Power and Education

Volume 2 Number 2 2010

www.wwwords.co.uk/POWER

Book Reviews
Habermas, Honneth and Education:
the significance of Jürgen Habermas’s and
Axel Honneth’s critical theories to education
RAUNO HUTTUNEN, 2009
Cologne: Lambert Academic Publishing
148 pages, ISBN 978-3838305882, paperback, £50.00

Through publications such as The Struggle for Recognition: the moral grammar of social conflicts (1995)
and Disrespect: the normative foundations of critical theory (2007), the work of Axel Honneth, Director
of the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt (site of the famous Frankfurt School), is starting to
gain prominence in sociology, political science and philosophy. At one stage a student of Jürgen
Habermas, he shares with his former teacher a commitment to continuing and updating the core
activity of critical theory – namely to develop coherent theoretical analyses of modern sources of
conflict that can be appropriated by those engaged in social change.
The current interest in Honneth’s work revolves primarily around his contribution to this
praxis-oriented version of social science and social philosophy. This takes the form of a theory of
recognition, a comprehensive and paradigm-shifting approach to reconnecting the micro and macro,
agency and structural levels of social thought. Developed over at least two decades, the work of
Honneth on recognition finds strong parallels in the work of other prominent theorists such as
Charles Taylor and Nancy Fraser. In summary, recognition theorists argue that the drive towards
personal autonomy and self-realisation can only be achieved intersubjectively – through the process
of recognition from significant others.
As well as being a former student of Habermas, Honneth also succeeded him as Professor of
Social Philosophy at Frankfurt. In a similar fashion to Habermas, Honneth has moved away from
the philosophy of consciousness and the isolated notion of the self. He has not, however,
wholeheartedly adopted the focus on communication and language that developed into what
Habermas terms a ‘universal pragmatics’. Honneth argues that instead of (or as well as) a theory of
universal pragmatics, what is needed is a theory of moral and social recognition. His conception of
recognition is designed explicitly to be a paradigm-defining notion, on the grounds of which a
normative foundation for social critique can be established.
However, this important contribution to social theory, one that seeks to break new and
impressive ground in our understandings of social behaviour, human need and sources of
transformation, has been explored only fleetingly in the field of education. It could be that Honneth
may experience the same fate as Habermas himself, whose work and that of critical theory in
general has played a subdued role in the development of educational theory, certainly compared to
Bourdieu. It is a constant source of amazement to this reader that the work of critical theorists has
been sidelined in this way, given that their focus on issues such as democracy, transformative
learning and critical dialogue lend themselves so well to educational debates. Of course, the fact
that Habermas has borne the brunt of a range of criticisms hasn’t helped, criticisms related to his
employment of convoluted language, alleged obscuritanism and, horror or horrors, a residual
Kantianism.
Rauno Huttunen’s book, therefore, has to be a welcome contribution to the field. The content
of the book is organised into three sections: an introduction that describes the author’s overall
approach to critical theory and education is followed by two separate sections on Habermas and
Honneth. The majority of the book is devoted to Habermas, with the last quarter set aside to
examine the relevance of recognition theory. It is apparent that Huttunen does not attempt to
organise his book around a central argument. Instead, the book is more of a collection of articles

