Symbolic Movement

TRANSGRESSIONS: CULTURAL STUDIES AND EDUCATION Volume 20 Series Editors

Shirley Steinberg, McGill University, Canada Joe Kincheloe, McGill University, Canada

Editorial Board

Heinz-Hermann Kruger, Halle University, Germany Norman Denzin, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, USA Roger Slee, McGill University, Canada Rhonda Hammer, University of California Los Angeles, USA Christine Quail, SUNY, Oneonta

Symbolic Movement Critique and Spirituality in Sociology of Education By PhilipWexler The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

SENSE PUBLISHERS ROTTERDAM / TAIPEI

A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-90-8790-273-5 (paperback) ISBN: 978-90-8790-274-2 (hardback) Published by: Sense Publishers, P.O. Box 21858, 3001 AW Rotterdam, The Netherlands

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Cover image: Helen Wexler, Israel

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

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Chapter One Introduction – Sociology of Education as Symbolic Movement 1

Part One New Sociology of Education Critique and Context

Chapter Two Ideology and Utopia in American Sociology of Education 17 Chapter Three New Sociology of Education: Decline and Fall 37

Part Two Postmodern Sociology of Education

Movement, Knowledge, Identity Chapter Four Movement: Society, Education and Theory 61 Chapter Five Knowledge: Structure, Text and Subject 83 Chapter Six Identity: Politics of Everyday School 105

Part Three New Age Sociology of Education

Return of the Sacred

Chapter Seven After Postmodernism: A New Age Theory in Education 131 Chapter Eight Resacralization: Society, Religion and Education 153 Chapter Nine Research: Ethnography of Being 183

Part Four Education, Spirituality and Society Chapter Ten Critical Pedagogy and Beyond 199 Chapter Eleven Gifted Education: Mind and Society …and Spirit 205 Chapter Twelve Conclusion: New Directions in Sociology of Education 215 References

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I want to thank the following publishers for granting permission to reprint excerpts from my previously published work:

Sage Publications for “Ideology and Utopia in American Sociology of Education,” (pp. 27-54) in Antonina Kloskowska and Guido Martinotti (Eds.) (1977) Education in A Changing Society.; Routledge for (pp. 17-46) and (pp. 67-97) in Philip Wexler (1987) Social Analysis of Education;and for Philip Wexler, “Structure, Text and Subject,” in Michael Apple (Ed.) (1982) Economic and Cultural Reproduction in Education, and for (pp. 128-158) in Philip Wexler (1992) Becoming Somebody. Falmer Press, and for Philip Wexler, (pp.56-79), “After Postmodernism: A New Age Social Theory in Education,” in Richard Smith and Philip Wexler (Eds.) (1995) After Postmodernism,. Falmer Press; To Palgrave Macmillan for (pp.113-152) in Philip Wexler (1996) Holy Sparks. St. Martins Press. Perseus Books for (pp. 93-110) in Philip Wexler (2000) Mystical Society. Westview. M’hammed Sabour and Joensuu University Press, for Philip Wexler, “Beyond the Iron Cage of Education: Toward a Weberian Sociology of Education,” in M’hammed Sabour and Leena Koski (Eds.) (2005) Searching for the Meaning of Education.

I want to especially thank Professors Joe Kincheloe and Shirley Steinberg, as editors of this series, and as colleagues and friends who have been steadfast in their interest and support of my work.

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CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

