This is the author’s copy. It was later published as: Singh, Parlo (2015) The knowledge paradox: Bernstein, Bourdieu, and beyond, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 36:3, 487-494, DOI: 10.1080/01425692.2015.1005956 Published online: 3rd March, 2015 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2015.1005956 COPYRIGHT: TAYLOR AND FRANCIS GROUP. REVIEW ESSAY The knowledge paradox: Bernstein, Bourdieu and beyond Parlo Singh* Griffith Institute for Educational Research, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia Knowledge and knowers. Towards a realist sociology of education, by Karl Maton, London, Routledge, 2014, 244 pp., AUD$145, ISBN 978-0-415-47999-8 Knowledge and Knowers (K & K) by Karl Maton is a curious book. It promises to traverse much territory across the whole gamut of the new sociology of education (NSE), education studies, and the social sciences. It does this by offering up Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) as a sociological theory of ‘legitimacy or … possibility’ (17). LCT is presented not only as a coherent network of concepts, but also an analytic device or methodology, a toolkit, with broad application possibilities that reach ‘beyond education and of practices other than knowledge’ (17). K & K claims not only to build on the theories of Bernstein and Bourdieu, but also build on the data analytic methodology of systemic functional linguistics (SFL). These are feisty intellectual moves which set the opening scene for a struggle of ideas within the intellectual field of the sociology of education. The book juxtaposes and integrates key concepts from two 70s megastars of sociology of education, Bernstein and Bourdieu (19, 126). From code theory, K & K selects the concepts of the pedagogic device, and classification and framing. These concepts are chosen to analyse knowledge and knower codes rather than pedagogy and curriculum codes as per the original Bernstein corpus. From field theory, K & K selects the concepts of field and habitus to analyse disciplinary fields and knower gazes. The professed concern of the book is ‘theoretical innovation’ (20). The focus of this innovation is ‘Bernstein’s code theory’ (20). A key question about the theories of Bernstein and Bourdieu is posed in the book. K & K asks why Bourdieu’s theoretical work gained such popularity and usage, while Bernstein’s work which focused predominantly on education systems, received less attention. The seductive appeal of Bourdieu’s work is considered a possibility, and is attributed to a number of factors including, the vague meaning of concepts such as habitus, and the vast array of objects/institutions which became a focus of this theoretical work. I concur with this critique of the persuasive appeal of Bourdieu’s oeuvre, and similarly agree that the ways in which Bourdieu’s work has largely been taken up in education studies, has not always led to cumulative knowledge building. Rather, I propose that the appropriation and recontextualisation of Bourdieu’s work in many education projects has led to a multiplicity of studies demonstrating a reading of the empirical world through the triadic concepts of field, capital and habitus. Many of these studies do not systematically refine and build on these
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2 concepts, but rather add to the array of capitals and habitus types. So the concept of cultural capital is extended sideways to include working class capital, linguistic capital, social capital and so forth. I suggest that few studies drill down into the notion of cultural capital or habitus to ask what are the dimensions or aspects of cultural capital, how do they shift over time, how can these shifts be identified or recognised, and how can interventions be designed to distribute different forms of capital to different categories of students and thereby shift, modify, and change habitus (see also Bernstein 1996, 2000). K & K suggests that the type of theory developed by Bourdieu produces these sideways movements. By contrast, Bernstein’s theoretical model encourages the progressive or cumulative development of precise, delicate concepts, that is, the unpacking of abstract, macro concepts into particular, micro, place-based concepts. Moreover, it enables two way translations from higher to lower order concepts, abstract to particular concepts, macro to micro concepts. In addition, the dynamic relation between the theory and its object of inquiry allows for theory re-generation and growth. K & K argues that Bernstein’s theoretical model starts with empirical studies, proposes concepts to explain/ make sense of this external empirical world, and then tests, refines, and progressively develops these concepts within a community of scholars. This notion of theory building and identifying the distinctive properties and features of the Bernstein sociological project, however, is not new. It is a topic that has been rigorously pursued by scholars across the fields of linguistics, philosophy, anthropology, and sociology, and from a wide spectrum of social, political contexts, including, Australia, France, South Africa, Columbia, Chile, China, and the U.K. (see for example Diaz 1984; Douglas 1996; Cheng and Pan 2006; Hasan 1999; Moore 2013). Many of these scholars also address the knowledge question, which K & K suggests has been blind-sided. A systematic comparative review of the literature on this topic would have rounded out the arguments developed in K & K, and ensured that the claims about knowledge building and theory innovation were more