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(some already previously published) on a selection of topics: Habermas and the problem of
indoctrination, the Habermas/Gadamer debate applied to education, educational action research, a
comparison between Habermas and Derrida, two empirical chapters and a final chapter on critical
adult education.
The absence of a central argument is not necessarily a negative aspect of the book, although it
might have helped deliver a more coherent narrative. The closest thing the book offers in this
regard relates to Huttunen’s account of indoctrination, an account that is the focus of the early part
of the text. His discussion of indoctrination, which he defines as ‘unethical influencing in a teaching
situation’ (p. 21), offers to English-speaking educators one of those ‘strange yet familiar’
experiences, as it provides echoes of more established concepts such as Freire’s ‘banking’ model of
teaching and Bourdieu’s notion of cultural reproduction. Huttunen’s modified theory of
indoctrination is at the centre of his aim to ‘create a critical theory of education that takes into
consideration both the aspect of freedom and the aspect of power in the process of socialisation’
(p. 37). The critical theory presented in the book (particularly in the first half), which encompasses
discussion of issues such as democratic personality formation, the relationship between
socialisation and tradition, indoctrinative teaching and, most importantly, what Huttunen calls the
‘pedagogical paradox’, offers much potential to educational theory, as it deals specifically with
questions of power and control within a pedagogical context.
Aside from this, I felt the book would have benefited from more detail on the connections
between the theories of Habermas and Honneth, and what these mean more generally for a critical
theory of education. For example, their shared concern with the intersubjective and relational
worlds could provide an excellent starting point from which to explore the teaching and learning
interface. Also, the inclusion of the empirical studies in the Honneth section is not wholly
successful. The case studies only cover the experiences of three individuals (including the author
himself), and the attempt to combine personal narrative with theory is not entirely convincing.
Nevertheless, the content of these case studies points to the real need to explore issues related to
recognition in more depth, particularly when it comes to the teacher–pupil relationship. On a
minor note, the book could have done with more precise text editing and proof reading.

Mark Murphy
Faculty of Education and Children’s Services, University of Chester, United Kingdom

References
Honneth, A. (1995) The Struggle for Recognition: the moral grammar of social conflicts. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Honneth, A. (2007) Disrespect: the normative foundations of critical theory. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Racially Equitable Teaching: beyond the whiteness of

professional development for early childhood educators
MARY E. EARICK, 2009
New York: Peter Lang
176 pages, ISBN 978 1 4331 0114 4, paperback, $34.00

Drawing on over thirty years of research, including her own, Earick explains how racial ideologies
maintaining White hegemony have shaped dominant discourses in law, policies and practices in
education at every level, from the overriding structures of education, to teacher education,
professional development, curriculum and lived schooling experiences of students and teachers.
With 16 years of experience working as an early childhood educator, Earick tells how she
witnessed change as gender equity became an accepted body of scholarly work and school-based
initiatives. She argues that, in US schools today, the achievement gap is race-based and significant
work is needed to address racial inequities, as has historically been done with gender equity. While
many would argue that schools and society in general still have a long way to go to make gender
equity a reality (see Banks & Banks, 2009), compared to racial inequities, gender inequities appear
to be more readily and comfortably discussed in education and in society as a whole. While current