Sociology of Education as Symbolic Movement

This is a book about sociology of education – past, present and future. Even the past, however, is not past, since its promise as a plan of work for the sociology of education has not yet been realized. On the face of it, the book chronicles the changing paradigmatic assumptions and lines of theory and research which have characterized “the field” for the last thirty years. “The field” is not the whole field, since the strongly coded disciplinary domain of sociology of education within academic, establishment sociology is underrepresented in these discussions. Rather, the field is a broader domain, one that is at once peripheral to the disciplinary apparent mainstream within sociology, but also much wider and larger. It is only “other” to the institutional, disciplinary tendency, but certainly not to social thought in Education, nor to more salient developments in social theory and to intellectual movements, more generally. This is the sociology of education that is better known internationally, outside of the American journal, - of which I was editor for five years - and which is a basis for dialogue and work among theorists, researchers and practitioners across the spectrum of social interest and specialization within Education. I have had the good fortune to span both worlds, and I take sufficiently seriously the commitment of “the sociological imagination,” to the intersection of biography and history to believe that my own path in sociology of education is somehow linked, if not fully representative, to changes in the ways of thinking about education socially that have characterized sociology of education. The historical context of sociology of education has been in my awareness from the beginning, as someone educated in the sociology of knowledge. Each of the changing sets of assumptions, directions and styles of work that are described in this book are understood within their particular historical contexts. It is as if I have been writing the history of sociology of education all along the way, while trying to work primarily on explanation and interpretation of the social meaning of education, during changing times. “Reflexivity” is built into this account of sociology of education, although the explanatory power of the concepts and theories stands or falls on its own. In this sense, sociology of education is a symbolic movement, because it is a conceptual screen that reflects, though not as a mirror image, historical social movements. Sociology of education is not alienated from social, cultural and historical movements to which its practitioners belong. It is rather, a specialized, symbolic aspect of those movements, and the indication of the very way in which it is an aspect of larger movements has itself changed, historically. Early on, in the

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first political moments of angry, utopian disenchantment from naïve scientism, what was called “new” and “radical” and “critical” sociology of education, understood this symbolic connection as one of “ideology” in social thought, sociology, and, particularly, for us, in sociology of education. With the move toward a more representationally-sensitive, constructivist mode of thought, whether as post-structuralism or postmodernism, ideology gave way to meaning as a constructed, semiotic process, and the linguistic turn in social thought meant a more critical understanding of culture, as well as political economy. Methodological interest moved onto a less historical, smaller screen of text and field ethnography, and to different and more personal coordinates of reflexivity. But, the awareness, however dimly, remained of a connection between theory and research in sociology of education and larger historical social movements. Even now, as the symbolic relation between contemporary movements of spirituality appears to be still more individual and inward, there is a dawning awareness that a new direction in sociology of education will also be linked to those salient historical socio-cultural movements in which not only its own paradigm, but a more general social imaginary and framework of social activity is being reconstituted. In changing terms – which I am going to try to show are much less cleanly separated and divided than we seem to think – sociology of education has, during recent years, not only altered its theoretical directions, but also symbolically presented and indirectly analyzed its social context. If we talk now, instead of about ideology or representation, rather more about “sublimation,” we are still talking about the duality of sociology of education, as at once an analysis of education and of the symbolic movements in the social field of which it is a part.

PARADIGMATIC MODELS

It would be ironic if in an account of sociology of education committed to symbolic analysis as part of a flow, of an historical process, we were to artificially freeze and make static a description of its changing paradigmatic assumptions and models of theory, research and practice. Yet, without overemphasizing the differences and the demarcations, there have been clear shifts, perhaps with blurred boundaries, in the models of sociology of education – shifts linked to the changing prominence and influence of different social movements. My view is that we are simultaneously interested in questions of power, meaning and being. The apparent desuetude of “critique” and popularity of “ spirituality” misunderstands the extent to which each of the commitments signaled by these terms have been interwoven at each apparent “phase” in the development of contemporary sociology of education. One of the values of assembling and including my earlier work in the field, as well as the current work, is to reveal how much of the present is incipient in the past. From the very beginning, which was the critique of sociology of education as an ideology with its roots in the early twentieth century, American, Progressive social movement, we can see the entirely contemporary interest in questions of “being,” and in the postmodern focus on meaning and identity. Perhaps more importantly, the current interest in spirituality

