthesis of duty and approval with selfactualisation and engagement are called “active realists” (see Klages & Gensicke 2006, p. 339).
11
The research carried out in 2003 by the German Youth Institute from Munich (DJI-Jugendsurvey)
is the third, (the others were in 1992 and 1997) study based on a representative sample of 9000 youth and
young adults (aged between 12-29 and 16-29 in the first two studies) (Gille, Sardei-Biermann, Gaiser &
de Rijke 2006, p. 19).
141
careers, pro-social behaviour and a hedonistic fulfilment of their personal needs. They
describe their role in life using a traditional idea of life success in German society
as a point of reference and look for opportunities by accruing qualifications or doing
work experience abroad. The synthesis of values – as it is emphasised by its authors
– is neither a conglomeration of fear of the future, being overburdened, insecurity
and conformism, nor an expression of social deprivation, but an ambitious reaction
to the complexity of modern society (Klages & Gensicke 2006, p. 349). The freedom
of an achievement society, the lack of clearly defined goals, or rather their growing
multiplication, and a further increase in individualisation make it difficult not only to
define oneself or one’s place in the society but also – as one of the students said – it
is probably more difficult to define and evaluate life success (N07). Being active in
taking opportunities and being flexible are their main “weapons” in the never-ending
“battle” for defining one’s place in the world. Typical for this synthesis of values is “an
orientation towards deeds” in which the most important issue is putting goals and the
notion of success into action (ibid). The road to success entails a constant striving for
achievement. It is carried out through trial and error, self-reflection and demonstrating
the rightness of your choices in the “eyes of others”.
Translated from Polish by Anna Zajko
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III. Opinions
2011
PAWEŁ RUDNICKI
University of Lower Silesia, Wrocław
Pedagogy and “Civilisation”: misinterpretation,
coercion and unreflexivity in education
Controversies surrounding matters of education or socialisation are not new. Fortunately, there exists more than merely one ideal conception of education. Relations
between educators and educands, the shaping of a young person and his/her value system, preparing the young for participation in the world including equipping them with
the competences necessary to understand, perceive or transform reality, have always
provoked heated debates that never reach unequivocal conclusions. Questions concerning the roles of parents, educators, and teachers have also triggered a number of
problems. Who should enter the role of educator? What kind of qualities should educators possess? What should they teach? How should they influence their pupils? These
questions, however, have never been limited to parents and children, educators and
educands. Indeed, educational discourses have always referred to various institutions:
the state, churches, political parties and, of course, the school. Each of them has presented its particular vision of education, emphasising the obvious advantages of a given
proposition and denouncing other suggestions. Reflecting on the existing pedagogical
ideas, one cannot overlook the fact that apart from issues concerning the education
process itself, pedagogy has ideological aspects and refers to questions of world-view
or power/submission relations.
Education is no longer simply the matter of a personal relationship between a parent and a child, but it has become an institutionalised process of indoctrination and
adjustment to the existing social, political and cultural conditions. Education and socialisation constitute key elements in the process of producing individuals according
to the authority’s intentions, needs and requirements. Therefore, it should not come as
a surprise that in pedagogical theories one can find ideologies that provide justifications
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PAWEŁ RUDNICKI
for “individual good” that may be fulfilled only due to the dogmatic reproduction of
the proposed patterns. In this context, one cannot ignore the functions of a hidden curriculum in getting a young person adjusted to the existing conditions by his/her unaware and docile subjugation to the will of dominant institutions. Indeed, controversies
concerning pedagogical theories take the form of an open conflict concerning ideas,
according to which, people must be educated, roles which new generations must be
prepared or moulded for, pupil’s consciousness or its absence, and, finally, the contexts of education whether one emphasises adaptation to the present conditions or human emancipation from these conditions whenever men and women consider them
constraining.
Various pedagogical doctrines also reflect social changes, intersecting with themes
of the Left and the Right, democratic and totalitarian systems, post-modernity, globalisation, post-colonialism and many others. The diversity of ideas results from a search
for ways of responding to a multidimensional reality and to all aspects of life in it. Thus
one can find trends in pedagogy (such as critical pedagogy), which rest on “Freedom”
as the major educational concept that shapes the understanding of one’s self in the
world, as well as those that recognise submission to ideas or institutions as something
absolutely desirable (e.g. education in totalitarian states).
There are theories that underline the significance of traditional education and those
that examine such types of education closely and deconstruct them in order to show
their coercive aspects. Among some (relatively) new theories, there are those presenting a new approach to education and upbringing. Some of them abolish education
altogether, emphasising that “those who love children, do not educate them” (antipedagogy), while others argue that adequate education might foster human liberation
from social constraints (emancipatory pedagogy). Critical pedagogies emphasise individuals’ uniqueness, their right to self-determination and questioning truths that remain
irrefutable. Such approaches inevitably worry all those participants of the education
process, who perceive human liberation as a threat.
It is in this context outlined above, that one can read the issue of the Civilisation
journal focused on pedagogy (Civilisation. Pedagogy with tradition towards tomorrow; Polish title: “Cywilizacja” Pedagogika z tradycją w jutro, 2007, no 22). One has
to notice that the major themes, which the journal’s authors focus on, are traditional
pedagogy and personalistic philosophy. The publishers seem to allow no alternative to
these ideas and argue that any other theory is damaging, restrictive, distorts a child and
its relationship with parents or teachers, or creates an inappropriate multidimensional
view of the world. The pedagogical issue of Civilisation contains materials from the
Sixth National Conference of Teachers and Educators organised under the title Classical pedagogy in the face of challenges of the present days in Lublin on March 3rd, 2007.
The purpose of the conference – according to the journal’s editors – was to show the
propositions of classical pedagogy and their value for solving today’s educational problems (ibid., p. 6). A number of authors present their reflections on the changing reality,
Pedagogy and “Civilisation”: misinterpretation, coercion and unreflexivity in education
147
arguing that only traditional approaches to education and references to personalism
provide an opportunity to teach human beings to distinguish Good from Evil, bestow
them with properly shaped personalities and moral judgements, and in addition ensure
that they function normally according to their religious beliefs. The articles touch upon
themes such as religion, nation and teaching the virtues that will help the educands
find their path in their daily lives. There are also numerous references to the traditional
pedagogical ideas of Herbart, Woroniecki and Nawroczyński. The texts are diverse as
far as their specific focus and scholarly level are concerned. However, what binds them
together, is the visible fear of post-modernism (post-modernity) and an aversion to new
educational conceptions such as critical and emancipatory pedagogies, but primarily
towards anti-pedagogy, which is presented as the equivalent of educational evil.
The articles convey controversial views on education, the socio-political situation,
schooling and the roles of the State and the Church. The authors strongly opt – despite
all the long and notable changes in pedagogy – for a one-dimensional reality as the
most predictable and secure, which leaves no room for doubts about the world because
everything is already known and has been for a long time. The authors, who are unable
to grasp post-modern ambivalence, approach the new theories irrationally. They do not
attempt to understand these ideas, nor do they take into account the specific contexts
from which these theories have emerged. The authors do not reflect on new ideas in
pedagogy or new analyses of child-parent or pupil-educator relations. One will not find
in these articles any attempt to recognise the ever-growing complexity of reality that
requires educators to pose new questions, to search for solutions and to go beyond conventional ways of approaching education or socialisation. The authors seem to claim
that anything that does not pass as (radically understood) personalism is wrong.
Appropriation of theory and one-dimensional pedagogy
Reading the pedagogical issue of Civilisation it is evident that the editors only offer a one-dimensional view of pedagogy. The authors have not made much effort to
broaden their own perspectives or to understand changes in pedagogy or in the world.
