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Baudrillard and the end of education

a b
Paul Moran & Alex Kendall
a
Faculty of Education and Children’s Services , University of
Chester , Chester, UK
b
School of Education Research , University of Wolverhampton ,
West Midlands, UK
Published online: 10 Nov 2009.

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 International Journal of Research & Method in Education
Vol. 32, No. 3, November 2009, 327–335

Baudrillard and the end of education

Paul Morana* and Alex Kendallb
a
Faculty of Education and Children’s Services, University of Chester, Chester, UK;
b
School of Education Research, University of Wolverhampton, West Midlands, UK
(Received January 2009; final version received August 2009)
Taylor and Francis
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10.1080/17437270903259873
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pmoran@chester.ac.uk
PaulMoran
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and Method in Education
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In this paper we examine ideas around Baudrillard’s work on reality being a

simulation, applying these ideas to educational research. We suggest that even
rigorously devised quantitative forms of research, and the empirical data that such
research produces, produce rather than simply report on reality; and that very often
such research is complicit with naive assumptions about what education is and
how education ought to be. We do not argue that such a process is intrinsically
wrong but reflect on Baudrillard’s work which indicates that this state of affairs in
inescapable.
Keywords: Baudrillard; education; simulation; reality; research

Introduction
We want to begin with a simple question, which we will not answer immediately,
because this is what the paper as a whole is largely about; instead, we will try to offer
an indication of what Baudrillard’s work promises. Here is the question: from the
perspective of educational research methodology, what does the work of Baudrillard
represent? And here is an indication of what Baudrillard offers, by way of an answer,
with parallels for education: Baudrillard wrote a book, entitled The gulf war did not
take place (Baudrillard 1995 [1991]). No war. Instead, a simulation of war that took
place on television screens and in other areas of the media; a simulation that occurred
even in the weaponry of the West and the deployment of its power. No education. A
simulation of education that takes place in the methodological presuppositions of its
researchers; a simulation that even invades the deployment of its policy and the prac-
tices of its teachers. What took place in the Gulf was not a war, but a simulation that
hid a scandal, which was a result of an imbalance of power. What takes place in
schools is also not education, and is similarly a simulation that hides a scandal, the
result of an imbalance of power. The investigation of war? No: the journalists were
looking in the wrong place for something that was not there; they simply helped to
create its illusion. An investigation of education? No: the researchers and the method-
ologies that they deploy are likewise engaged in the similar act of forgery, a similar
manufacture of presuppositions about what education is. There is no real education,
no real of education, no real about education; all that we have are a series of forgeries;
an endless number of simulations; all with no real anchor point in the real, because
there isn’t one. Could this be so? Baudrillard’s work forcefully and subtly indicates

*Corresponding author. Email: pmoran@chester.ac.uk

ISSN 1743-727X print/ISSN 1743-7288 online

© 2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/17437270903259873
http://www.informaworld.com
 328 P. Moran and A. Kendall