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has to be understood politically, as part of that very same quest to undermine the alienating effects of global capitalist social organization. Of course, it too has ideological uses, and the long history of Romanticism (Abrams, 1971) demonstrates the ways in which the “discovery” of an inner, spiritual life deflects from and indeed, represents a failure of imagining the possibilities of realistic social transformations. So, the conceptual foci, which all too quickly become academically commodified icons, are historically interwoven in the chapters of this book, which present different historical moments and their symbolic presentation in sociology of education. With all that, and the dangers of periodizing the historical flow – “mors immortalis,” Marx wrote, eternal, constant movement – sociology of education, at least in its broader, theoretical, intellectually and socially contextualized manifestation, particularly my work in sociology of education, and its appearance in this book, is historically organized in terms of changing paradigms or models. Yet, I emphasize that these models belong to a larger historical flow, and while we may want to convert them to convenient bookmarks for organizing sociology of education, they are also symbolic aspects of an ongoing historical process of social movement. That movement begins, for the models of sociology of education that are developed in this book, with the political and economic interest of the new sociology of education, at least in the way I have conceptualized it. For in addition to historical context, I do sociology of education by working not only from broad context or educational practice, but also out of theoretical traditions. And the salience, valuation, and apparent utility of these traditions have changed as well. Sociology of education is about social movement, but it is also about social theory, and changes in the traditions of social theory that are more or less prominent and effective during different historical times. I begin then, as I believe at least contemporary American sociology of education (the “other”) does also, by working sociology of education between, in the in-between of context and tradition, of movement and theory.

CRITIQUE: NEW SOCIOLOGY, IDEOLOGY, MARXISM AND DISENCHANTMENT

This is a view not of simple parallelism or reflectionism, but of a certain broad simultaneity. New sociology of education is part of the New Left social movement (or at least a stratum of it, as we shall see), but it also, simultaneously presents the entrance of Marxist thought into the American academy specifically, during the late sixties and nineteen seventies. The first section of the book is about this simultaneity. “Critique” is about contextualizing the assumptions of the then extant sociology of education, as an academic version of Progressive- Liberal thought. I try to show how new social movements lead to challenges, first in political practice and then in academic theory to reigning paradigmatic assumptions. But, what is occurring analytically, is not a crude actionism. Rather, the analysis is itself evidence- as symbolic movement – of two further developments. The ideology and utopia analysis of liberal sociology of education and then the political, economic

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class analysis of the rise and fall of its successor in the new sociology of education, is part of the introduction of Marxist social theory into sociology of education, and educational theory, more generally. In this first section on new sociology of education, we are simultaneously reading about ideology critique of the field, and competing assumptions and models, but also introducing basic concepts of Marxist social analysis. Here too, it is a Marxism of a particular sort. While “ ideology” figures prominently – a term which may have become old-fashioned, but, in my view, is not analytically fulfilled in terms of its contemporary value – “alienation” is a key term, driving the analysis and bridging between the theoretical tradition of Marxism and the existential angst propelling the analyst in everyday life struggles. Theoretically, the Marxism in this sociology of education, moves from the so-called bourgeois sociologization of Mannheim’s abstracted, but extremely powerful and useful analysis of ideology and utopia, deeper into the social organization of alienation, and through that, back into Lukacs’s philosophical Communism, with his emphasis on “reification.” This in turn goes back to Marx’s central analysis of “commodity fetishism,” and all of the many facets of the commodification of social life. Commodities and the conversion of all social processes into commodities – commodification – are the heart of the political economy of capitalist production, and it thus leads to questions of the workings of capital, as an economic and political production process. So, when we analyze the “rise and fall” of the new sociology of education, we do so in terms of the contraction of the knowledge industry and the class interests of the producers of the specialized discourse . The importance of Marxism does not end with ideology critique or the initial, new sociology “phase” in the development of sociology of education. Postmodernism, which is the broad marker that I use to characterize the work that came after the ideology critique, with its emphasis on representation, knowledge and identity, also includes, in this book, a political economy of education. For textualism and ethnography in research and the broad appeal of the field of “cultural studies” for the “other” sociologist of education, all takes place within the historical social movement of the reorganization of educational institutions precisely along the lines of a macro-structural process of commodification. While the visibility of the New Right as a social movement affecting educational policy is evident, the economic face of the transformation of the everyday social organization of education is part and parcel of what appears in our account as the second or middle phase of sociology of education as “postmodern.” Nor should the ongoing relevance of a Marxist sociology be limited to contemporary analyses of globalization in education, however valuable. The conceptual power of the Marxist model is precisely in its reach into what appears furthest from the economic, productive sphere, but yet belongs to its productive regime. What that means in this book is that the contemporary interest in spirituality is not the successor to critique, since the processes of ideology, alienation, exploitation in production, and commodification as a fulcrum social process are also relevant during a time which we analyze in terms of “re-sacralization,” and its meaning for sociology of education, and for educational