Indeed, what they want is to reconstruct a vision of the world that no longer exists,
and they propose education models that bring to mind the exclusively correct patterns
known from totalitarian ideologies. They appropriate a positive pedagogical concept
by selecting only those of its components that can be formatted to serve a given doctrine in the ideological struggle. It is a pity that this is the way the authors perceive
personalism, which Fr. Janusz Tarnowski (1992; 1993) had presented as a much more
humane philosophy, based on respect for others and with an ability to create conditions
for dialogue beyond one’s personal constraints; the philosophy that is referred to in
Korczak’s pedagogy. The version of personalism and traditional pedagogy presented in
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Civilisation does not respect difference, rejects dialogue, avoids alternative solutions
and returns to the past. The authors do not even attempt to see beyond their own views.
It is difficult to believe that such educational perspectives could present an interesting
and effective proposition in the time of fluid modernity that constantly makes us search
for new solutions, including in the field of pedagogy, by widening educational analysis
of the world and moving into new spaces that traditional concepts have overlooked.
Today, however, ignoring these new contexts seems unacceptable and such an approach
reveals a misunderstanding of reality by the authors. The articles lack insight into geopolitical, cultural or economic changes, and aspects of multicultural, intercultural or
global education are absent. The authors do not reflect on contemporary transformations in family, social roles and interpersonal relations. In summary the narratives on
personalist pedagogy as described in Civilisation constitute no more than some kind of
wishful thinking and cannot be treated as an alternative to the pedagogies they criticise
(but often do not even identify them correctly) and cannot provide solutions to the educational problems that they omit to mention. The authors do not allow themselves to see
the world globally and they reject the fact that traditional education and personalism
can be subject to transformations so that people could make use of them in the present.
Indeed, what is being offered rests on assumptions of absolute theoretical petrification and a conviction that it is the world that should adjust to ideas, not the reverse. It
is a false perspective as it a priori dooms these ideas to failure – not because they are
wrong (indeed, one can at least hope that the authors assume their propositions are most
effective for education), but because they do not even try to extend the view and test the
perspectives and concepts they describe. I do not intend to negate the assumptions of
personalist pedagogy (especially the version developed by Fr. Janusz Tarnowski) or of
traditional models of education. I simply want to challenge the way these perspectives
are conceived – that they reject rational polemic – which makes them marginalised,
not because of content, but due to the form and attitude asserted by the authors of the
articles in Civilisation.
To illustrate how the contributors to the issue of Civilisation deal with pedagogy,
let us examine a few examples. A selected (according to an entirely subjective criteria)
sample of passages provides us with a picture of the authors’ approach to pedagogy
and humankind, their rejection of dialogue, alternatives or any kind of difference. For
instance, Henryk Kiereś, arguing about the essence of personalism, points out that
according to personalist tradition, education, that is, shaping of one’s mind and
human will, is a cultural fact, something given to us and universal to mankind.
Factuality and universality of education prove it necessary for a human being as
a human being, as it guarantees that everyone’s life will be precisely and not accidentally (intentionally!) formed, and protects the heritage of tradition making
historical intergenerational passage possible (Kiereś 2007, p. 13).
149
This definition delineates the field of thinking about traditional education. The author believes his view is the best idea for education. He takes aim at the libertarian
and collectivist approaches in quite an unsophisticated manner. He claims that liberal
perspective means merely securing individual freedom and autonomy, and the collectivist one creates qualityless individuals unable to control their own lives. In this view,
personalism reaches a higher level since it gives an individual as much freedom as he or
she needs and simultaneously leads him/her so that the individual should not doubt that
he/she has control over his/her life. The author reduces his critique of collectivism and
individualism to unpolished slogans such as the individual is nothing, the individual
is zero, or, conversely, the individual is everything. The author’s analysis is not much
more in-depth than the slogans themselves. Arguing about education, Kiereś refers to
various philosophical perspectives and reaches an unsurprising conclusion that people
are different, so
for each person a suitable educational principle should be found. There are no
universal educational “recipes” and if one searches for them, it can only lead to
pedagogical reductionism (vide collectivism and individualism) and anti-pedagogy
(ibid., p. 20).
While stressing that everyone has the right to their own quest, the aforementioned
author negates this right by indicating that certain perspectives are essentially wrong.
Therefore, he privileges personalism, de facto claiming it is the best idea. This privileged position of personalism consists on quite a simple assumption: if some idea cannot be qualified as personalist, then it is wrong. The author shows no interest in the
significant differences between various aspects of liberal or libertarian approaches. He
does not reflect on their multiple dimensions but emphasises that taken to their extremes they inevitably lead to anti-pedagogy, and such an argument seems sufficient to
consider the liberal approach improper. Simultaneously mentioning thinkers as differing as Rousseau, Dewey, Russel or von Schoenebeck, the author does not even attempt
to analyse their ways of thinking about freedom or their pedagogical assumptions. He
treats collectivist education in a similar way. In his horrifying symmetry in approaching
educational ideas (good vs. bad, right vs. wrong), he leaves no room for pedagogical
pluralism. This totalitarian certainty in claiming primacy of specifically perceived personalism can be traced in many articles in the journal.
Another author, Mieczysław Krąpiec, sounds much more radical, when arguing
about advantages of traditional pedagogy. He opens his reflections with quite a multifaceted definition of education, which is
an actualisation of human potential that we are bestowed with upon birth. Each
human being is born with certain given traits, a soul created by God, a unique genetic code, which shapes one’s body in the mother’s womb, where a child starts to
form its body beginning with the first divided cell. One needs to be shaped in order
to get educated, so the next step in education takes place in society, nation and
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family, which are the second womb where we all live, actualise our potential and
realise ourselves. All this begins as early as when the mother starts speaking to her
child during the first two years of its life. Without this speech the child, a new human
being, would not exist. These early words form the child’s spirit and establish eye
and tactile contact; then the child learns how to distinguish – these are the beginnings of education as actualisation of potentialities that the child possesses upon
birth along with the vast amount of genetic code. All this needs to be activated if
the child is to become fully human. [next paragraph – P.R.] How does this actualisation come true? Today they want to impose on us modes of this process according to
patterns developed by parties or through codified law, in foolish and irresponsible
ways. We live in such a system, in this kind of Europe where laws are made by
a handful of people, and if we do not comply with this system, they will not give
us money… (Krąpiec 2007, pp. 22-23) [bolded passages above and further – P.R.].
One can thus ask; what kind of education does this definition offer? Does actualisation constitute a part of socialisation or education or upbringing, or resides in all
of them? What does Europe have in common with education? In addition, does the
quoted author challenge the legitimacy of democratic rule and suggest some kind of
conspiracy theory? One can reach the conclusion that such a notion of education does
not speak of a human subject but treats individuals as objects influenced by their mothers, society and the Church, since the third womb that the author discusses is God.
Education to become a human can, in this view, take place only through the search for
Christ the Teacher and God, and trust in religious principles in order to reach the truth
by getting to know reality and doing good; to reach beauty by creating and living for
others (ibid., p. 24).