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arguments seem to be orientated more towards keeping gender equity on the table for action and
discussion, racial equity is often considered too uncomfortable a topic, as Earick’s experiences as a
researcher demonstrate.
Earick outlines the defining role race plays in how teachers self-identify and subsequently apply
what they view as equity pedagogies. She also thoroughly demonstrates the three assumptions
underlying her argument, namely: ‘White racial hegemony perpetuates White supremacy in our
educational system’; ‘White racial hegemony is reproduced through publicly funded professional
development’; and ‘teacher pedagogies construct and deconstruct racial identities in academic
settings based on a White-based norm’ (p. 76). Earick situates her work in her own lived
experiences of Whiteness and racial isolation during her own schooling, even in settings which
professed to be ‘dedicated to multicultural ideals and practices’ (p. 1). In fact, Earick’s personal
narrative is present throughout her book, providing concrete examples for the reader of how her
own race consciousness developed as a result of racial inequities she observed as a practitioner and
as a researcher.
Earick presents and explains prominent racial ideologies and structures that support and
maintain the status quo in social systems such as education. She demonstrates how publicly funded
schools support White power and privilege through the reproduction of White racial ideologies
which result in a significant achievement gap between Whites and non-Whites.
She then presents her alternative to such ideologies. First, she presents a new theoretical
framework she calls Racially Equitable Teaching (‘RET’) a process by which White educators could
emancipate themselves, and indeed their students, from the predominant racial ideologies. The
RET theoretical framework is informed by critical race theory. She outlines three practice-based
expectations of RET: challenge Eurocentric curriculum and teaching materials; foster racially
equitable academic identity development; and dedicate professional development funds to support
RET projects. Finally, she discusses her ECRIE (Early Childhood Racial Identity Equity) framework
to guide educators to a heightened awareness of race, in terms of how individual identity and
ideologies are constructed and how teachers can deconstruct their own identities and ideologies
and help children do the same. ECRIE helps teachers be conscious not only of what they say and
what they do but also encourages them to analyse the latter dichotomy.
Earick’s book is a comprehensive reader which will be of interest to all educators, be they
teachers, scholars, or policy makers. To make her work more widely accessible, particularly for
pre-service teachers and parents, Earick could expand upon the rich examples given in her text and
either incorporate them as concrete examples of the manifestations of the ideologies and racial
projects she aptly describes or develop them as case studies. Thus, her analyses and explanations
could better inform teacher training.
One thing I found jarring when I read Earick’s book was that she used the term ECRIE before
telling the reader what it was. In fact, I had to interrupt my reading and go to the University of
South Carolina website to find out that ECRIE is the Early Childhood Racial Identity Equity
teacher professional development project in Columbia, South Carolina. It would be helpful to
provide a fuller description of her program as it could be used widely not only for pre-service
education but also for professional development of in-service teachers, administrators, and policy
makers. That said, I appreciated that her discussion of ECRIE focused on its goals and objectives
and how teachers need to individually and collectively examine their beliefs and actions. A cookie-
cutter approach to so doing would deny the particularities that individual people and situations
bring to questions of race and racial equity. As Earick says, White teachers need to understand that
they are racial beings, deconstruct their own racial identity and ideological beliefs and commit to
ongoing critical self-reflection. Her book provides important information and ideas to facilitate
such a process.
It is important for educators and parents to understand that there are multiple perspectives on
what is regarded as official or important knowledge, and that certain dominant perspectives
determine what is or is not included and emphasized in educational curricula. Earick’s analysis of
various orientations to learning led me to reflect on some of my own assumptions and preferred
pedagogical approaches, particularly inquiry-based learning.
Earick makes frequent mention of the Eurocentric nature of school curricula and yet her book
seems very United States-centric. This does Earick’s work a disservice as it is too important not to

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be read and used widely on a global level. To make the book more accessible to a wider readership,
it would be helpful to explain more fully the United States legislation to which she refers and to
situate it globally. In addition, her discussion of racial ideologies, particularly Whiteness as property,
appeared to focus exclusively on American examples. In so doing, it would be tempting for a non-
American reader to dismiss such ideologies as being particular to the United States, while I would
argue that such ideologies are global in their scope. As well, the distinction between Whiteness as
property and Legitimizing invisibility could be made clearer.
She also explains how laws governing teacher qualifications and program funding result in
teachers in the United States having finite and narrowly focused opportunities for professional
development. Once again, to reach a wider audience, Earick needs to go beyond the boundaries of
the United States and discuss how laws, policies, and educational curricula worldwide sustain or
challenge the racial status quo.
Earick acknowledges the sensitivity of discussing race and racism and the resistance she has
encountered as a researcher. In her final chapter, Earick states, ‘Racism has no middle ground; a
community is either racist or not’. In my work engaging community members in discussions of
race and racism (Carlson Berg, in press), I have found the work of Trepagnier (2006) to be helpful.
Trepagnier advocates moving beyond the dichotomy of racist/not racist to adopt a continuum of
less racist to more racist. Such a change acknowledges the prevalence of racism and, in my
experience, has helped bring people to the table to discuss race and racism in schools.
Earick strongly advocates for race-based initiatives to begin at an early age when identity and
concept formation are at their beginnings. While she focuses on children and teachers in early
childhood settings, the information and recommendations she offers would be helpful to educators
at all levels. As a Faculty of Education professor teaching pre-service teachers who will be working
in francophone minority language contexts, I found Earick’s book most helpful not only in terms of
readings I will now suggest to my students but also in terms of concrete strategies and activities in
which I could engage my students to prepare them to be racially equitable teachers.
This work provides important insights to help teachers analyse their overt and covert beliefs
about race and attend to students’ race, ethnicity, cultural and multilingual identity development.
Teachers at all levels will be inspired by her examples of how teachers examined their thoughts and
actions, learned to critically examine their teaching approaches and materials, and used classroom
discussions and specific stories to guide their students to be more racially aware and to foster
development of positive racial identities and in-group messages.
Laurie Carlson Berg
Faculty of Education, University of Regina, Canada