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practice. While new sociology of education is used in the organization of the following two chapters to characterize the introduction of Marxist analysis to the field, it does not end at a particular moment in analytical time. That is the meaning of the distinction between context and tradition. The explanatory value of that tradition continues, even as the context of social movements changes, to the extent that the tradition is not simply an ideology, in Mannheim’s classic definition of the term, but, is instead an effective, interpretive tradition for the social analysis of education. The first two chapters of the book focus on this tradition, which then reappears in the later emphases on postmodernism and the re-sacralization or introduction of religious interests and discourse, which brings us to what I suggest is the current “new” direction in sociology of education – spirituality. This first section then offers an ideology critique of both Liberal and New sociology of education, while simultaneously introducing the terms of Marxism that are then used beyond that moment, in postmodern and spiritual sociologies of education. In addition to these values of the study of sociology of education as ideology and utopia, and as a domain for the application and use of a wider array of concepts of Marxist social analysis, there is a third moment in the simultaneity of our “symbolic movement.” If we see the development of sociology of education as itself an historic social movement, then what we see in this first phase, is, in addition to its intrinsic topic of analysis and introduction of a theoretical tradition, its own position in the discursive or symbolic movement of sociology of education. Whether this position, like the focal topic of analysis and theoretical apparatus, also has a much wider meaning and set of implications is not something that I am going to claim here. Nevertheless, as part of both a model of social movements and as a characterization of an historical time, we see in the language and mood of this section, the workings of a process of “disenchantment.” Here the call is not simply to the Marxist tradition as an analytical resource, nor to the ideological debunking of Progressive-Liberal sociology of education as an ideology, but to an existential hunger for “being,” This “ontological thirst,” as Eliade put it, we shall see reflected throughout the book, through the identity politics of postmodernism, to a re-sacralization of ethnographic research in education, and ultimately toward a call for a re-magification of the world and spiritual social understanding of education, as a new direction. Already, within a Marxist discourse, the American Transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau, which it may be claimed is at least a precursor to prevailing elements of new age spirituality, is apparent. With that Transcendentalism, and later with Romanticism, the utopian longing and its analytical expression occurs under the cloud of absence, lack, frustration, and the wish to “control our lives,” This desire is born in dis-enchantment with the alienation and impoverishment of being in everyday life. It is symbolically expressed also in the dis-enchmantment with knowledge, with a scientific, academic cognitivism. The critique of ideology is driven here by a dis-enchantment with the promise of scientific knowledge that is represented in our specific case, in the originary, early twentieth century sociology of education. The only apparent “neutrality” of the assumptions of the field is a false promise of the

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science of society, of scientific, established, mainstream, disciplinary sociology of education. Its explanatory failure in the face of historic social movements that renders its discourse as ideological, is what encourages the dis-enchantment with its legitimating meta-discourse: the objective, neutral language and knowledge claims of science. In the simultaneity of symbolic movement, “critique” is a moment in the social process of dis-enchantment.

POSTMODERN MOVEMENT: THE SUBLIMATION OF REPRESENTATION

In the diachronic narrative of sociology of education, symbolic practice as ideology belongs to the first phase, as critique, to the second phase of postmodernist movement as representation, and to the last phase of spirituality as sublimation. Consistent with our resistance to a paradigmatic freezing of periodization that provides short hand, virtually commodified icons of classification, these processes also occur across models and phases. Sublimation is not the exclusive, dynamic symbolic property of the time of spirituality in sociology of education. The second part of this book, displays sociology of education as a postmodern analytical movement. Historically, the disenchantment with scientific liberal sociology of education and the utopian hope that the paradigmatic signs of new assumptions representing the new social movements would mover beyond critique to social transformation was not realized. The hope’s disappointment was ambivalent. On the one hand, new sociology of education achieved moderate academic success, and the older assumptions were effectively challenged by a new theoretical interest in questions of social inequality, the social character of knowledge and a focus on the persona of students. New, critical and radical achieved academic legitimacy.But I try to show that the price of legitimacy was in the taming of the radical edge of the critical time, and in the cultural institutionalization of models such of reproduction and resistance that were accommodated and incorporated within both deeper conservative conceptions of social stability and acceptance of an educational context shaped less by revolutionary leftist aspirations than by the incipient neo-liberalism of the educational New Right. The mixed success of the new, critical sociology of education did change the terms of discourse, but how deeply is a question raised in part two of the book. The Marxist tradition lost its luster to the mood not simply of disenchantment with science, but with the decomposition of stable meaning more broadly. This mood was the temperamental aspect of a much larger intellectual, structuralist and post-structuralism turn toward language, meaning, and the understanding of signification as a semiotic process. “Decomposition” in our mode of simultaneous analysis means at once the decomposing moment of the historic social movements both of the Left and of sociology of education, toward a decentralizing of stable meaning, in favor, on the one hand of a new pluralism of the attributies of inequality, including gender and race; but, also of any social movement that would represent in education the social aspirations of the new sociologists of education. Their partial conceptual and limited academic status success and blunting of

