Mediating the discourses of marketization and Bildung with Slavoj Zizek's dialectics

Abstract

A number of different discourses are evident in contemporary Irish educational policy, debate and theory: the grammar of marketisation, the poetry of Bildung and culture, the prose of Christian formation together with the ubiquitous rhetoric of personal developmental psychology. These are among the languages vying for descriptive, and more significantly, normative dominance. All claim both to describe and legitimise the reality of education and tensions and antagonism between these understandings divides the educational community, politicians and social commentators. They also function as ?formative discourses? shaping the way in which we view and imagine the subjectivity of learners. Reading these languages as examples of dialectical ideology types as proposed by Slavoj Zizek and applying his critique of ideology suggest a new way of illuminating these languages of education. The critique also proposes a novel notion of the subjectivity of the learner that eludes dominance by language and the symbolic order.