References
Banks, J.A. & McGee Banks, C.A. (Ed.) (2009) Multicultural Education: issues and perspectives, 7th edn.
Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
Carlson Berg, L. (in press) Experiences of Newcomers to Fransaskois Schools: opportunities for community
collaboration, McGill Journal of Education.
Trepagnier, B. (2006). Silent Racism: how well-meaning white people perpetuate the racial divide. Boulder:
Paradigm.

Going Beyond the Theory/Practice Divide in Early

Childhood Education: introducing an intra-active pedagogy
HILLEVI LENZ TAGUCHI, 2010
New York: Routledge
202 pages, ISBN 978-0-415-46445-1, paperback, £22.99

In reading Hillevi Lenz Taguchi’s Going Beyond the Theory/Practice Divide in Early Childhood, I
entered a brave new world of inquiry and theorizing that intrigues and expands my thinking in
early childhood education. As a parent and teacher-educator I welcomed the opportunity to plunge
into a monograph whose title speaks compellingly of movements within my practice – the

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interrogation of binaries and the need to consider and use pedagogies other than the familiar.
Taguchi introduces readers to an ‘intra-active pedagogy’ that draws on the work of Swedish scholar
Karen Barad (1998, 1999, 2007, 2008) and French philosophers Deleuze & Guatteri (1987, 1994).
Taguchi’s project is concerned with corroding the theory/practice divide that predominates in the
realm of early childhood education. The book’s central thesis is that ‘matter matters’.
The book offers two introductions and seven chapters followed by references and an index. The
first introduction contextualizes the Swedish preschool, and preschool teacher education settings of
the author’s research and practices, which forms the bedrock of the book. For instance, the series
editors Dahlberg & Moss suggest that a strong and enlightened national policy on preschool
education is a factor in the kinds of experimentation and new thinking that occurs in preschool
education in Sweden. Readers learn of a well-funded and well-established system of early childhood
education that eschews fixed approaches and a search for ‘the best way’ in favour of encouraging
dialogue and creativity. Therefore, the particularity of a Swedish early childhood setting ‘that steers
without unduly prescribing’ appears to have inspired Taguchi’s exploration of one of the key
concepts of her book: intra-active pedagogy and the ethics of immanence (Barad, 1998, 1999, 2007,
2008).
In the second introduction Taguchi locates herself as a researcher (e.g. feminist and
transdisciplinary), adds historical and contextual details, and explicitly addresses the question of
‘what is this book about?’ (p. 3). Here, Taguchi discusses the ‘context of pedagogical practices from
which an intra-active pedagogy has emerged’.
In chapter one Taguchi tackles her primary contestation: going beyond the theory/practice and
discourse/matter divide. Her contestation of the ‘theory/practice binary divide’ destabilizes one of
its major characteristics: power relations that cast academic knowledge (seen as theoretical and
masculine) as inherently more valuable than the preschool practices that are typecasted as
feminine. In contrast to such either/or constructions and discourses, Taguchi proposes an
alternative way of thinking where ‘discourses are understood to be intertwined and intra-acting
with the agency of all other bodies, materials and artefacts in the world, with no clear-cut
boundaries between them’ (p. 24).
One of most alluring and unforgettable insights offered by Taguchi is her use of Barad’s (2007)
work to illustrate that agency – ‘the active force to change and alter reality’ – is not solely produced
by discourse but also by the material world of matter and artefacts around us’ (p. 29). This author
has made me think and see that matter is far from being passive. Thus, it is difficult to resist the
powerful suggestion that the materials in early childhood practices (e.g. the shiny blue paper,
coloured marbles, pots of paint, a toy car, a piece of stick, etc.) are imbued with an agency, are
active, and are implicated in producing meaning-making and learning for children as well as
teachers (p. 29).
The foregoing statement leads closer to where Taguchi appears to be directing readers: a focus
on the in-between, the interdependent, intertwined nature of the relationship between discourses,
things, matter and organisms (p. 29). Using this as her premise, Taguchi argues that we can proceed
to ‘think of discourse and the material in new ways: in terms of the discursive being immanent to
the material and the material being immanent to the discursive’ (p. 29). Therefore, ‘learning is not
something an individual child achieves isolated from the material-discursive pedagogical space’
(p. 39). On the contrary, ‘learning is produced in the intra-actions that emerge and where different
organisms, matters and discourses intra-act with each other’ (p. 39).
In chapter two she convincingly argues that the learner and the world are entangled becomings
and cannot be separated from each other given their interconnections. Taguchi explains that ‘our
meaning-making and the learning we do is dependent on the material world around us. The
material world acts upon our thinking just as much as our thinking acts upon it. Our thinking can
alter the stone, and correspondingly the stone can alter our thinking’ (p. 49). In an example that
suggests transformation, transgression, and deep learning as a process of intra-activity, a young boy
and his peers moved from seeing a stick as a gun – an item intended for killing – to naming it,
decorating, and making it a friend ‘that made shooting with it impossible’ (p. 35). This
transformation came about as a result of intra-actions between the boy, his peers, the stick and the
teacher. These intra-actions are detailed for readers and we are led to see how the shift in the
meaning of the stick occurred. Taguchi uses the example of the stick as gun to stick with other