Where does this definition place people (parents, children) who do not practice
religion? This strongly exclusionary perspective of education reveals the author’s radical views. In his article, Mieczysław Krąpiec considers nation (family of families) as
the most important social form, created in a family where people learn how to live for
others, recognise and do good and live Under the influence of God The author also
discusses causes of disruption of family and nation, namely the “pseudoculture”, which
attacks in order to disintegrate family, first of all marriage, by promoting civil unions,
homosexual ones, which will bear no children but deprave everything (ibid., p. 24). The
divagation about education, family, nation, religion and God shows, on the one hand,
a perspective of a good civilisation based on religion, and, on the other hand, its opposites – wrong and destructive actions, which disturb social order that the author sees
in “traditional education” constituting the foundation for good families and a strong
nation. This traditional education divides and strongly stigmatises. It explains both how
to be good and who the bad one is. This simplistic model leaves no doubt that the author
offers his educational approach to one particular group of people. He considers evil
all those who do not fit his definition. There is no place for people thinking freely and
151
educational spaces (“wombs”) do not allow active participation of the educands themselves. Reading Krąpiec, one may feel tempted to associate this concept with Huxley’s
Hypnopaedia described in Brave New World. The absence of a child’s self-control over
his or her life can only result in incapacitation, imposed upon the educated by everyone
else claiming it is for the individual’s welfare. This stands in striking contrast with the
personalism of Fr. Janusz Tarnowski, who, as Bogusław Śliwerski has pointed out, had
written of the end of
pedagogy of rulers, strategists and enlightened pundits full of ambitions to change
other people, as well as [the end] of pedagogy that uncritically gives prominence
to the role of educator. Pedagogy capable of facing the future must be oriented
towards living close to others, not keeping a distance from them. Coping with the
challenge of this principle becomes, therefore, the core of a different pedagogy, the
one “with a human face”, rooted in Christianity and expressing itself through authentic dialogue (quoted in Śliwerski 2005, p. 71).
The authors of articles in the this issue of Civilisation, fear changes in adult-child
relations (in all dimensions: parent-offspring, educator-educand, teacher-pupil) perceiving such transformations as abolishing the monopoly of adults who lose – in new
pedagogical theories – their full control over those who have been subject to their
power.
Anna Lendzion, another author who points out issues of schooling and education,
argues that Polish schools are in crisis and face problems such as, psychologism
that calls for replacing education with psychotherapy, which is no longer a method
of treating emotional disorders but becomes a tool in personality development…
(Lendzion 2007, p. 53), generalised accusations of manipulation in education, debunking of apparent actions and pseudo-education, tracing of oppression and indoctrination (enforcing one’s ideology) in negative pedagogy. The anti-pedagogy version of negative pedagogy offers absolute reductionism in education (ibid., p. 54);
promoting the absolute non-directiveness in education, overstressing the child’s
freedom at the cost of the educator’s role in giving directions… Representatives of
this doctrine oppose the principles of authority, obedience and conformity. The
educator’s authority should, in their opinion, result from interaction (a reciprocal
relationship), in which both sides share mutual respect, recognition and trust (ibid.,
p. 55); disintegration of contemporary education (…) interpreted in post-modernist
pedagogy as a desirable effect of relativism of truth and good in historical and
cultural perspective… (ibid., p. 56), utopianism of education, which is revealed,
for instance, in equating education with dialogue and meeting and furthermore
in the symmetrical relationship of two subjects and the adult-child partnership
(crossing a generational line that divides parent from child and teacher from pupil).
(…) The cult of freedom, which is understood as a pupil’s total autonomy, leads
to absolutizing children’s rights without proper emphasis on a child’s duties (ibid.).
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The selected charges presented above are clearly aimed at non-directive, anti-authoritarian and critical pedagogies and also anti-pedagogy. The accusations concern the
disturbing change in relations (in the criticised conceptions a teacher takes the role of
facilitator or transformative intellectual who quits his or her traditional role and turns
towards dialogue and empathy, recognises pupils’ own experiences, rejects oppressive
forms of educating, hidden curriculum and symbolic violence in his teaching practice),
the replacement of artificially created authorities with the real authority formed in interaction, and exposing violent relationships in education, especially contexts of symbolic
violence. A critique of “new pedagogies” reveals a fear of liberating education that
provides both educators and the educated with an opportunity to learn and interpret the
world according to their own knowledge and experience, and not according to orders
of authorities or institutions. Education as discussed in theories that the contributors to
Civilisation criticise, offers a different perspective on human beings, one that assumes
creativity and the absence of fear of freedom. Lendzion worries about education that
abolishes obedience and conformity, so she calls for education based on symbolic violence, which produces incapacitated, objectified and other-directed individuals. Lendzion’s article advances a view of education and socialisation, which is full of disbelief
in the possibility of human liberty, existential creativity and responsibility for one’s
own life, and finally, that one, can build relationships with others based on authentic
values. The author discusses problems that are by no means justified and she misses the
contexts of theories she criticises. It seems she does not understand these conceptions.
Indeed, the objections she raises reveal her actual support for symbolic violence (the
making of conformists, subjugation to artificially created authorities, depreciation of
dialogue etc.). Lendzion does not try to understand how oppressive school can be, and
how detrimental a bad educator can be. The author is far from the conclusions elucidated by Jacek Kuroń, who argued that
the essence of pedagogical action rests on (…) constraining free will of the educated. The better educator I am, or the more effective is my action, the more likely my
pupils will make a choice I want them to make. Therefore, I sacrifice my pupils for
the cause I believe in, so I sacrifice them for my own benefit… (Kuroń 1984, p. 12).
In her clumsy critique of the new theories, Anna Lendzion calls for coercive pedagogy – subjugating and pursuing the assumed goals without taking into account the arguments of those who are being educated. This by no means fits the personalist doctrine.
The brief insight into the radical views of the authors shows their reluctance to reflect on education or socialisation from another perspective. The pedagogy expounded
by contributors to Civilisation does not let other ways of thinking, views or ideas be
heard. They appear right when they claim that in numerous situations pedagogical theories remain far behind reality, or when they criticise social institutions, primarily the
state and the schooling system, as those that impose schematic constraints on people.
Yet one can hardly accept the biased categorical judgements, which marginalise all
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views other than those proffered by the authors of the journal. The publication is striking for its lack of an alternative view of education and pedagogical theories and for its
one-sidedness and dogmatism. There is no room for a pluralist debate on education.
One can notice the authors’ certainty that only their perspective is acceptable, that is,
only their notion of education is right. One finds such an approach hard to agree with,
as contemporary education studies expound a whole range of ideas that should provoke
productive debates on education or the roles played by actors involved in this process.
The discussed materials from the national conference reveal only one- dimensional
thinking about education. One can see as disturbing the fact that the authors offered
no theories other than their own radical reading of personalism. Although there are
pedagogues thinking in other ways, the contributors to the pedagogical issue of Civilisation try to convince us otherwise. Indeed, random readers of the volume might be left
with impression that traditional and personalist approaches (understood in a very radical fashion) exhaust the spectrum of pedagogical ideas. The personalism presented in
Civilisation lacks the perspective of Janusz Tarnowski. This is a striking abuse. It may
be worth, therefore, to supplement the above discussion with some correcting notes on
critical and emancipatory pedagogies including the so “dreadful” anti-pedagogy.
Omitted pedagogies, or free and self-aware human beings
The problems with understanding new pedagogies often result from taking a viewpoint too narrow to grasp them. Simplistic reading that does not take into account
social, political, cultural or economic contexts, hinders the full presentation of a given
conception, and even more so its comprehension. Authors’ biographies are also relevant in this process. If one omits this multi-layered context, new pedagogical theories
seem unclear, banal or even wrong, as the contributors to Civilisation claim. What
hampers appropriate reading of these theories is that the authors relate them in a simplified way and reduce them to one common denominator, whereas there is no single
anti-pedagogy, and no single critical or emancipatory pedagogy. Pluralism, variety and
diversity of new tendencies in pedagogy enrich thinking about humanity and education.
