Page 155 - Šolsko polje, XXXI, 2020, 5-6: Teaching Feminism, ed. Valerija Vendramin
P. 155
reviews
S. Ahmed and her discussion of the blacksmith’s arm – a story of the laws
of exercise and natural selection, of inheritance of what one is capable of
being useful to, a story of a blacksmith’s son following his father’s path
by inheriting his stronger arms (pp. 85–102) – is not only a demand to be
useful unequally distributed on the basis of race and class (some are freed
from the obligation to be useful), but also contains a particular temporali-
ty of spreading across generations. When the use is what one inherits, it is
a “prediction” and a “command” (p. 90) to be useful for something rather
than other that it is inherited. It is a partiality of an existence, a particular
forness extracted from all the possibilities of what one could be (p. 21). As
S. Ahmed discusses in the following chapters on use as a technique and on
use and the university, the education system is one of the clearest examples
of a directive mechanism, tending to put that inheritance to use.
In Chapters 3 and 4, Ahmed shows how intended functionality is
not the only principle guiding the usage either of an object or an agent.
Namely, alongside intended functionality that is evident and generally
clear, for example via explicit instructions or proclamations, there is also
an additional part of functionality, one that stays silent or hidden, but
which nonetheless results in a particular usage and the effects that stem
from it. It is, as Bourdieu (1998, p. 113) analyses in relation to the econo-
my of symbolic goods, this “double consciousness” of an institution or of
a field whose entire logic rests “on the taboo of rendering /the truth/ ex-
plicit”. By referring to the use as an inheritance and use as a technique, and
applying it to the analysis of the monitorial schools for working class chil-
dren in England in the early 19th century under the guidance of Andrew
Bell and Joseph Lancaster, S. Ahmed makes visible the gap and the ten-
sion between the “official” truth of the field of education – usefulness, and
its repressed truth, reproduction.
At the beginning, the analysis of education and use refers to the
monitorial schools, enveloped with fears of “the danger of education” – of
engendering insubordination rather than passive subordination to one’s
social destiny that is achieved by limiting agents’ aspirations – but fur-
ther chapters aim to show how education and reproduction are entan-
gled in the context of university. Despite S. Ahmed’s claim in Chapter 4:
“/a/ccounting for use and the university is thus a way of bringing the ar-
guments of each of my three preceding chapters together” (p. 144), the
leap from the monitorial schools of the 19th century to the founding of
University College London (UCL) in 1826, and to the modern university
– analysed from the perspective of diversity, of complaint and of queer use
– seems to provide us with an idea of quite a linear continuation as if the
educational field is destined solely for its reproductive role, disregarding
153
S. Ahmed and her discussion of the blacksmith’s arm – a story of the laws
of exercise and natural selection, of inheritance of what one is capable of
being useful to, a story of a blacksmith’s son following his father’s path
by inheriting his stronger arms (pp. 85–102) – is not only a demand to be
useful unequally distributed on the basis of race and class (some are freed
from the obligation to be useful), but also contains a particular temporali-
ty of spreading across generations. When the use is what one inherits, it is
a “prediction” and a “command” (p. 90) to be useful for something rather
than other that it is inherited. It is a partiality of an existence, a particular
forness extracted from all the possibilities of what one could be (p. 21). As
S. Ahmed discusses in the following chapters on use as a technique and on
use and the university, the education system is one of the clearest examples
of a directive mechanism, tending to put that inheritance to use.
In Chapters 3 and 4, Ahmed shows how intended functionality is
not the only principle guiding the usage either of an object or an agent.
Namely, alongside intended functionality that is evident and generally
clear, for example via explicit instructions or proclamations, there is also
an additional part of functionality, one that stays silent or hidden, but
which nonetheless results in a particular usage and the effects that stem
from it. It is, as Bourdieu (1998, p. 113) analyses in relation to the econo-
my of symbolic goods, this “double consciousness” of an institution or of
a field whose entire logic rests “on the taboo of rendering /the truth/ ex-
plicit”. By referring to the use as an inheritance and use as a technique, and
applying it to the analysis of the monitorial schools for working class chil-
dren in England in the early 19th century under the guidance of Andrew
Bell and Joseph Lancaster, S. Ahmed makes visible the gap and the ten-
sion between the “official” truth of the field of education – usefulness, and
its repressed truth, reproduction.
At the beginning, the analysis of education and use refers to the
monitorial schools, enveloped with fears of “the danger of education” – of
engendering insubordination rather than passive subordination to one’s
social destiny that is achieved by limiting agents’ aspirations – but fur-
ther chapters aim to show how education and reproduction are entan-
gled in the context of university. Despite S. Ahmed’s claim in Chapter 4:
“/a/ccounting for use and the university is thus a way of bringing the ar-
guments of each of my three preceding chapters together” (p. 144), the
leap from the monitorial schools of the 19th century to the founding of
University College London (UCL) in 1826, and to the modern university
– analysed from the perspective of diversity, of complaint and of queer use
– seems to provide us with an idea of quite a linear continuation as if the
educational field is destined solely for its reproductive role, disregarding
153