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critical analysis as the price of a newfound legitimacy is chronicled in chapter four. The processes of what now constitutes global neo-liberalism in education, of commodification, privatization and corporatization are the unexpected forms that an historic social movement takes in education. At the same time, the loss of political certainties for the critics combines with the practical and academic de-construction of meaning, to orient sociology of education away form macro-structural, political and economic interests, toward newly prominent interests in textual and ethnographic research, toward the politics of culture, meaning and identity. The de-stabilization of both Marxist and practical social and educational certainties probematizes meaning and identity, albeit partly driven by a combined ethos of meaninglessness and market liberalism. Within this new, contextually induced problematization, and the turn away from historical macroanalyses, new traditions shape the postmodern movement in sociology of education, toward semiotics and ethnography. Within postmodernism, I try to show how to appropriate the “new” more culturally oriented traditions, but to maintain the critical interest in both transformative social analysis and educational practice. The chapter on knowledge embraces the semiotic interest, but rejects the textualist urge to remain only within the text. Instead, I try to insist on linking the construction of meaning to social structure on one side, and toward the appropriation by, as well as positioning of, the subject of meaning, on the other. The acceptance of the arbitrary character of signification is rejected, while deconstructing Marxist realism, to show how meaning is also a productive process, and thus, not a substitute for a political economy of education. Likewise, the new individualist face of the new market liberalism of the nineteen eighties is appropriated as an analytical topic, but not as an explanatory force. In the excerpt from my multi-year field study of everyday life in high schools, I accept the rediscovery of ethnography in education, as well as the topical focus on the individual person, but I embed them both in a class analysis of schools, continuing to show the vibrancy of a Marxist analysis, under conditions of postmodern social and educational movements. Identity in school is researched within the framework of class differences in school composition, and the way that macro-structural, historical, economic and political processes are transformed into the everyday life of identity negotiations in the everyday life of students in school. Identity is indeed a constructed process, but in Marxist terms, students do not construct it just “as they please,” but in terms “inherited from the past.” The process of “becoming somebody” is a social process of producing identity with the semiotic social resources that are differentially available and differentially defined, depending on the location of the student/identity worker within the class system; and in the particular terms which it sets for her struggle to reproduce the individual, existential identity aspect of her social being. In this way, the combined individualist and voyeurist consumerism of the postmodern era is re-appropriated for a detailed ethnographic description of how exploitation and alienation occur in the social relations of class schooling.

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As a symbolic social movement, the disenchantment of the critics was succeeded by the de-centering and decomposition of the cultural studies and ethnographic heirs of the new sociology. In chapters five and six, I try to show how the critical interest is continued within this regime, by refusing the amnesia of historical social structure, alienation, exploitation and class difference and antagonism. In this sense, there is also a continuity with the version of a so-called “humanist Marxism” that characterized the initial critique of new sociology of education. Erich Fromm, a leading exponent of this position, reappears in the book’s next section, as a critical theorist working against alienation, and going outside of Marxism to draw on still other traditions as resources for understanding and transforming the historical social context. Despite the legitimacy offered to the “other” sociology of education within the cultural decomposition and individualist elevation, on the one side and the efflorescence of various styles of cultural and ethnographic theory and research, on the other, I suggest that the paradigmatic development of the sociology of education reveals that at least in part, postmodern sociology of education failed to sate the ontological thirst of the critical sociologists of education. Fromm, who wrote in his introduction to a selection of Marxism ( Bottomre and Rubel, 1956) of the need for a “de-alienation,” was an early proponent of the recovery of pre-modern traditions as a resource for theory and critique. If indeed, the postmodern moment in sociology of education was creative, in the expansion of its research repertoire of possibilities to include a semiotics of school knowledge and an ethnography of school identity, as an historic movement, it may be said that its creative sublimation of the loss of meaning remained unstable and unsatisfying. Sociology of education has not completed the creative aspect of the sublimation of postmodernity. But, the need for a deeper recovery of meaning or even a de-sublimation of the more respectable research agenda is, what I think characterized later work – in its search for a solution to the earlier historic crisis of power and meaning by a re-sacralization of society and education. The quest for being continues in sociology, after postmodernism, into a new age.