The 20th century brought about a large number of new pedagogical theories that
reflected radical transformations in thinking about education, school, roles of teachers
and students, however educational practice has not changed significantly. As a form of
critique of the elites’ role in deciding what and how to teach children, youth and adults,
numerous authors postulated ways of liberation from stereotypes and stigmas produced
in educational relationships located in school and beyond. Critical approaches posed
questions not merely about the content or form of the curriculum but also about patterns
of educating self-aware and creative humans. The critics demanded a clear answer to
the question of who constructs curricula and what hidden contents, especially those
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reflecting power relations, the educational programs contain. Why does education focus on restricting individuals’ subjectivity and making them reproduce the existing
roles? A number of authors in the field of critical and emancipatory pedagogies (including many non-pedagogues) referred overtly to the problem of social inequalities and
their consequences for individual freedom and patterns of societal life. Proponents of
anti-pedagogy undertook the task of rethinking relations between children and parents,
pupils and educators, and reached a perverse conclusion: it is sufficient to assist and
facilitate, education as such is not necessary1. Presenting this perspective, Hubertus von
Schoenebeck notes that the basis for
an approach free of educational claim is the respect for the inner world of each
human being, also the child’s inner world as it is experienced by the child itself (in
accordance with our perception) (Schoenebeck 1994, p. 173).
Alice Miller (1994, 1997) discusses quite different dimensions of anti-pedagogy.
She presents toxic aspects of education, which produce human tragedies, and argues
that people brought up in absence of love, respect and opportunity for self-determination, are unable to function independently. She shows how destructive an educational
relationship can be, how children are trapped in their parents’ dreams and aspirations,
how the social system subjugates people who lack the ability to stand up against it.
Miller uses the term “poisonous pedagogy” (literally: “black pedagogy” or “dark pedagogy”; German: “schwarze Pädagogik”), which denotes all violent acts, which, when
practiced as a normal elements of education, objectify children and turn them into their
parents property and entitle the latter the right to engage in evil-doing in the name of
misunderstood love. Miller’s books smash pedagogical myths, deconstruct traditional
education and expose the effects of abuses of educational power. Representatives of
non-directive pedagogy postulate a shift from schematic education, traditional canons and directives that indicate the aims of the educational process, towards empathy,
friendship and dialogue. They argue that each human being has the right to have his or
her own identity. For example, Carl Rogers advocates relations based on mutual trust,
respect and autonomy of participants in educational processes (Rogers 1961). One has
to note also non-authoritarian pedagogy that focuses on human self-development, offers new perspectives on conflict, and propagates acceptance and dialogue in educational relations (Gordon 2000). Indeed, these “revolutionary” views constitute an integral part of contestation against social systems, and establish links with countercultural
movements and ongoing struggles for a better, more just and more democratic world.
The 20th century witnessed numerous revolutions. Some of them resulted in millions of
dead, while others transformed human ways of living or thinking. Educational revolutions, that is, new pedagogies, affected ways of educating and were, perhaps, the most
1
Some of the authors discussing this issue are Schoenebeck, Miller, Braunmühl, Neill, Korczak,
Śliwerski and Szkudlarek.
155
important as they have paved ways for humanness in times of consumerism, ever more
aggressive politics and omnipresent technology.
The critique of education, educators and authorities that non-authoritarian or nondirective pedagogies and pedagogues offer, has become a new ground for defining
child-adult relations, which previously had rested on assumptions of domination of
seniors and the imperative to submit to their power. Civilisation shifts in the later part
of the 20th century have had a strong impact on human actions. They transformed the
existing systems in quite a revolutionary way. Collective and individual experiences
of totalitarianism, the Holocaust, states using political and mental terror against their
citizens, schools introducing a priori modes of re-socialising their pupils, oppressive
notions of education – all those factors must have resulted in radical changes. New
theories put a strong emphasis on a child’s subjectivity, raised questions about an educator’s impact on pupils and identified the state (and its subsystems) as an entity aimed
at the programmatic subjugation of children including those who care about and educate them. Parents, teachers, educators – namely, adults – should focus on the task of
recognising children’s needs, not tell them what is good for them or what they should
dream about. Anti-pedagogical mottos, those who love children, do not educate them
or be and encourage rather than educate highlight the proposed changes in relations
(Schoenebeck 1994, pp. 5-12)
Education has become a synonym for intellectual and emotional invasion, and it
takes place whenever there appears somebody who thinks he/she knows better than
the child what is good for the it Even though educators come from the outside, they
possess certainty that they know better than the person for whom they decide what
is good for him/her in life (ibid., p. 40).
Recognition of education as a process restricting freedom, subjectivity and agency
of the educated, has become a starting point for reflections on new relations.
Anti-pedagogy focuses on possibilities of forming true, authentic relations between
adults and younger generations, based on friendship and freedom. Children and
youth reject pedagogical claims by appealing to adults: I am responsible for myself!
It is part of my essence of being human. Recognise it and respect it! Support me
loyally, but do not educate me as if you knew better (Szkudlarek & Śliwerski 1992,
p. 146).
New roles somehow triggered changes in both sides of the education process: children finally gained an opportunity to make their own decisions to affect their own lives
with all the consequences; adults have been freed from responsibility for educational
decisions. In new pedagogical theories children gained full rights in using language
too. Communication allowing the “I” perspective has given children a chance to express their own needs and desires as they feel them (like in Gordon’s conception). In
addition, a handful of schools introduced changes by consciously withdrawing from
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oppressive institutional patterns and creating safe spaces for young people interested in
personal development. Alexander Neill and his school have become a leading example
in this.
The basis of the Summerhill’s system is a belief that education should focus first of
all on a child’s instincts. The subconscious is far more important than the conscious
mind. In our theory, the child should be free to express itself in a way required by
inner force that drives the child’s actions. We can use here words such as the subconscious or existential force or any other term. This force will find, in one way or
another, vent for its energy. If it is set free, it will find its expression in love and creative impulses. If it is suppressed, it will appear as destructive actions, hate as well
as illness of body and mind (Neill, quoted in Gribble 2005, pp. 17-18).
New pedagogies have advocated independence, self-development, self-assessment,
self-discipline, critical thinking, rejection of claims to traditional roles by parents and
educators, justice (and many others) as major principles of human existence. From
a situation of being, in all respects, subject to adults’ power, the child became their
equal partner. Margaret Mead argued that in prefigurative cultures children provide
warranty for society’s continuity, since they have the best capacity to adjust to rapid
developments of the civilisation and the conditions for its existence. Creating systems,
which would not restrict children’s activity and would not weigh on the young generation with history, tradition or social customs becomes the task of adults. To realise this
one must first create new models for adults who can teach their children not what to
learn, but how to learn and not what they should be committed to, but the value of commitment (Mead 1970, p. 72).
New pedagogical theories freed parents/educators/teachers from their earlier dramatically false role, that of a universal paragon: the know-all, the only righteous and
moral model. However, the notion of a non-directive educator assumes much more
difficult tasks: he must be authentic, not pretend, his feelings must be true, his advice
should be helpful and not constitute automatic formulas for keeping the child calm
while not solving the child’s problems; he must be cautious to provide assistance only
when truly necessary; he must be empathic to use his/her sensibility to become the
child’s friend; creative (Śliwerski 2005, p. 120) since permanent changes are integral
part of such educator’s habitus; self-aware since the educator’s views, knowledge and
way of living can inspire others. Thus, practically speaking, the educator’s responsibility for the child is much larger, because it results from the real care. The teacher
who does not have to rely on directives from authorities can withdraw from traditional
school repressions aimed at the pupil, and start fostering the child’s awareness and
self-experience. The educator does not have to follow the objectives and curriculum
requirements strictly, as the pupils’ own curiosity and free will to learn about reality can
become a curriculum in itself. Finally, the “set-free” teacher can leave all models and
157
authorities behind so that they do not hinder the pupil’s personal uniqueness, but help
to overcome the child’s difficulties in life, not just in school.