that this is indeed the case. And one of the implications of this exposure of the absence
of the real, the essential, the thing itself, is the end of the real, the essential, the thing
itself, and in this sense, the end of education; or at least the end of education in its
metaphysically constituted form, as being, in itself, different to its reproduction by
what we might otherwise conceive of as a range of para-educational commentators,
organizers, factors and forces.
Perspectives drawn from Baudrillard, we argue, suggest that there is a massive
series of discontinuities in education and educational research studies, but these
discontinuities are in themselves productive, not eliminable and help to contribute to
the illusion of what education is. One of the areas where this is most interesting is
that of research methodology. It may seem strange to suggest that the different
methodologies produce illusions of education, but if this is so, it is probably even
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stranger to consider that this is not because such methodologies fail to engage with
educational reality; instead, these illusions are what education is; and furthermore, if
education amounts to nothing more than a series of illusions, taken as a whole, these
illusions have the property of often being glaringly discontinuous. Moreover, it is the
nature of this discontinuity, or perhaps more accurately the circumstances that gener-
ate this field of discontinuities, that sanctions the illusion of the very possibility of an
educational ontology, upon which so many identities, so many meanings, are
composed. Let’s try to make this crystal clear: Baudrillard’s work indicates that if as
a researcher you attempt to engage with a methodology that can be rigorously
applied in order to discover something about education then you are pretty much
engaged in delusion, perhaps even professionally so; but this is not because you are
using an inappropriate research methodology; instead, you have acted upon an
illusion that education exists beyond its simulation, which is fractured, multiple and
discontinuous.
There is something else, too, that we would like to mention at this early stage:
Baudrillard’s work also represents a movement away from, or at least a reconceptual-
ization, of the territory that Marxism has traditionally inhabited. The oppositions, iden-
tities, movements towards change, liberation and revolution that have occupied
Marxists and the left become interpreted just as much as products of simulation and
as producing simulations of reality as all other aspects of post-industrial Western soci-
ety. For educational methodology, for education itself, this will come to mean that
critiques of what might be seen as current inadequate practice and policy are only, in
a sense, illusionary critiques; they are very much, from this Baudrillardian perspective,
part of the simulation of education process.

Goradian critique and Baudrillardian methodology

Before we consider the theoretical underpinnings of this application of Baudrillard to
educational methodology, it may be useful to illustrate this contention of simulation
and illusion by drawing on an example taken from Research and Method in Educa-
tion. The example we have chosen is Gorard and Cook (2007). Gorard’s work, in
particular, is a highly visible form of research that espouses objective and critical
insights about education through the deployment of a rigorous methodological
schema. For this reason Gorard in general, and Gorard and Cook (2007) specifically,
take on an appropriate and symbolically representative methodological position that
Baudrillard’s work is sceptical about. The paper (2007), a debate between Gorard and
Cook about mixed methods and experimental design studies is motivated by the
 International Journal of Research & Method in Education 329

following assumption: ‘… what we [the authors and the research community that they
represent] policy-makers and practitioners require in the form of high-quality educa-
tion research evidence’ (Gorard and Cook 2007, 307). On the face of it this is an
entirely reasonable goal. But what about this word, ‘require’? What do ‘policy-makers
and practitioners require’ this evidence for? Is this a ridiculous question? Surely, the
answer is something along the lines that we need good evidence in forming educa-
tional policy and practice because we need to know: ‘…“who gets what?”; “what does
a given educational service cost?”; “what is classroom life like?”; and “what works to
improve student performance?”’ (Gorard and Cook 2007, 308). The last of these
questions is of particular concern to the authors:

The majority of these questions are descriptive; only the last is explicitly causal …
Arguing for mixed-methods research is anodyne, given the heterogeneity of knowledge
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needs in education … The debate needs to be framed differently … only when causal
questions are central – and only then – [the debate should be about] the priority that
should be given to randomised control experiments versus other causal methods. (Gorard
and Cook 2007, 308)

This appears to be such a reasonable position that to contest it in any form would be
simply an act of perversity. On this basis, education is about resources and methods
of delivery, which are largely descriptive issues that require qualitative methodologi-
cal tools, and the effectiveness of delivery models, which is largely a causal issue, and
requires quantitative tools and a debate about whether ‘randomised control experi-
ments versus other causal methods’ yield the most pertinent data and data analysis for
such questions. The authors also acknowledge that originally descriptive questions
may require later causal investigation; but on the whole their delineation of types of
research methodology to investigate types of problems appears to stand. But is this
what education is? Well, certainly, it is a part of education. We want to briefly
describe this part, below.
The assumptions which the Gorard and Cook (2007) model of education investi-
gates includes education being about an improvement agenda; improvement in lots of
senses. They discuss the improvement of the distribution and targeting of resources,
training of teachers and performance of pupils. Gorard and Smith (2007) extend this
model of educational investigation to participation in post-compulsory education; but
after an extensive review of data conclude that ‘… inequalities in initial education
could be viewed as simply a manifestation of profound multiple social disadvantage’
(Gorard and Smith 2007, 154). From the perspective of much of Baudrillard’s work,
this is an interesting finding. It is not interesting because it indicates the failure of
government in the United Kingdom to successfully implement innovations, such as
Academies (Gorard 2005) or Action Zones (Power, Rees, and Taylor 2005), in order
to foster improvement: it is interesting instead in that such ventures are pursued as if
they were possible, in as much as they might produce improvement, such as the rais-
ing of educational attainment according to government measures and increasing
participation in post-compulsory education for the members of those communities;
and also that this aspect of improvement is their primary function. As Gorard and
others point out, the socio-economic and home-background determinants of educa-
tional outcomes have been known for a considerable time, as have the failures of
government initiatives to alter this pattern. Isn’t it perhaps time to consider that such
initiatives and the improvement agenda that they support are complicit with a different
function?
 330 P. Moran and A. Kendall

