warmed-over soapboxesclever would be nice

Pretentious academic bullshit

§ February 12th, 2009 § Filed under edutainment, procrastiblog § 2 Comments

see also No. twenty-five on my facebook list

First, government must fail because it works through a continuous problematisation of the domains in which it operates. It engages with social reality by representing it with intellectual instruments that show this reality only in the light of what it could be, under an optimal administration of its natural and human resources. Government thereby programs its own failure and it does so as a condition of its ongoing and truly remarkable inventiveness. …State schooling is not an instrument of a universal self-realising moral personality. It is an apparatus of social training that happens to have deployed the pastoral techniques of moral self-regulation as instruments of social discipline.

You asshole.

Edit: Wait, I have more!

Second, we have argued that the capacities of the self-reflective person are not themselves grounded in the principle of self-reflective personhood. These capacities we have traced to specific ethical disciplines and relationships whose ultimate provenance is the ’shepherd–flock game’ of Christian pastoral guidance. It is only inside the specially instituted relations of moral problematisation and self-concern—of pastoral surveillance and self-examination—that individuals acquire the interest and moral ability to concern themselves with themselves and to carry out that ‘work of the self on the self’ that we know as the self-reflective person. As the improved adaptation of this pastoral pedagogy to the exigencies of government, the modern school system was not therefore taking over the principle of self-realisation as ‘prescribed by the eternal and immutable dictates of reason’. Instead, it was borrowing and adapting a definite and limited set of ethical disciplines and relationships, inside which the capacity for self-reflection was formed as a moral deportment.

Arse.