Education under oppressive conditions becomes a synonym for manipulation. There
is an agenda from above, which assigns what to teach and how to teach it. Teachers select methods that suit them best. What can those people who are to play roles of pupils
in such a system do? Two options exist, the first one is to be a docile pupil and accept
education, schooling and teachers with no objections. The second is much less comfortable: to protest and resist! Contesting the reality brings hope for changes that, indeed,
seem illusory, but at least rebellion can help indicate there is no consent to the social,
political and educational status quo. Emancipatory pedagogy develops the theme of
liberation in a broad context. The school system, authority, social system, culture, politics, economy, interpersonal relations, forms of communication – all these facets (and
many others) somewhat determine the efficiency of the project of social subjugation
and incapacitation of people who naively see the state as an institution friendly towards
them. Emancipation becomes
a process of subjective development expressed in conscious actions aimed at freeing
the subject from being dependent on others and confronting and rejecting diverse
pressures. It is, therefore, a conscious, emotional, verbal and action-oriented reaction to socially legitimate dependencies and stereotypes by the subject’s effort to
gain (individual and collective) independence (Czerepaniak-Walczak 1995, p. 14).
One can see as paradoxical, however, that it is the school and teachers themselves
– that is, those criticised so strongly – that possess the ability to emancipate the pupil.
This emancipation must be universal, egalitarian and it requires all participants to make
an effort in order to make it come true. Moreover, it requires that civil society and
schooling develop under conditions of a democratic state.
The freedom and human capacities of individuals must be developed to their maximum but individual powers must be linked to democracy in the sense that social
betterment must be the necessary consequence of individual flourishing. Radical
educators look upon schools as social forms. Those forms should educate the capacities people have to think, to act, to be subjects and to be able to understand the
limits of their ideological commitments. (…) Democracy is a celebration of difference, the politics of difference [..] and the dominant philosophies fear this (Giroux
1992, p. 15).
For decades, education and schooling were understood as strongly linked to the
existing social system, of which they were integral elements. Political systems determined the school’s role and place in society, and also its form and competence.
Critical pedagogy based on theoretical developments of the Frankfurt School, analyses politics in the context of viewing social reality in its totality that the representatives
of the Frankfurt School understand as the universe of human potential, which rests on
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PAWEŁ RUDNICKI
an historically formed notion of humanity (Wiśniewski 2004). This includes political
parties’ agendas and government policies, along with the effects of “grand politics” on
common people. Here we have school and moreover educational and social systems
seen as something that causes permanent exclusion experienced not only by pupils but
also by their families and local communities. Some aspects of this exclusion are: educational standards that do not tolerate difference and are meant to ignore any form of
diversity resulting not only from individual differences but also from social ones2 and
close off educational opportunities for pupils who do not want (or cannot) submit to
the system (Bernstein 1990; Bourdieu & Passeron 1990); a common consensus based
on the assumption that schools (and other institutions) function for the benefit of the
society, know best what is good for people and any kind of critique is inherently wrong,
since those who are critical risk being ostracised (therefore they often prefer to remain
silent rather than exposing themselves to social disgrace) (Goffman 1961; Meighan
1986; Wróbel 2006); persuasion that authorities and the social system have the right
to determine pupil’s fate (with the mediating role of school system) subjecting him/her
to the law of human resources allocation, thus ascribing the pupil to a position in the
social structure (Marcuse 1964; Bauman 1966).
New pedagogical perspectives do not cast a shadow of doubt that one has to break
with educational patterns used to date. Consent over subjugation propagated more or
less intentionally by institutions and educators, restricts human capacities and leads
to existential problems classified as crises. Some firm proposals for change have appeared. These revolutionary propositions in educational change include a few themes.
They focus on the celebration of awareness and raising consciousness about submission to authority and ways of emancipation. They point towards concrete situations of
educational subjugation that one can observe in any social environment. They offer
radical ways of changing education. They suggest new solutions to make education the
major tool for creating a better world and more self-aware human beings (Illich 1970;
Kuroń 2002; Kwieciński 1997). They emphasise the importance of relations based on
real emotions, dialogue and respect.
This brief outline of contemporary pedagogical theories that received so much criticism from the contributors to Civilisation shows a vast gap in the different approaches
to the human condition. Radical personalism as outlined by speakers at the conference
Classical pedagogy in the face of challenges of the present days constitutes no alternative to the present situation. This perspective is overwhelming, restricting, divisive and
dualistic in its black-and-white view of the world. The ideas that the conference speakers reject are certainly far from perfect, they also contain ideological message and create illusory visions of reality, but their advantage is that they treat humans as subjects
and allow them to make their own decisions for which they can take responsibility.
These theories expose power relations and propose modes of liberating action. They
2
Ethnic differences, especially in case of minority groups, provide an example.
159
stress the importance of creating one’s own identity and using experience in addition to
reflexivity to understand the world.
The picture of pedagogy as presented in Civilisation is horrifying – not merely
because of proposed methods or educational means, but also due to the unreflexive
approach of the volume’s contributors, who perhaps do not notice the rapid changes in
the present and do not grasp the new tasks of pedagogy in the face of new challenges.
In order to change anything, one needs to develop the understanding of how fluid our
times are. Personalism based on fear, symbolic violence and one-dimensionality lacks
this ability to trigger change. Civilisation’s contributors offer pedagogy suitable for expectations of people who do not comprehend the world and believe that if people cannot understand the reality around themselves then they should be isolated from it. This
separation from the reality concerns not only pedagogy, but also religion, politics and
culture. People, who feel in danger in their own community, seek solutions in radicalism and symbolic aggression. This kind of approach provides no solution, but instead
produces only false conviction that one possesses monopoly on the truth. Fortunately,
the reality is quite the opposite. Indeed, people who are open-minded and critically
reflexive, are able to see that a single dimension is far too little to live one’s life by.
Translated from Polish by Marcin Starnawski
References:
BAUMAN Z., 1966, Kultura i społeczeństwo, PWN, Warszawa.
BERNSTEIN B., 1990, Odtwarzanie kultury, PIW, Warszawa.
BOURDIEU P. % PASSERON J.-C., 1990, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (Theory, Culture and
Society Series), Sage.
CZEREPANIAK-WALCZAK M., 1995, Między dostosowaniem, a zmianą, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu
Szczecińskiego, Szczecin.
GIROUX H.A., 1992, The Hope of Radical Education, [in:] Weiler K., Mitchell C. (eds.), What Schools
Can Do: Critical Pedagogy and Practice, State University of New York Press, Albany; previously
published as The Dream of Radical Education, [in:] B. Murchland (ed.) Voices in American Education,
Prakken Publications, Ann Arbor, MI 1990, pp. 95-108.
GOFFMAN E., 1961, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates, Doubleday, New York.
GORDON T., 2000, Parent Effectiveness Training, Three Rivers Press.
GRIBBLE D., 2005, Edukacja w wolności, Impuls, Kraków.
ILLICH I., 1970, Celebration of Awareness, Doubleday, New York.
KIEREŚ H., 2007, U podstaw wychowania: aretologia czy aksjologia, Cywilizacja, Nr 22.
KRĄPIEC M.A. OP, 2007, Wychowanie narodu przez wychowanie człowieka w cywilizacji osobowej, Cywilizacja, Nr 22.
KUROŃ J., 1984, Zło które czynię, Krytyka, Niezależna Oficyna Wydawnicza, Warszawa.
KUROŃ J., 2002, Działanie, Wydawnictwo Dolnośląskie, Wrocław.
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KWIECIŃSKI Z. (ed.), 1997, Nieobecne dyskursy, cz. V, Studia kulturowe i edukacyjne, Wydawnictwo
UMK, Toruń (and other parts).