But what function might this be, other than a very powerful one, since it appears
to be reproduced, over and over again, and even forms the basis of its own critique, in
the exceptional work of Gorard and others? From a Baudrillardian perspective, this is
a very useful place, certainly methodologically, to begin. Much of Baudrillard’s work,
as we have already mentioned, is based around the idea of simulation. In terms of the
example that we have given, stemming from Gorard and Cook (2007), what is being
researched is the simulation of an educational reality, as if the simulation had any
pertinence outside itself. Because, as Baudrillard attempts to make clear, there is, in
fact, no such thing as a reality beyond this simulated domain:

This is the story of a crime – of the murder of reality. And the extermination of an illusion
– the vital illusion, the radical illusion of the world. The real does not disappear into illusion;
it is illusion that disappears into integral reality … Though the crime is never perfect,
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perfection, true to its name, is always criminal … But perfection is always punished: the
punishment for perfection is reproduction. (Baudrillard 1996 [1995]: Preface)

In more concrete terms, methodologically, what does this mean? The simulation of
education, the illusion of the world is composed, partly at least, by the interventions
that Gorard and others investigate, and by the proposition that they will, in fact, work;
or at the very least, that the rational for these interventions, and the policy of improve-
ment, is in fact, outside this simulation, a possibility. But of course, this is not the case,
as the work of Gorard and his colleagues makes clear, over and over again, as a form
of critique, a rational critique, a Goradian critique. And over and over again, more
interventions are produced, in support of the same policy of improvement. The repe-
titions, even the repetitions of critique are part of the same process; they are classically
dialectical in the way that they operate, the complicity, with each other, as Baudrillard
describes in relation to Marx and political economy. The perfection that Baudrillard
discusses, the inevitable falling short of perfection, and the repetition to cover over,
make good and close this shortfall are all inscribed in movement, Goradian critique
and improvement agenda. And inevitably what emerges from this simulation is
reproduction on another level: socio-economic-educational reproduction, rather than
transformation, and the repetition of professional positions that interrogate and insure
its continuation.
What, then, should we look for in a methodology derived from Baudrillard?
Certain characteristics: repetition, simulation, the continuity of positions despite calls
for transformation, apparently dialectical processes and a particular kind of haunting
vacuity which presages the continuity of the same; but more: any methodology
derived from Baudrillard would be one that did not offer advancement along the lines
of critique, in the positivist, rationalist way inherent in a Goradian methodology. In
order to understand why, it is necessary to understand a little more about the
philosophical underpinnings of Baudrillard. We have chosen to examine some of
Baudrillard’s early work, which emerged from the dissatisfaction with, or the percep-
tion of an end of Marx’s critique of political economy: we have chosen this because
there are striking parallels between Marx’s critique and Goradian critique, at least
from a Baudrillardian perspective.

