Notes on the Intersection of History and Critical Theory

The importance of history in framing the cultural arbitrary and providing a basis for reproduction cannot be understated. Just as historical understanding helps to inform decisions made in the present, institutions carry the burdens of their respective wellsprings. A critical approach to education and the problems it faces in relation to new social dynamics must begin with a critical interrogation of the ideas underlying approaches to education. For education to allow people to lead a good life according to their own definition, it must be decoupled from its historical raison d’être and disconnected from the functionalist provision of cultural capital as connected to hegemony. Symbolic violence is perhaps unavoidable, because differences between individuals will hopefully always obtain. The idea here is not to problematize power in general but rather to look at the connection between power and history to identify the ways in which violent power is exercised. That being said, symbolic violence as a means for enforcing an oppressive system can be creatively circumvented.

An important first step in approaching the history of education systems is realizing that history is not something that can simply be wished away. Walter Benjamin (1968) perhaps best explains the burden of history and “progress” with this description of a painting by Paul Klee:

107

A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are starting, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. The storm is what we call progress (257-258).

While Benjamin’s creative and critical explanation of history is appealing, it must be explained in its relation to society. The idea that history – particularly 20^th Century European-driven history – is an enormous cognitive burden carries a great deal of currency. Horkheimer and Adorno (1997), for example, would have likely been on board with this understanding of history. Following Benjamin’s ideas, one ought to search for the roots of catastrophe and attempt to come to terms with how the catastrophe has been kept alive going into the future.

This is where examining critical junctures and their impacts on the formation of cultural arbitraries becomes important. History affects institutions. The effect of history on education and social structure, however, is much more ambiguous.

History can provide the conceptual link between social structure and institutions.

There are diverse concepts providing this link, but the most readily comprehendible is Wallerstein’s (2004) depiction of what he refers to as an historical (social) system, namely that: “all social systems are simultaneously systemic (they have continuing characteristics that can be described) and historical (they have a continuing evolving life and are never the same from one moment to the next)” (94). This definition, though, leaves much to be desired.

That an historical (social) system exerts a discursive power on the actual social system is implied, but the way in which this process works is thoroughly unclear. One can speak of institutions, for example, and discuss the ways in which they have evolved over time, but the starting point of the evolution – which is where the importance of history comes into play – is important insofar as its frames the contours of the “continuing evolving life”. Just looking at institutions and supposing that they shape human life – instead of the other way around, that

108

human life shapes institutions – imbues the institutions, in turn, with too much explanatory power.

While both Wallerstein’s definition and his world-systems theory are certainly plausible, they have certain blind spots, as well, a common shortcoming amongst system theorists. For example, Wallerstein argues that the present world-system has existed since the 16^th Century and has since constantly expanded and now encompasses nearly the entire world. Part and parcel of this system is a generalized division of labor, one which started in Northwest Europe and eventually came to encapsulate and define the entire geographic world (again, with exceptions), dividing the states of the world into periphery and core, all parts of the same logic of production and accumulation (Wallerstein 2004: 22-24), which should be enough to lead the reader to conclude that the approach is an extension of the Marxian conception of the logic behind the relation between labor and capital. The totality of the logic behind world-systems theory and its historical extension is such that any possible empirical example of how this is not the case is dismissed with a kind of clever sleight of hand. South-South trade, for example, would either be depicted as entirely ineffectual or as a development of a nascent world system in and of itself.³⁶

In conceptualizing one part of the relationship between society and history, it becomes apparent that Benjamin’s approach is perhaps too cynical (for lack of a better adjective) and Wallerstein’s is focused too much on the historical, materialist logic of the system in its totality. Locating a middle ground between these conceptions of history is necessary before

36 That being said, world-systems theory does offer a great deal of insight into how social problems are manifest and, at least to a small extent, how they can be overcome. Korzeniewicz and Moran (2009), for example, employ world-systems analysis in order to understand how social inequality is and has been reproduced across the world-system. In so doing, they come to some fairly milquetoast conclusions about how inequality functions. At the global level: “The use of ascriptive criteria to sort populations and thereby construct what is skilled or unskilled has been constitutive of the very creation and reproduction of inequality” (103). That is, of course, both true and unsurprising. Ascriptive criteria lead to the reproduction of social inequalities, because these criteria are simply transmitted from one generation to the next (i.e. historically), namely through the transference of cultural capital (and often symbolic capital) via education. While the authors are most interested in between-country inequality and how it, by way of relative national economic growth, can be overcome (106), they offer this suggestion as a panacea of sorts for overcoming within-country inequality: “the gradual displacement of ascription by achievement” (101). How can this take place if the historical logic underlying an institution responsible for this displacement is premised on ascription and not achievement?

109

the actual analysis can be performed. In the next subsection, an appropriate conception of history will be arrived at by examining the relations between theory, history, social structure, education and reproduction. These relations will tie together the ideas explored above to the comparison to follow. The reasons behind the “symptomatic reading” of the thinkers above will hopefully become comprehensible to the reader. One can, after all, admire part of a school of thought while remaining critical of what it means to be a “member” of a school of thought and of the notions underlying it. For example, one can admire John Dewey’s ideas about education without having to believe that pragmatism as a philosophy offers much in the way of understanding people and the world. Such is the benefit of being an outsider on the inside of academia.³⁷