Re-configuring and deterritorializing subject↔object relations in education

Abstract

For many years in the 20th Century, Western thinking in education has been defined against the background of Cartesian dualisms, both with respect to philosophy and methodology. And it was this Cartesian thinking, the separation of the discursive and material, and the elevation of the philosophy of the subject, the human I, that gave birth to the postmodern era, and in recent years, to the notions that we tend to call new materialisms and post-humanisms. And it was modernity and its ruins, that gave birth to the re-writing of the human self, and of subject↔object relations. As cultural critic Greenberg (1973) argues: “the essence of Modernism lies in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence. Immanuel Kant used logic to establish the limits of logic, and while he withdrew much from its old jurisdiction, logic was left all the more secure in what there remained to it” (p. 66).