Relational Ontologies and the Struggle for the "Soul": Thinking Past Egologies

• In Event: New Events and Their Implications for Analyzing Social Contexts of Education: Facing Crises, Technology, and Difference

Abstract

Since the 1970s, educational theory has drawn attention to the politics of knowledge, power relations, the differential shaping of selves, and to strategies of truth-production as non-neutral. Our current times are characterized by a confluence that requires this continued critical vigilance: a time of rising economic inequality, an ecological crisis, an intensifying of cultural diversity, and a degraded public sphere now defined by ‘post-truth’. Schooling policy has been captured by neoliberalising logics that mean ‘new structures and new technologies of control’ as well as ‘the transformation of the values and cultures’ of our institutions, but most importantly, the ‘concomitant formation of new subjectivities’ (Ball, 1997, p. 259). And we are now all involved in a struggle over the ‘soul,’ rendered as homo-economicus (Foucault, 2008).
The idea of the soul in this case is not the religious one, but the soul invoked by Foucault (1977) to name that aspect of self, or subjectivity, that ‘exists, or is produced … within the body … or born … out of methods of punishment, supervision and constraint’ (p. 29).

At stake is the social cohesion that enables us all to live together across the myriad of differences. Meantime, schooling policy foregrounds: vocational purposes, high stakes testing that narrows what counts as learning, and pushes teachers towards adopting highly scripted pedagogies. Against this dissonance, this paper foregrounds attempts to experiment in ‘other socialities’ (Venn, 2009, p. 226) that draw on relational ontologies, and especially to be thinking past old versions of selfhood or ‘egologies’ (Critchley; 1996: 16) or ‘new grounds for non-individualist, non-ego-centric …forms of being’ (Venn, 2009, 225).

The paper takes up as its key research questions: how do we learn to live in culturally diverse societies? How can education contribute to the demands of translation across cultural difference? The paper is informed by more than a decade of educational ethnography and action research conducted in Australian disadvantaged schools, and cultural studies of colonization (Hattam et al 2009; Hayes et al 2017; Alhuwalia at al 2012).

The paper also draws on philosophical investigations into relational ontologies including from various poststructuralisms (Hattam & Baker 2015), from Indigenous understandings of relational reciprocity (Baak, 2016), and from Buddhist ontology, drawing on the Indian deconstructionist, Nāgārjuna (Siderits & Katsura, 2013). His middle way philosophy provides a framework for rethinking the ‘self’ as a basis for ethical self-transformation and for imagining and realising being-in-relation. Put simply, middle way philosophy asserts that our sense of self, the ego, is by its nature, a reification or imputation that we label onto that set of processes that is our mind/body complex. Quite literally we nominalise what is only process and by so doing, set up our own separation. Instead of being-in-relation we experience alienation. The paper concludes with some brief reflections on the pedagogical implications of thinking past egologies, including concrete possibilities for socially-engaged Buddhist pedagogies (Hattam, 2008).

Author

• Robert James Hattam, University of South Australia