KWIECIŃSKI Z. & ŚLIWERSKI B. (eds.), 2004, Pedagogika, t. 1, PWN, Warszawa.
LENDZION A., 2007, Realizowanie programu wychowanie w szkole w aspekcie kształtowania charakteru
ucznia, Cywilizacja, Nr 22.
MARCUSE H., 1964, One-Dimensional Man. Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, Beacon
Press, Boston.
MEAD M., 1970, Culture and Commitment. A Study of the Generation Gap, Doubleday, New York.
MEIGHAN R., 1986, A Sociology of Educating, Saunders College Publishing/Harcourt Brace, London.
MILLER A., 1994, The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search For the True Self, Basic Books.
MILLER A., 1997, Breaking Down the Wall of Silence: The Liberating Experience of Facing Painful Truth,
Virago.
NEILL A.S., 1960, Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Childrearing, Hart Publishing, New York.
NEILL A.S., 1992, The New Summerhill, ed. by Albert Lamb & Zoe Readhead, Penguin Books, London.
ROGERS, C. 1961, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy. Constable, London.
SCHOENEBECK von H., 1994, Antypedagogika. Być i wspierać zamiast wychowywać, Santorski & Co.,
Warszawa.
SZKUDLAREK T. & ŚLIWERSKI B., 1992, Wyzwania pedagogiki krytycznej i antypedagogiki, Impuls, Kraków.
ŚLIWERSKI B., 2005, Współczesne teorie i nurty wychowania, Impuls, Kraków.
TARNOWSKI J., Pedagogika dialogu, 1992, [in:] B. Śliwerski (ed.), Edukacja alternatywna – dylematy teorii
i praktyki, Impuls, Kraków.
TARNOWSKI J., 1993, Jak wychowywać?, Wydawnictwo ATK, Warszawa.
WIŚNIEWSKI T.R., 2004, Krytyka i zniesienie polityki według Teorii Krytycznej, Studia Politologiczne, Nr 8,
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WRÓBEL A., 2006, Wychowanie a manipulacja, Impuls, Kraków.
IV. Reviews
2011
Mieczyslaw Malewski,
Od nauczania do uczenia się. O paradygmatycznej
zmianie w andragogice (From teaching to learning.
The paradigmatic shift in Adult Education Research)
Wydawnictwo Naukowe DSW (University of Lower Silesia Press)
Wrocław 2010, ISBN 978-83-62302-08-6, pp. 239
Over the past several months readers
might have become aware of the recently
published book by Mieczyslaw Malewski
From Teaching to Leaning. On paradigmatic change in adult education research.
The author, as in his previous publications, discusses the present methodological condition of European research activities in the area of adult education, taking
into consideration the constantly changing subject of the discipline. This change
is observed on two levels: the theoretical
potential of discipline, which constructs
knowledge about the cultural and social
entanglement of an adults in the surrounding world as well as the research methods,
which when identified, will allow us to
ask questions about the actual cognitive
potential of current studies/research projects. What does the author reveal?
Hustle and bustle
around some notions
While trying to create the research
map of adult education, M. Malewski
claims that as all of it takes that education of adults as the subject of research
and cognition it clearly concerns issues
involved in adults’ educational activity
and their unlimited potential for development and growth. Taking into consideration the variety of questions but mainly
the type of key theoretical concepts quoted by different authors, the direction of
modern investigation can be described as
a ‘tendency’ best summed up by the following quote from arousing researchers’
interest in teaching to arousing their interest in learning. This tendency suggests
a movement towards the modification of
the traditional didactics of adults, which
used to be centered on teacher’s activities
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ALICJA JURGIEL
and synchronized student’s activities in
the classroom. However, according to
Malewski this turnaround implies something even more profound, which is the
problem of recognizing learning as the
participation of an adult subject in various social activities and where an institutionalized learning environment would be
just one of many. For researchers it means
diverting their attention to an adult learner in a social context: learning in a group,
organization and community. The value
of personal experience as an element of
the education of adults is emphasized but
the attitude towards it differs from M.S.
Knowles’s perspective, which connected
it with the liberal method of teaching in
which learner experience was considered
a tool leading towards self-fulfillment and
self-actualization. The individual experience is placed in its wider cultural and social context. The best reference for this noticeable change in researchers’ interest in
the cultural and social aspects of learning
is found in reading contexts, which build
the meaning of two crucial notions of continuing education and lifelong learning.
The concepts of continuing education and a learning society, as the author
reminds us, is a thinking which has been
greatly influenced by the education of
politicians after the Second World War.
Not only are these concepts reflected in
the shaping of educational policy but they
also influence the constantly changing
economics of labour and new technologies. They also form part of the ideological
basis for many international organizations
such as UNESCO, OECD, the Council of
Europe, the International Labour Organization and the World Bank. The idea of
human capital harmonizes with the concept of continuing education. Currently,
human capital is associated with both
knowledge and skills, which will guarantee prospective employees maximal
productivity. To justify the necessity of
undertaking the effort of individual education, one fixed argument is often used
which states that the higher the level of
acquired qualifications an employee possesses, the greater are his chances of finding the right niche in the ever-changing
labour market. The consideration of ‘human capital’ goes beyond the individual
dimension and involves investing in personnel and managing human resources at
an organizational level so that it would
generate some profit. National educational policy orientated towards encouraging
different forms of formal education is also
of crucial importance.
In the meantime, the concept of lifelong learning and a learning society is
a matter for debate in the countries where
post-war history indicates a constant increase in the education of society (Great
Britain, Canada, New Zealand and Sweden). The discussion around the concept
of a learning society referred to the idea
of a post-industrial society and information society looking at its productivity,
economic growth and fast information
flow. M. Malewski states that the substantive discussion concerning ‘learning society’ takes place on three levels:
● Learning society is treated as an educated society, civilly involved, glorifying both liberal democracy and equal
opportunities
● Learning society is considered as a learning market that creates opportunities for
Mieczysław Malewski, From teaching to learning. The paradigmatic shift in adult education... 165
different institutions to provide services
to individual subjects since a free market is a basis for encouraging competition in the field of economy.
● Learning society is perceived as
a learning network, which allows individuals to adapt various achievements
to their lives and relies on a full spectrum of sources, consequently making
the development of individual interests and identities possible.
According to M. Malewski, the search
for new dimensions in learning and creating identities forms the modern meaning
of adult education. Of course, apart from
educational institutions and families there
are also different groups such as voluntary
organizations, informal groups, neighborhoods, the local environment, workplaces
and new social movements which provide
ample opportunities for an individual to
learn and to construct meanings within
a public space. Many authors debate not
only the connection between learning and
the existence of social capital but also
the importance of a community (cultural,
ethnic) and collective learning for an individual. In this way the concept of social
capital considered as a network of mutual
commitments loses its entirely positive
meaning.
M. Malewski claims that the attempt to
find new meanings concerning the concept
of cultural and social learning may suggest that an adult subject, who is ‘doomed’
to be trapped between the world of teaching and learning, involved in a constant
battle to keep a balance between the individual and social aspects of his life also
starts gaining rights to be a designer of his
reality. This is why, I believe, references
to concepts of learning described by such
authors as P. Jarvis, Y. Engestrom, J. Heron and K. Illeris, which are present in the
text, emphasize the unique meaning of
socio-cultural learning in the design of
a subject’s identity.
