subject as subject and object – Foucault

The trouble is, how does this ideology continually interpellate individuals as subjects?  Don’t they have a say in this interpellation process? Can all individuals be brought under the sway of ideology? And doesn’t the Althussarian conception of the subject have the whiff of absolutism about it? Althusser is unclear on these points. Foucault, however, picks up on some of these points in his writings that are concerned with the relations and forces which constitute the subject, distinct from a conception of an autonomous subject whose reason and agency constitutes knowledge (and learning) and endows the world with meaning. We, as subjects, have to search the realm of knowledge looking for meaning and self-understanding: and I don’t think Foucault is meaning to be existential here. We are both the subject and object of knowledge and this seems especially true of this thing called executive education – the educational philosophy of which is the theme of this blog. Leadership, management, executive education; the development and accrual of human capital; the investment in this particular and peculiar managerial asset class; all of these placeholders for what it is that goes on in business schools (one site among many) seem to regard the subject (the manager, leader, executive, etc.) of these endeavors as the object of its study, whilst at the same time this object is being worked through and produced.

the subjection of the subject – Althusser

Blimey! -what’s this? Executivezen’s off again, on her wild goose chase to find the agency of  education, the who, the subject with which we (executive education educators) have a relationship. What’s brought this one on is a stint of reading Althusser. I’ve just been reading Reading Capital where Althusser looks through idealist and essentialist readings of the singular subject towards the ideology that creates that subject. The ideological state apparatuses and repressive state apparatuses. Althusser is not concerned with investigating what particular subjects may think – i.e. what executives, managers or leaders learn from our dealings with them in educational institutions – but rather he is concerned with the ideological mechanism overlayed (I was being polite there, but I mean that we overlay) onto our educational/developmental/learning subjects. The educational, etc., ideologies through which perception, learning, subjectivity are produced. My interest is in foregrounding the ideologies we (unconsciously) use. For instance, consider our modalities of chinos, of casual dress, of splitting into syndicate groups, the plenary discussion, the classroom games and overt political shenanigans of getting onto the educational programme in the first place. And by our here I mean both the institution of b-schools and its customers (see previous post). All of these modalities insert the subject into the materiality of educational (managerial, corporatist) ideology. These ideological practices, on our part, work not only to tame and discipline consciousness but also to normalize and subjugate the body according to certain – educational, developmental, learning – models of behaviour. We create our subjects: they don’t preexist outside of our ideological practices and texts. As Althusser states, the ’subject’ is both a noun and a verb, ‘to subject’.

Now, if you can change this ideological indoctrination, you can change the behaviour of these subjects without even a peep from the ‘what’ of what it is they’re learning. If we relinquish notions of the essentiality of the subject, we can relinquish the subject’s sovereign status as… and there’s a whole long list here, such as ‘learner’, ‘change agent’, ‘executive’, ‘manager’, ‘leader’ – in fact, we could create some more epithets since it’s us that create the subjects that we deal with. Spooky!

who/what does education have a relationship with? – member

Picking up on Roger’s point in the comments to the last post:

…But if the experience is so unique, can even one other person [the coach] help the putative leader find his or her own way? Is trial and error not the only viable path to leadership, and to hell with the collateral damage? Well, the obverse of that coin may be better that we all share some simple sense-making tools than that we all lay waste to those around us as we learn hopw to lead them…which would be a bit like wanting to be a proficient torturer and expecting your friends to allow you to practice your techniques on them…

 For executivezen, Roger’s point just strengthens the view of executive education as a wholly artificial construct. I agree with him that is it unrealistic expectation that an exec.ed. intervention designed and “sieved through the preconceptions, ambitions, hopes and fears of the customer” could ever be sufficient for any one individual, depending on what constitutes sufficiency in this case. I’d like to draw educationalists attention to the tendency of educational decisions to attempt to erase their traces of power, force, will and contingency by naturalizing or essentializing their contents: a tendency that attempts to make invisible the choice of an ‘educational’ intervention by reference to natural and beneficial qualities invested into education, and to hide the political forces marshaled by the customer and educational supplier.

One possible way acknowledging the political contingencies of exec.ed. is to consider the consuming agency as a member of the educational process. Membership connotes both a peripheral relationship with the membership-granting body – in this case the educational institution or process – as well as an enfolding and entitling relationship that distinguishes members from non-members. Non-members are the condition of possibility of membership and establish a difference that is instantiated by particular entitlements and privileged status. It would seem possible that a customer of exec.ed. could qualify for membership status to the educational club, just as much as a consumer can enjoy similar privilege. The only difference is the type of entitlement to which these two sub-categories of member qualify. There is no doubt that consumers and customers of exec.ed. are part of an elite membership, by virtue of the investments they are able to make towards that membership.

who/what does education have a relationship with? – customer

So, continuing from the previous post, what does the signifier ‘customer’ bring to the unpacking of the consuming agency of leadership education? In what way is an actant in the drama of leadership education a customer? Consumer and customer are largely synonymous, with the addition of the latter designating the trappings of a formal transaction in the process of consumption of the goods and services that they consume: the former merely implies such a formal transaction may, or may not, take place. The goods and services that form the basis of both the process of consuming and the transacting to consume are, executivezen would say, the resources of the formal programme of leadership education. These goods and services are, variously, access to the lecturers involved in delivering the programme of education; access to the materials and resources used by the lecturer; and access to supporting agencies – personal coaches, psychometric instruments, peers within the intervention, staff tasked with managing the intervention – of that programme of education. This list goes on, but notice it does not contain the goods of learning about leadership since such a consumable is not a necessary and sufficient condition of the transactive act.

But, as troubled in prevous posts of this blog (Oct 5, 06: Sept 30, 06), what are the boundaries of a programme of education and at what point can one claim that a particular resource (as above) falls within a nominated resource library of such a programme? Using the specific goods and services of the formal transaction that are warranted via the customer relationship as defining the relationship between educational ’supplier’ and consuming agency is misleading; such a focus serves only to highlight the spectral (to use the language of Derrida) or the un-real quality of education. In that sense then, the tag of ‘customer’ as the type of agency with whom suppliers of formal leadership education have a relationship, seems less useful. To what is the consuming agent of leadership education, once she has entered into a transactive relationship (i.e. the consuming agency as customer) with the supplier of leadership education, entitled to precisely? What has her purchasing (direct or indirect) power bought her that she doesn’t already have? Answering this with ’simply access to the goods and services of a programme of leadership education’ isn’t quite fair since this aludes to the customer as inexpert and passive; neither does it acknowledge the genuine learning outcomes that may emerge as a result of this purchase. But it does highlight the relative arbitrariness of the relationship between the notion of customer and consumption, a breakage that is a consequence of a poststructural view of education.