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agential and performative possibilities to press for an intra-active approach to ‘try to make visible
and do justice to what the learning child brings into the play or learning situation’ (p. 34).
Embedded in the discussion above is the key focus of Taguchi’s research and pedagogical
advocacy: intra-activity between children and their materials, peers, and teachers in early childhood
education. She challenges those concerned with early childhood, to ‘change our gaze to the
perspective of the materials’ so that we may see ‘how the material realities can be understood to
have agency in relation to what happens in the material-discursive intra-active processes taking
place between the materials, the children and [teachers]’ (p. 35).
According to Taguchi, a powerful tool for enabling shifts in focus and to investigate and
understand what is happening in the ‘in-between’, in the interstices of child, environment and
materials, is pedagogical documentation – a material-discursive apparatus (p. 63). In chapter three,
she explains that:
pedagogical documentation can be understood as a movement or force that creates a space
that makes our lived pedagogical practices material. It is the material films, images,
observations, etc., that make up the documentation that together construct such a space
where intra-active phenomena between children, concepts and materials can emerge and be
actualized (i.e. made visible and readable to us). (Taguchi, 2010, p. 66).
Borrowing from Barad’s world of physics, Taguchi refers to pedagogical documentation as a
specific constructed ‘cut’ of a pedagogical event (p. 64) to name a material observation of practice
that can again, and again, be talked about and studied as an aspect of documentation (p. 64).
Taguchi is captivating when she writes that ‘it enables and produces the connections between
organisms, matter and human beings that make life an ongoing movement of living’ (p. 67).
These new ways of theorizing and acting challenge the gridlock that developmental psychology
appears to have over the way we observe, document, and judge children. Taguchi’s intra-active
pedagogy and new use of pedagogical documentation to code, decode, and recode intra-activities
between children and the material world around them invite us to undertake multiple readings of
learning events. The possibility of multiple readings of children and their intra-actions with
materials and environment liberate us from fixed and traditional approaches and might allow for
greater generosity in the observations and judgements we make about them. In the smooth space
that Taguchi opens for us, pedagogical documentation itself is not a fixed phenomenon. She
explains that our ‘observations and documentations can be understood as having agency of their
own and in terms of their own materiality, acting upon us just as any other matter’ (p. 88).
Following the discussion of pedagogical documentation in chapter three, the agential power of
Taguchi’s book works its commanding magic in chapters four, five, six and seven where readers are
treated to further theorizing and examples of intra-active pedagogy and pedagogical
documentation in action in Swedish preschools. The ideas presented in earlier chapters are not
dropped but explored and woven in the fabric of the text. An example of this is the author’s
discussion of Deleuzian & Guattarian (1987) concepts of smooth and striated spaces, and Deleuzian
(1990, 1994) notions of re-enactments and counter-actualizations and their applications and
articulations in the early childhood spaces. To the credit of the author, black and white
photographs (documentation) of children engaged in intra-actions with materials (e.g. clay, glass,
and water) are judiciously used to scaffold understanding and to support the author’s textual
contentions in chapters four and five.
The focus of chapter six is writing – specifically a hybrid writing process that emerged in the
teacher education program on which the book is based. She actualizes through writing her
intention to ‘perform academic writing processes from an onto-epistemological perspective, where
being is a state of interdependent becoming, and where learning and knowing takes place in-
between different agencies that are trying to make themselves intelligible to each other’ (p. 139).
Throughout the chapter the author critiques ‘binary thinking and writing in teacher education’ and
outlines a concrete hybridized approach to writing that is an outgrowth as well as a supportive and
sensitive framework of the intra-active, onto-epistemological pedagogy she advances.
The final chapter of the book is concerned with the ethics of the different ontologies and
epistemologies, the theory of immanence, contestation of binaries in science and philosophy, and
their implications for early childhood education. Taguchi uses an example that involves the reading
of children’s drawings through the lenses of three different ontologies and epistemologies to