Socio-cultural aspects
of adult learning and the latest
research methods
Examining an adult who learns as
if by accident by taking part in different
social activities requires searching for
methodological inspiration in interpretative and critical research. M. Malewski
believes that this methodological but also
linguistic turn resulted in the widespread
interest of researchers in biographical research orientated towards identifying and
understanding phenomena and not only
verifying them. It can be claimed that biographical research is enjoying a peculiar
renaissance and its promoters work in two
ways – on one side they refer to the tradition of the Chicago school, on the other
they try to associate new meanings with
it. Modern researchers have different attitudes towards understanding biographical
research that can be instantly recognized
through the way they work in the context
of the text work (narration, life story) and
especially in the context of answering the
question about the aim of their research.
In an attempt to identify the different
ways of conducting biographical research,
M. Malewski refers to research methods
already existing in the field of adult learning. The author describes the problem as
a general attitude towards biographies
166
ALICJA JURGIEL
according to which a biography is considered a life story which makes the main aim
of the analysis as one of selecting different events from the life of an individual.
As a result, according to M. Malewski, researchers involved in this kind of the field
investigation are not free from mistakes
which can include: the aforementioned interest in factual events in a given biography, excessive psychologism, stability of
the cognitive perspective and consequently the non-theoretical character of the research. Is there a way out of that trap?
I believe that the intention of
M. Malewski is to send a message which
is to treat biographical research as a discursive one, which from the perspective
of its epistemological assumption means
‘discusses with itself’. This discussion
takes place on the level of creating research tools, methods of analyzing data,
achieving results and their final interpretation. In this case, an accepted method
would be to challenge the mechanism
of creating narration. There are visible
differences on the level of data analysis
between searching for and identifying
preconceptions (intentions) which created fundaments for the ‘rethinking of the
text’ by the researcher, searching for the
essence of the researched phenomenon
in this text and finally searching for different methods of experiencing the same
phenomenon by the researchers.
In the context of the referred methods of conducting biographical research
M. Malewski seems to ask a question if
the story may be considered a valuable
method of cognition, providing knowledge about the world through the process
of making phenomena meaningful or is it
rather a rhetorical creation which covers
and uncovers reality to the same degree.
The question depends on what kind of status we (researchers) want to grant it.
It needs to be emphasized, that the
book provides a wide spectrum of cognitive arguments supporting the changing
methodological condition of adult education as a discipline. The author has made
an attempt to show the changes which in
his opinion need to occur found not only
in the research procedures but also in the
cultural contexts justifying them. However, it is difficult not to notice that in some
fragments of the book the author allows
himself to describe the learning process
in a naturalistic and anthropological way
which is considered valid whenever the
education of adults is being discussed. It
is as if he claimed that although the school
as an institution exists, adults do not need
to take part in this intentionally organized
education because considering its socializing and adaptive nature – it does not
support their growth nor (considering the
kind of learning) does it reveal the social
or cultural potential of the subjects.
I believe that the criticism of formal
education and its segregation methods in
the system as well as glorifying personal
knowledge does not provide an adequate
formula for conducting research. The difficulty may be concerned with the ability
to challenge the theory that learning is always a positive experience and that education of adults is in our common good,
serving development and growth (regardless of the environment in which it takes
place). M. Malewski’s book may help us
solve those dilemmas.
Reviewed by Alicja Jurgiel
2011
Hana Červinková, Bogusława Dorota Gołębniak (eds.),
Badania w działaniu. Pedagogika i antropologia
zaangażowane (Action Research. Engaged pedagogy
and anthropology)
Wydawnictwo Naukowe Dolnośląskiej Szkoły Wyższej (University of
Lower Silesia Press) Wrocław 2010, ISBN 978-83-62302-14-7, pp. 502.
The first decade of the twenty-first
century was undoubtedly a period of
breakthroughs in Polish social sciences. It
was a critical phase particularly for Polish
pedagogy, in which, after a time of grievous stagnation, intense work was undertaken. This was done to catch up with the
worldwide developments in critical reception and creative application (both in
theoretical reflection and in research practice) of scholarly paradigms alternative to
the positivist one and was also the result
of intellectual aspirations budding within
the integrated humanities area. Such endeavours were facilitated by the earlier
pioneering efforts undertaken in some
academic quarters, whose eminent representatives followed by their students resolved, against all odds, to be productively receptive to the latest findings, trends,
approaches, etc. and thereby to qualitatively rebuild their respective disciplines.
In Polish educational sciences, we should
distinguish the contributions of Zbigniew
Kwieciński and Lech Witkowski as well
as researchers of Toruń’s Cultural and
Educational Studies Centre (Ośrodek
Studiów Kulturowych i Edukacyjnych)
as of particular importance.
The research staff of the University
of Lower Silesia in Wrocław, identifying themselves with the aforementioned
intellectual community, substantially
contribute to and creatively develop such
activity, creating new spaces of academic
discourse and participating in a number of
crucial initiatives. They consistently strive
to consolidate and refine the interdisciplinary, conceptual and methodological
consciousness of social (educational) researchers, resorting for this purpose to the
legacy of the world’s humanist thought on
the one hand and, on the other, to its most
recent tendencies, the most important of
168
DARIUSZ KUBINOWSKI
these being the interpretative, critical,
participatory, and qualitative approaches.
These are central to and highlighted in the
University’s research projects, conferences, methodological workshops and publications, and particularly in the school’s
flagship journal Contemporary – Learning – Society (Teraźniejszość – Człowiek
– Edukacja).
One of the series published by the Lower Silesia University Press (Wydawnictwo
Naukowe Dolnośląskiej Szkoły Wyższej)
is the Contemporary Social Thought Library (Biblioteka Współczesnej Myśli
Społecznej). Its main objective is the
publication of Polish translations of significant works by prominent humanist
scholars that support the post-positivist
reformulation of philosophical (epistemological and methodological) premises
and principles which underlie the current practice of social sciences. The 19th
volume in this series is an anthology of
texts by various authors, titled Action Research: Engaged Pedagogy and Anthropology (Badania w działaniu. Pedagogika i antropologia zaangażowane) edited
by Hana Červinková, a cultural anthropologist and director of the University
of Lower Silesia’s International Institute
of Cultural and Educational Studies, and
Bogusława Dorota Gołębniak, a pedagogue and the University of Lower Silesia’s Vice-Rector for Research and International Cooperation.
The anthology consists of both classic
and modern texts directly pertaining or
closely related to the action research tradition. Representing various academic institutions from many countries, the texts’
authors anchor their arguments, concepts,
tropes, etc. in interdisciplinary cultural
and educational studies and research.
Undoubtedly, the editors’ selection of the
texts should be lauded as intentional and
accurate and thereby providing a cohernet
theme for the anthology. Owing to their
choices, the anthology constitutes an ample, unique, and inclusive compendium of
knowledge about the philosophical foundations, practice, application, and assessment criteria of action research. And we,
the readers, obtain a comprehensive insight into scholarly, humanist, ethical and
political dilemmas that action research inevitably generates and confronts. In keeping with the book’s subtitle, its content
and structure proportionally include the
principal threads of the world’s pedagogical and anthropological reflection in this
field. At the same time, the pedagogical
texts clearly manifest their cultural, anthropological, and ethnographic underpinnings, and the anthropological texts
reveal their educational, activist, and
therapeutic orientations. All the texts are
formed into a cohesive whole by the paradigm of humanistically oriented social
sciences, they all share similar characteristics based on a fundamental reliance
on interpretative approaches, qualitative
methodologies and critical theory.
The volume opens with a programmatic article by B.D. Gołębniak and
H. Červinková titled “In Search of an
Emancipatory-Transformative Dimension of Pedagogical and Anthropological
Research,” in which the editors elucidate
the rationale for including particular texts
in the volume (e.g. citing correspondence with scholars who suggested certain
modifications in the initial selection) and
Hana Červinková, Bogusława Dorota Gołębniak (eds.), Action Research. Engaged pedagogy... 169
explain translation decisions made with
a view to consolidating adequate Polish methodological terminology. Primarily, however, they resolutely, boldly, even
“militantly” locate the publication in the
constructive critique of the positivist paradigm of social sciences as well as in the
ideological quest for a new, anti-dogmatic, more humanistic, and specifically engaged knowledge about man/people and
his/their world/worlds. Written on behalf
of Polish social researchers, the article simultaneously challenges them to live up
to such a task in Polish conditions but with
the imperative of constantly referring to
the worldwide developments in the field.