Baudrillard, Marx and the end of use value and exchange value
Much of Baudrillard’s work is haunted by Marx. Some of this haunting is manifested
by an attempt to rearticulate Marx’s organization of the use value and exchange value
 International Journal of Research & Method in Education 331

of labour as a critique of the culture of modern capitalist society (1981 [1973]). Other
work is haunted by an attempt to move away from Marx’s organization of these values
(1975 [1973]). And later work (1993a [1976]) expresses identities and meanings in
ways that signal, amongst other things, the distance Baudrillard has managed to travel
away from the landscape of political economy that Marx ordinarily inhabits. This last
point is interesting on two counts, which we are going to pose as questions: to under-
stand why this last point is interesting, we briefly need to run through one of the
central arguments that Baudrillard makes about Marx’s critique of political economy
in 1975 [1973].
In a sense, the argument that Baudrillard makes is no more complicated than this:

Marx made a radical critique of political economy, but still in the form of political econ-
omy. These are the ruses of the dialectic, undoubtedly the limit of all ‘critique.’ The
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concept of critique emerged in the West at the same time as political economy and, as
the quintessence of Enlightenment rationality, is perhaps only the subtle, long-term
expression of the system’s expanded reproduction. (Baudrillard 1975 [1973], 128).

So what do we have here (because, we think, these points are going to be central to
our understanding of a Baudrillard methodology; or rather, what Baudrillard tells us,
sometimes indirectly, about the limits of methodology generally)? We think we have
two questions. The first question is: could Marx have escaped the dialectic, could he
have produced a critique of political economy that did not conform to political econ-
omy, which stepped outside the quintessence of Enlightenment rationality, which was
not part of the system’s expanded reproduction? And our second question: has
Baudrillard managed this trick? We are, however, going to leave these two questions
hanging for a little while, as we turn to a discussion of use value and exchange value
in the French philosopher’s early work.
Over and over and again, Baudrillard comes back to use value and exchange value:
‘… use value is not implicated in the logic peculiar to exchange value, which is the
logic of equivalence … there can be use value without exchange value …’ (Baudrillard
1981 [1973], 137). Use value, here, resides in the classically Marxist determination of
the utility of a commodity, its function, and in these terms is intimately bound with
the role it serves in maintaining lived experience. Exchange value, by contrast also
according to this same classically Marxist determination, is the abstract property of a
commodity that is derived from the labour through which it is produced; and by means
of this abstraction it is possible to compare one quantity with another and exchange
them with their equivalence or sets of equivalence, in what becomes the arena of a
market. What Baudrillard describes in following this organization of the world is a
metaphysics, an ontology, based around a certain conception of function, production
and exchange. He chides Kristeva for imagining something other than this highly
utilitarian and directly representational condition of being:

Is there a definition of labor in Marx different from that of the production of useful ends
…? Kristeva attributes to Marx a radically different vision centered on the body,
discharge, play, anti-value, nonutility, nonfinality … If there was one thing Marx did not
think about, it was discharge, waste, sacrifice, prodigality, play, and symbolism. Marx
thought about production (not a bad thing), and he thought about it in terms of value.
(Baudrillard 1975 [1973], 36)

Is there a contradiction in the position that Baudrillard takes up here, for Marx, against
Kristeva? Isn’t it somewhat out of step with Baudrillard’s championing of semiotics,
 332 P. Moran and A. Kendall