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problematize them and to illustrate the consequences of their use. These readings are fascinating
and compelling and should be studied by all in the field.
Going Beyond the Theory/Practice Divide in Early Childhood Education: introducing an intra-active
pedagogy is essential reading for researchers, teachers, parents, and all others who have the privilege
to teach young children and the power to make judgements about them. The book questions much
of the dominant thinking, universalizing discourses, and taken-for-granted reductive assumptions
that circulate as truths in early childhood education. In this book Taguchi not only questions and
challenges entrenched ontologies and epistemologies, she proposes an onto-epistemology that is
worthy of those who are most precious to us: children.
Barbara McNeil
Faculty of Education, University of Regina, Canada

References
Barad, K. (1998) Getting Real: technoscientific practices and the materialization of reality, Difference: A Journal
of Feminist Cultural Studies, 10(2), 87-126.
Barad, K. (1999) Agential Realism: feminist interventions in understanding scientific practices, in M. Biagioli
(Ed.) The Science Studies Reader. New York and London: Routledge.
Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Barad, K. (2008) Posthumanist Performativity: toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter, in
S. Alaimo & S. Hekman (Eds) Material Feminisms. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Deleuze, G. (1990) The Logic of Sense. New York: Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, G. (1994) Difference and Repetition. New York: Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1994) What is Philosophy? trans. Graham Burchell & Hugh Tomlison. London and
New York: Verso.

Reflexive Research and the (Re)Turn of the Baroque.

(Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the University)
CATE WATSON, 2008
Rotterdam: Sense
152 pages , paperback, £25.00
ISBN 978-90-8790-640-5, paperback; 978-90-8790-641-2, hardback; 978-90-8790-642-9, ebook

‘Ekphrasis’ means ‘verbal representations of the graphic’, I learn from Cate Watson. She advocates
‘reverse ekphrasis’ – a ‘re-reading through the interplay of the visual and the verbal’. That
unsettlement is generative, offering and indeed demanding the ‘contaminating hybridity of
intermediality’ (p. 108). Later, and slightly confusingly, she refers to ‘reverse or perhaps reciprocal
ekphrasis’ (p. 119, my emphasis), a trope of excessive mutuality, I think.
She proposes a ‘pictorial turn’ to succeed the ageing linguistic one. The traffic between image
and text has been too one-way. We need the more plural engagements of ‘intermediality’, the
‘juxtaposition/synthesis of different media forms’ (p. 108). I back away from that ‘synthesis’, again
too functional: I like my jigsaws to be jagsaws, along the broken lines of zigzag/jigjag. She offers a
pictorialisation of the Body without Organs, Deleuze & Guattari’s infamously amorphous concept.
It pictures this review.

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Figure 1. copyright, Bruce Tuckey.