REVITALIZATION: SACRED, NEW AGE SOCIOLOGY OF EDUCATION

Post-modernity, as the term implies, was a transitional time, between the modern, and the complex contemporary period that encompasses socio-cultural tendencies as dissonant as global capitalism and neo-liberalism, religious fundamentalism and new age spirituality. With post-modernity, modernity had reached its limit. From the vantage-point of Sorokin’s ( 1957) theory of socio-cultural dynamics, the sensate premise of culture was already in its tumultuous transition toward a new premise, toward a new set of social and cultural commitments. In such transitional times, when the old methods of cultural and personal adaptation fail and new modes of mastery are not fully expressed, there arise social, symbolic movements that Wallace ( 1956) called “ revitalization movements,” movements of new visions, new social routines and, ultimately, movements toward an altered social reintegration.

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Sociology of education, in our overarching, organizing model of a discourse as symbolic movement, also began a “phase” of revitalization. Disenchantment and decomposition increasingly gave way to a reexamination and rethinking of theoretical traditions, and, beyond that, recovery and rediscovery of historically even earlier traditions of meaning and interpretation. Simultaneously, the wider social and cultural context was changing, and new social movements arose, in Feminism and Environmentalism, and also in a host of disparate social movements aimed toward revitalization and coded in every hue and style of religious meaning. The broad-scale revitalization, which is also articulated in sociology of education, included a revision of the culture of modernity, a re-articulation of ancient religious traditions, and attention to the anti-institutional, but religiously-oriented movements of everyday life that were often referred to as instances and heralds of a “new age.” Part three of this book includes attempts to articulate the meaning of this revitalization within sociology of education. The revision of modernity here means a revision of the theoretical resources of sociology of education, which are importantly classical sociology. This sociology of “the founders” has been ordinarily understood and utilized as a sociology of modernity, indeed, as the explication of the rise of modernity, and as explanation for its successful entrance onto the world stage. Moreover, classical sociology is taught as advocating the epistemic culture of modernity, in its call for a science of society, value neutrality and a theory of evolutionary social progress. Durkheim is a founder of a science of social facts, in the positivist tradition of Comte, and his methodological positivism is embedded in a social theory that describes the increasing differentiation, and complexity typical of modernity, of the institutionally organized division of labor. Modernity has its price, in anomie and its social pathological manifestations, but on the whole, it is the evolutionary path toward a necessary social complexity and individualization. Weber is taught as the chief avatar of value neutrality in social science, as the analyst of the triumph of bureaucracy as the hegemonic, modern social form of organization and of rationalism as the unintended, but victorious successor to ascetic, individualist Protestantism. Marx too favored science and evolution, and Communism is a rationalist utopia, achieved in a rational movement that presses forward evolution’s progress into capitalism and beyond it. The revitalization of sociology of education includes, as one aspect of its formation in theoretical traditions, a revision and rethinking of classical sociology as the sociology of modernity. Not advocates, but critics, torn, ambivalent, nostalgic for the pre-modern, is, in my view ( see also McCarthy, 1993), a more accurate portrayal of the theoretical, cultural and personal situation of sociology’s founders. Only in the last decade has a more readable version of Durkheim’ classic, the elementary forms of religious life (1995) become widely available. Durkheim’s repeatedly asserted the importance of religion, in its irrational, frenzied, de-structured collective state. He reiterated the findings of his major work in a later paper, complaining that the point of the book had not been grasped, and in the foundational sociology journal of which he was editor, he asserted the casual priority of religion, and religious ritual and belief as determinative of almost all