Must we construct? (With walk-ons for MDMD and Robert De Niro)

[Paul Nightingale]

"Are there any knowledges that a person must construct in order to resist
the cultural dominance of hegemonic discourses?"

Knowledges in the plural. Do they complement each other? Who gets to write
the game-plan?

Must construct: compulsion.

In order to resist: to what end?

Michel Foucault (1982) "Afterword: The Subject and Power" in H Dreyfus & P
Rabinow (eds) Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics,
Brighton: Harvester.

"When one defines the exercise of power as a mode of action upon the actions
of others, when one characterises these actions by the government of men by
other men - in the broadest sense of the term - one includes an important
element: freedom. Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only
insofar as they are free ... [S]lavery is not a power relationship when man
is in chains" (p221). Austra is a free subject.

So resistance is always an option; one is never deprived of one's capacity
to resist. Does this mean one's relationship to hegemonic discourses
necessarily includes the capacity to resist (ie such a relationship isn't
possible without)? If the question you ask is concerned with empowering
students, then the answer, according to Foucault, is that they already are
empowered. The question might then become: what are they empowered to do? If
they are empowered to resist, then the form of resistance will depend on (I
haven't written 'determined by') that which they resist.

Hegemonic discourses: again, the plural.

Martin Bloomer (1997) Curriculum-Planning in Post-16 Education: The Social
Conditions of Studentship, London: Routledge.

Students say they prefer interactive to receptive learning (ie they wish to
be actively engaged in their own learning, rather than accepting passively
what the teacher tells them). In practice, however, the opposite is the
case. Consequently, history students "stressed knowledge as information with
little apparent awareness of, or enthusiasm for, contested knowledge. Only a
minority ... were to any extent moved to engage with multiple perspectives
or argument" (p119).

However, they have engaged with discourses of learning in order to
manipulate the interview situation, in the process reinventing themselves. I
suppose, to be provocative, I would have to question the question insofar as
it refers to education as a system and, therefore, one of Foucault's
truth-games. Unavoidably, that system is designed to legitimise class
relations, and schooling (as opposed to 'education') must always construct
success and failure: so does it really matter what students, as individuals,
know and don't know?

Is that (should it be regarded as) a (rather more pedestrian) re-formulation
of the question?

Of course, the simple answer to the question is provided by De Niro in
Ronin: "Lady, I never walk into a place I don't know how to walk out of."