There are two end-views. A sixteenth-century university chapel, which then begins to be interlaced
– interlacerated – by the interpellation of some monster, folding into it, and eventually replacing it
with a gross caricature of a blubberly human being. She has pictured the University as a Body
without Organs, Nowotny’s Mode 1 knowledge replaced by Mode 2, the Knowledge Economy
destiny. A new King for King’s College, 500 years in the coming. The four pictures model and
mock (she never does one without the other) the contemporary state of ‘knowledge’. This is our
global destiny, Watson seems to be saying, and it is also one that lies deep within us. We are
‘interpellated’ by the BwO. If we can know that circumstance, by way of a postmodernism
subsumed by the baroque, then she has written a ‘liberatory manual (or at least a manual for
understanding why such liberation is impossible)’. Or perhaps ‘a manual for making your own
Body without Organs’ (p. 122). At least ... Or perhaps ... you get the drift? The qualifications and
brackets in this book are always subversive, nugatory and playful in ways I will shortly explore. As
she says (p. 111), ‘I toy with my reader’. (:
Let me toy back. I really like the humour of this book, in the full sense of that word: ‘state of
mind’ in particular. It is never merely clever or funny, although it is both of these things. It is
theoretically sophisticated, and politically committed in ways that are un-pompous and self-
deprecating. Her ‘participant self observation’, an aspect of ‘autoethnography’, is not the softly-
softly self of much action research and autoethnography – Althusser and Laclau & Mouffe escort
her out of the prison of reason towards the freedom of a ‘“Baroque realism”’ (p. 47) which is
instantly ironised by inverted commas that simultaneously perform an inverted meaning.[1] She
seeks a juxtaposition of the local and the global that constitutes ‘a multi-dimensional interpellatory
space occupied simultaneously by competing and conflicting discourses creating aporetic moments
within which subversions, resistances, contested spaces and ultimately a kind of autonomy can
arise’(p. 34). The key generator is a ‘narrative intransitivity’ that enables ‘dialogue creating a third
critical space’ (p. 92). The trouble with such summary description (mine, not the author’s) is that it
is too ‘local’ because the book is just as much a backing away from, as an assertion of such claims.