play, indeterminacy of meaning, that he turns to Kristeva and says, essentially: you
have Marx wrong, and by implication, the world wrong too; isn’t it at least odd that
he claims Marxism is about a determinacy? And what kind of determinacy might that
be? Well, clearly, a Marxist one. What Marx offers, according to this Marxist reading,
in writers as diverse as Althusser, Adorno, Jameson and others, in the work of trade
unions, in the representational force of certain political parties, is the production of a
signifier or set of signifiers that promise a signified, a Marxian signified; where the
interpretation of history is a movement towards realization, the meaning of being is
organized around the metaphysics of use value and exchange value, and activity within
this universalized space is motivated by the finitude of this vision. But this is at the
level of a signified, a potentiality. Two levels, then, now. Perhaps, even, three. And
the question that is attached to even the act of considering these levels is: was Kristeva
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right? That’s right, what we are suggesting is that in order to even think about the possi-
bility of these levels, which follow from understanding Althusser, Adorno, Jameson,
trade unions, certain political parties as signifiers pointing towards a Marxian signified,
is the question: Was Kristeva right? Here are the levels: the first level is characterized
by the discontinuity between the signifier and the signified, it is the level at which all
ontology is possible, through which identity in general can emerge, be annulled,
change, be represented, fuse with other identities and be dispersed. The second level
is characterized by particularity, by designation of identities, by a finite understanding,
by a metaphysics that must locate itself is being a priori at this second level as if it
were foundational, as if this were reality itself. And the possible third level: it is simply
understanding and referring to or using the second level as a tactic, as a pragmatic and
positional tool in an attempt to achieve certain outcomes.
Well then, was Kristeva right? We have to remember that Baudrillard says,
emphatically, that she was not. But how can he do this? Kristeva, according to
Baudrillard, understands Marx in relation to the body; in relation to the ascription of
drives, motivations and imaginary dimensions that situate the subject, and the reified
body, within a symbolic environment. Isn’t this much the same as Baudrillard’s claim
that the limitations of Marx’s critique reside in the critique being produced by the
dialectic? Isn’t Kristeva’s point of understanding simply earlier, prior to the point at
which the body is identified, reified and put to work in producing the definitions of
use value and exchange value? It is not a very difficult matter to show that the distinc-
tion separating use value and exchange value is manufactured by the symbolic order
that upholds their metaphysical justification. How can we know what the use value of
any commodity might be, other than by comparing it to other commodities, and finally
to the commodity of situated life, to the commodity of lived experience, of which no
such singular thing exists (since the lived experience of this moment is different to that
moment, and different again from individual to individual)? This is nothing more than
use value as exchange value, and vice versa; their designation as one or the other being
arbitrary, the decision to accord equivalent values between such arbitrarily determined
commodities a matter of the pragmatics that operate within a system at any given
politically propitious time. Surely, then Kristeva is right: how can Baudrillard claim
otherwise? Only, we think, from the position of the third level that we have described;
it is only by adopting the position that Marx’s critique of political economy is strate-
gic, and formulates the understanding and identities of use value and exchange value,
as conditions analogous to a Lacanian and economic symbolic order, that
Baudrillard’s judgement against Kristeva can be logically upheld. Recognition of this
third level is marked by Baudrillard as being the moment when the contradictions that
 International Journal of Research & Method in Education 333

are inherent in this enterprise of critique bring critique to an end; this end moment is
the moment when the metaphysical underpinnings of the critique of political economy
are revealed as the economic machinery that is necessary for a certain political posi-
tion to be maintained. The more interesting implication is that this is also the moment
when politics in general is also brought to an end:

… Marx said that after Feuerbach the critique of religion was basically completed… it
is necessary to move resolutely to a different level… Today we are at the same point with
respect to Marx. For us, the critique of political economy is basically completed … At
this level, the situation is no longer that of a critique: it is inextricable. (1975 [1973], 129)

The contention that we want to consider is: just as Baudrillard has claimed that we are
at the end of critique when we have reached the moment where the conditions that
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formulate critique bend back and feed into themselves, revealing the metaphysical
underpinnings of positions and identities with respect to critique as the economic
machinery necessary for certain political positions to be maintained; so now is educa-
tion. More specifically, we want to explore the argument that a methodology aligned
to Baudrillard would follow this line of argument: education was justified as a kind of
political economy, in which its commodities could be gauged via analogies made to
use value and exchange value; but those days are over, education is at an end with the
realization that the positions that it helps to sustain are pragmatically expedient, and
are therefore inconsistent and subject to change; they are founded on nothing more
substantial than a pragmatic impulse to forge identities within a symbolic system of
exchange.