The translations published in the volume are logically and consistently placed
in four sections. The first section includes
two classical “founding” texts of the discipline: Kurt Lewin’s article rooted in
pedagogical thought and Sol Tax’s article grounded in anthropological thought.
The second section comprises four articles by leading representatives of the
action research tradition: Wilfred Carr,
Stephen Kemmis, Gerald I. Susman and
Roger D. Evered, and Peter Reason and
William R. Torbert, respectively, presenting the philosophical premises of action
research and the diverse theoretical perspectives connected with it. The third section consists of five articles concerning
engaged pedagogy and educational action
research (case studies and reflections);
and the fourth section includes eight texts
discussing various facets of engaged anthropology. The anthology also contains
information on the contributors and bibliographical notes concerning the original
texts. We will not discuss particular texts
from the anthology in detail here, hoping
thereby to encourage potential readers to
peruse the book themselves. Instead, we
will concentrate on the main benefits this
publication brings for the development
of pedagogical studies and research in
Poland in the broader context of the necessary – though still arduous – work in
progress on reformulating the methodological basis of practicing social sciences
in Poland.
Firstly, the anthology is the first complementary and comprehensive action
research monograph in Polish. Thus far,
we have had only access to scattered, isolated articles on action research methodology, selected information from sections
in methodology handbooks, fragmentary
accounts from (sub) chapters in monographs of emancipatory pedagogy and
critical theory/pedagogy, or sparse studies in which the method, used in research
practice, usually supplemented other
techniques of assembling and analyzing
the empirical material. In our country,
the prevailing attitude has long been (and
apparently still is) that action research
is not a scholarly method. Based on the
articulated opinions of some orthodox
methodologists, this common conviction
generates understandable caution and
insecurity in applying action research in
practice. The anthology, without doubt,
offers action research a new cognitive legitimisation and gives us hope that from
now on interest in practising it will keep
increasing. It is all the more important
because – as the authors of most of the
texts included in the anthology competently assert – this mode of practical humanistic inquiry (even though it is based
170
DARIUSZ KUBINOWSKI
on revision of the positivist concept of
scholarship) provides new, vital, topical,
and operative knowledge about man and
the social world, knowledge which can
foster improvement, enrichment and the
greater humanisation of this world. Comprehended in this way, the action research
tradition fits perfectly into the new paradigm of integrated humanities (located at
the intersection of science, humanities,
art, ethics, and action) with their key emphasis on the interrelationship between
cognition and therapy, long highlighted
by Maria Janion. That this is the anthology’s objective is directly articulated in the
introductory article. As the anthology’s
editors stress, its major aim is to “encourage this practice-oriented, non-positivist
approach” (p. VIII).
Secondly, the anthology substantially
supports the effort of restructuring Polish
pedagogy as a modern field of knowledge
concerned with the integral, inter- and
trans-disciplinary correlations within humanities and social sciences. The publication aids Polish pedagogy in its attempts
at remaining in touch with state-of-the-art
research and being more open towards
new, inspiring ideas, which are developing in scholarship across the world. It is
imperative that Polish pedagogy be more
receptive to the successively emerging
humanist approaches, and tendencies,
starting from critical theory and feminist
thought, through modern cultural studies
and various methodologies of qualitative
research, and ending with post-modern,
post-structuralist, and post-colonial ideas
as well as post-humanist and post-scientific concepts. Action research, practised and methodologically developed
primarily in the field of pedagogy, is becoming an essential element both in the
new epistemological approach and also
in practical thinking. The anthology provides persuasive arguments for advancing
pedagogical/educational/didactic action
research that would be critically but also
constructively engaged in the transformation of Polish education. This would include both the humanising and civilising
of the system as well as the emancipation
of teachers, students and parents, postulated for the sake of greater equality, justice and democratisation of didactic and
educational processes in our country.
Thirdly, several articles from the anthology emphasise the importance of the
so-called “action turn” in contemporary
social sciences, which has been decisively facilitated by the growing interest
in practising pedagogically and anthropologically oriented action research in
many countries. Currently, we seem to be
facing another change in social sciences
and humanities, one that could be called
“a pedagogical turn”. It entails broadening the scope of research and refining the
interpretation of human reality by applying the pedagogical approach as defined
by critical theory, which accentuates the
need for social change, emancipation of
the marginalised and support for personal
growth. Conceived in such terms, “human
pedagogy” has manifested itself, amongst
others, in the evolution of the classical
Handbook of Qualitative Research edited
by Norman K. Denzin and Yvonny S. Lincoln, published by Sage, whose third edition – the most “pedagogical” one – has
been introduced to Polish readers by the
Lower Silesia University Press as Metody
Hana Červinková, Bogusława Dorota Gołębniak (eds.), Action Research. Engaged pedagogy... 171
badań jakościowych (2009). If the “pedagogical turn” becomes reality also in the
Polish context, the pedagogical community will face another challenge. The
challenge consists of applying the new
methodology, enriched with a pedagogical perspective, not only to learning about
the human world but also to transforming
it for the benefit of human beings. Such
hopes for action research are being preliminarily articulated in the world’s social
sciences and humanities.
Fourthly, Action Research is bound
to contribute considerably to raising the
methodological consciousness of Polish
social scientists, on condition, however
that they thoroughly study its content and
seriously approach the ideas it conveys.
The concepts the anthology espouses are
present in the contemporary discourse on
science, which focuses firstly on a wellargued critique of the positivist definition of scholarship and such scholarship’s
actual relevance to humanistic inquiry.
The anthology shares in the current intellectual climate produced by the nascent,
but increasingly bold debates in Poland
on the essence of science about man, its
place among the assorted methods of
knowing and modes of understanding the
human world. Earnestly championing the
ideal of pursuing truth in the production
of humanistic knowledge, such debates
entail creating new adequate research
epistemologies and methodologies. Several passages of the anthology question
the essence of scholarship and not only
in the direct context of action research.
Importantly, such reiterated queries no
longer sound as “heretical pranks” but
as logically substantiated and evidently
humanistically oriented cognitive and
practical dilemmas. Hopefully then, Action Research – in conjunction with many
other translations of texts, fundamental
to contemporary qualitative research,
published more and more frequently by
Polish academic publishers, and the productive efforts of the increasingly numerous community of Polish qualitative
social (and pedagogical) researchers will
popularise and encourage the new methodological and discursive frameworks in
Polish social sciences.
Finally, a question is posed as to
whether the methodology of action research will be recognised as cognitively
valuable by committees conferring academic degrees in Poland. The question
troubles many young researchers who are
interested in applying this method but at
the same time feel frustrated by the methodologists’ current indecisiveness on the
issue. Various academic spheres are likely
to adopt different attitudes and policies in
relation to it. Yet undoubtedly, as qualitative research once had to arduously “fight
its way to sovereignty” until it was ultimately acknowledged as meeting the
standards of a re-structured, humanised
definition of scholarship, now action research will similarly have to continue the
“struggle” for such status by means of
extensive and productive implementation
into research practice. It concerns first of
all pedagogy as an applied science, but
also many other disciplines of social sciences and humanities.
Reviewed by Dariusz Kubinowski
Translated from Polish by Patrycja
Poniatowska

Contemporary Learning Society A quarterly of social

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