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It seeks to live within such tensions. To deal in quotes is to offer too atomistic a response to the
book’s complexity. On the one hand, each separate claim has to be read and unravelled in the
hermeneutics of the book’s global arguments. In that sense, the reader has a performative role in
reading the text as it thinks rather than as it writes itself. On the other hand, it’s like a negative
version of ‘having your cake and eating it’: there is no cake and no way can she eat it, though
there’s a hell of a lot of sandwiching going on. I think of some Mad Hatter’s tea-party: ‘Do have
another palimpsest, vicar’. ‘Oh, thank you, Aporia, I do mind if I don’t’.
Having recently dabbled in the adjacent realm of critical and deconstructive juxtapositions of
the ontological kind (Stronach, 2010), I am sympathetic with Watson’s ‘snoop-cocking’ approach
(p. 45), and the doubts I now want to express are just as much self-doubts.
The first is this. If Watson is right and she has constructed and enfolded a baroque postmodern
that is ‘aporetically and gloriously true’ (p. 1), however many caveats, digressions, asides, and
ironies she disturbs that claim with, then the charge of upsetting the transcendent metanarrative
can still rebound as a kind of negative theology of the transcendent. And there are so many
negatives in the theorizing and methodologizing. She celebrates the irregular, the parodic, the
inverted, the interpellated, the travestied, ironic, illusory and paradoxical to such a degree that she
might deflect any criticism by expressing surprise that the reader had missed the irony, or the irony
of the irony, or the allegorising of the definitional. Or ... there is an infinite regress lurking in there,
perhaps benign, perhaps not. All these deflected meanings are gathered together in the communion
of the ‘fold’, in the chapel of the Wunderkammer, in the wardrobe of her mind ... If that sounds
‘over the top’ and parodic, then that’s good too (p. 6). To extend that doubt, I applaud the ‘topsy-
turvy world’ (p. 2) of her hermeneutic circus, though there may be too many somersaults and too
many clowns, and only one animal in the menagerie, poor old BwO. But to see postmodernism as
just another ‘recurrence’ of the baroque seems to universalise the baroque as an imminent fate, and
again a manifestation (never made manifest of course) of a negative theology that will never stop
denying itself. In this Church, it is the Word that is forever being denounced. The priests are gone,
but the congregation remains, ‘participant self observers’ [2] to the last, democratically worshipping
their ‘restless ontology’ (p. 11). Is this a Calvinism of the Last Instance?
OK, that’s certainly overworked the religious metaphor. RIP – if that now means Restless in
Peace. Or perhaps ‘Pieces’. Or ... Stop it. The second doubt needs a new trope. Because the account
is so inverting in nature, so interpellated in its sense of self, there is no danger of the usual charges of
narcissism and ‘navel-gazing’. Indeed, the author is pictorially absent, craftily represented instead
by her bicycle, room, view, building, etc. Not a navel in sight. This text is not ‘up its own arse’
(p. 20), as Watson deliberately no doubt provokes us, though it’s not a bad overall metaphor for its
reflexive epistemological strategies: and I mean no criticism there. But all the talk of ‘negative
identity’, ‘self-mechanisms’, ‘sedimentation’ (p. 37), and inescapable ‘mis-recognition’ (p. 65) drains
a sense of agency from the account. The abstract nouns carry the action around here (ontology
‘draws attention’, p. 11; space ‘creating aporetic moments’, p. 34; genres ‘construct writers’,
discourses ‘write us’, p. 86). Even fornication ‘thinks’ for her![3] (Jeez! I have to jog for mine.) Of
course some of that has to be true but the account seems to me to tip into an unacknowledged
over-determinism. To be more specific, it seems to me that if Watson is right in her
characterisation of the self, then her-self is not possible, and she couldn’t possibly have written this
book. On the other hand, the Book could have written Her. She has posted herself Missing in
Action, and it’s not so. Few authors are more lively, energetic, inventive, provocative and agentic
as this one, and it seems discrepant for her to explain away textual inventions in such implicitly
reductive theorizing. It’s not that I don’t admire the subtle display and interplay of interpellations
and determinations, it’s more that I don’t think that a story of contradictions and paradoxes
‘opening’ spaces for ‘critical thinking’ tells enough of an agentic story. There’s no room for the
‘surprise’ of ‘events’, as Nancy and Bachelard might have it (Nancy, 1993; Bachelard, 1994). The
author is too dead.
But, all in all, this is an excellent, thought-provoking book, brilliantly and playfully written
through and across a number of rich empirical, literary and theoretical registers. (I have neglected
the empirical bits in this review – and have now run out of space.) I say: buy it, read it, and tell your
friends.

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Book Reviews

A last thought, thinking again about those images where the chapel morphed into a Body
without Organs. I was looking at Mr Blubber the BwO (sounds like a postmodernist Happy Families
game), and thinking, he (yes, I know, habit of a lifetime) [4] looks like George Melly, the pose
suggesting perhaps his early homoerotic phase. That brought to mind a book he wrote called
‘Rum, Bum, and ... I was stuck. Was it ‘Bounce’? I had to look it up. It was ‘Rum, Bum and
Concertina’. The ‘forgotten’ word represented rather well the concertina effect of the pictures
squeezing into each other. Had the absent word nevertheless generated the unconscious
association that would allow it to be rediscovered as a presence? Was this an ‘absent presence’
staring me in the face? An abstract noun thinking me thinking?? Blimey, this book’s getting to me
…
Ian Stronach
Liverpool John Moores University, United Kingdomy

Notes
[1] Though it would be wrong to think that ‘realism’ and ‘Baroque’ get the same degree of irony.
[2] PSO expresses a certain redundancy: when would self-observation ever lack a participant?
[3] Some of the author’s best thoughts (like Barthes apparently) come to her during sex.
[4] Does the Body without Organs have a gender? Presumably not. But it’s big and it’s bad, so I’ll go with
the stereotype.

References
Bachelard, G. (1994) The Poetics of Space, trans. M. Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press (first published 1958).
Nancy, J.-L. (1993) The Experience of Freedom, trans. B. McDonald. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Stronach, I. (2010) Globalizing Education, Educating the Local: how method made us mad. London: Routledge.

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