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!