Education, use value and exchange value

What, we might ask, is the signified that education points towards, and how would our
Baudrillardian methodology propose that we investigate it? We will limit ourselves to
an example within the United Kingdom, namely considerations of Rose (2008) drawn
from the Times Educational Supplement, specifically the issue dating from 12 December
(Ward 2008). The reason why we have chosen to discuss a Baudrillardian methodology
in this way is because it allows us to look at a current policy development across a
variety of levels.
Rose (2008) describes proposed changes to the National Curriculum for children
in state education from the point of school entry to around 11 years of age. The changes
described in Rose’s report, The independent review of the primary curriculum: Interim
report, figure as a major event within compulsory school education; and one of the
significant ways that this event is interpreted is as a return to the already there, to an
essence, an underlying rightness or truth about primary schooling. It is from this
perspective that Ward is able to make the following, opening comment: ‘The primary
curriculum is a major step closer to getting the radical overhaul it requires – but it is
not yet certain it will go far enough’ (Ward 2008). Whilst we would not claim that Ward
and Gorard are the same, it is interesting to observe that they are both oriented by the
assumption that there is a something called education that exists independently of the
methodologies, comments, curricula designs, testing regimes, forms of discrimination
and eventual economic differentiation that education supports and so on; and also that
it can be known, traduced, buried and found beneath mounds of poorly designed and
obfuscatory policies and practices. It is the possibility that education is this something,
 334 P. Moran and A. Kendall

this signified, that allows proposals ‘… to slim the curriculum and improve transition
in and out of primary education’ (Ward 2008) to be made and acted upon, to approach
the essence of what education is, and to create structures for children to move through
it efficiently and smoothly. We have to remember that this is not simply a form of
rhetoric; what is being described creates and lends meaning to identities. This is remark-
able, given that meanings and identities are based on a simulation. Indeed, since Rose
(2008) is only an interim report, trials will be undertaken and data will be produced,
gathered, organized, sifted through and analysed by researchers, policy-makers and
administrators, all of which are activities that confirm professional positions and stim-
ulate the economy of symbolic exchange. We think of this, now, as symbolic exchange
rather than use value or exchange value because the something, the signified, in
Baudrillardian terms cannot be reduced to the level of a commodity that has any identity
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or worth outside this system. There is nothing in itself about education; there is no
datum that can be assessed outside the metaphysical assumptions of what education
is. We can see this in the self-referentiality of the Rose curriculum’s verification, which
reportedly makes it ‘… easier to teach cross-curricular lessons and provide a smoother
transition …’ (Ward 2008) between the curricula for younger and older children: in
this way teachers inhabit and re-tell the simulation ‘in its own words’, so constructing
teacher and subject identities. To talk of use value and exchange value in this context
would be to grant the objects that these values refer to abstract properties, as if their
existence could somehow occur objectively, outside the simulation of their life and
circulation. Indeed, the compulsion to animate and be animated by this relatively
closed, perhaps even solipsistic economy is very strong: ‘The six areas are perfect. They
are how primary education works. They ring true’ (Ward 2008). By being within the
circuit of this symbolic exchange, it is possible, probably even essential to know that
the system does indeed ‘ring true’, is crystal clear, honest – if all the ‘surplus’ can be
done away with, the curriculum stripped back or ‘slimmed down’ as per above (perhaps
through randomized controlled testing and trialling) then what’s left is the bare bones,
the ‘truth’ of the educative process. It’s a sophisticated truth game, but one that cannot
be known as such from within the simulated education world. Indeed, quoting David
Lambert, chief executive of the Geographical Association about the Rose curriculum,
Ward reports: ‘I see this as an opportunity to rescue it [the subject of geography within
primary schooling]’ this ontological fetishism, a belief in the reality behind the sign,
is absolutely necessary for the simulation to be maintained, for the signified to remain
in place. Otherwise, well, the otherwise is the end of the simulation as other than itself,
in short: the end of education. This is what a Baudrillardian methodology promises.
Towards a conclusion we have argued that the work of education is the simulation
of education. A methodology informed by Baudrillard enables the researcher to step
away from the omnipresence of what can only be desired but must be spoken of as
‘there’ – an origin, a ‘real’ referent for the idea of knowledge as property, to be ‘held’
and measured – for long enough to acquire a critical displacement, sufficient to take
stock of the myth of education, fragmented and elusive in its very will to be ‘there’.

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