nuanced. But K & K does not task itself with this type of work. Rather, it concerns itself with putting forward a case for LCT. Knowledge blindness, myopic modelling: LCT as resolution The main purpose or objective of the book is to go beyond and extend the work of Bernstein. It does this through a series of strategic conceptual moves. First, K & K claims that ‘knowledge has become the silenced Other in education’ (7). Then it asserts that ‘foundational frameworks’ (215) of Bernstein’s code theory conceptualize knowledge but mainly in relation to curriculum and pedagogy, that is, the ‘pedagogising of knowledge’ (51). A gap or space that needs to be filled is identified – a focus on what has been silenced, blind-sided – knowledge. LCT claims to build on the foundational work of Bernstein’s code theory, and classic applications of this theory, not by means of a radical rupture or departure, but through an exercise of cumulative knowledge building on and about knowledge. K & K a curious book characterised by attention-grabbing intellectual moves. It begins by establishing and naming a ‘knowledge paradox’ (2). It claims that ‘[k]nowledge is thus one of the most discussed and one of the least discussed issues in academic debate. Knowledge is everything to society but nothing to social science’ (2). This has produced a number of conditions: ‘knowledgeblindness’ (7), ‘knowledge-myopia’ (8), and ‘myopic modelling’ (8). Now having set up this proposition, K & K enters the disciplinary arena of the sociology of education/knowledge and offers up a theory, LCT, which will contribute ‘towards resolving the knowledge paradox’ (2). This paradox, it is suggested, has been produced by the turn to social constructivism, that is, the philosophical
3 assumption that all knowledge is socially constructed. Consequently, this has produced an ‘epistemological dilemma’ (14), the twin problems of relativism and essentialism. Moreover, the constructivist turn in the social sciences has led to the conflation of knowledge and knowers and produced an ‘epistemological fallacy’ by confusing ‘epistemology with ontology’ (6). A paradox is established and then a theory (LCT) and analytic methodology is offered as a resolution. The toolkit of LCT will resolve ‘knowledge blindness’ and ‘knowledge myopia’ so that ‘knowledge practices [can] be seen, their organizing principles … conceptualized, and their effects … explored’ (3). This notion of resolution is threaded throughout the book. But what if the very notion of resolution is a fantasy? What if the paradox at the heart of the socalled knowledge society is a paradox about the need for certainty and control (Singh 2014)? The growth of knowledge does not lead to resolution. Rather it leads to more ambiguity and uncertainty, which in turn leads to a flurry of knowledge production. What of the claim about knowledge blindness? This is a claim rehearsed by a number of scholars describing themselves as social realists (see Barrett and Rata 2014; Young and Muller 2014). K & K positions itself within this quadrant of the sociology of education disciplinary field. But there is also a point of departure from this social realist scholarship. This point of departure blind-sides LCT to a central concept in the Bernsteinian project, that relating to the pedagogisation of knowledge, namely pedagogic discourse and the principle of recontextualisation (see Singh 2014; Tyler 2014). While other scholars have revisited and retheorised the Bernsteinian notion of pedagogic discourse (see Ivinson 2014; Lapping 2011; Muller and Hoadley 2010), there is a distinctive silence around pedagogic discourse and its principles of recontextualisation in K & K or LCT. Critical realism, social realism: knowledge and knowers The philosophical foundation of K & K is social realism, defined following Popper’s ‘heuristic distinction between three metaphorical “worlds” [where] world 1 refers to physical bodies and their physical and physiological states; world 2 refers to mental states or processes, and world 3 refers to the products of our human minds, such as architecture, art, literature, music, scholarship, educational knowledge etc.’ (12). K & K proposes that the boundaries between worlds 2 and 3 are blurred or not held apart by scholars in the NSE tradition. Consequently, knowledge within the NSE lacks foundational criteria to distinguish powerful knowledge from power/knowledge relations or knowledge of the powerful (see also Moore 2013). Thus, powerful knowledge and power/knowledge relations are conflated and become one and the same thing. NSE constantly straddles the essentialism – relativism spectrum: knowledge is invested in the body of the knower (e.g., standpoint theories) and therefore the voices of different knowers that have been silenced in power/knowledge relations need to be given space to be heard (e.g., relativism). This subjectivist doxa fosters ‘a belief that knowledge is only the knowing of knowers, that studying ‘relations within’ knowledge is subscribing to conservatism and positivism, and that, if studied, knowledge must be endlessly typologized’ (8). This position fails to ‘grasp that knowledge is not only constructed by individuals as each sees fit but rather produced by actors within social fields of practice characterized by intersubjectively shared assumptions, ways of working, beliefs and so forth’ (11). Again, K & K emphasises the point that ‘though knowledge is the product of our minds, it has relative autonomy from knowing – knowledge has emergent properties and powers of its own’ (12). The problem of knowledge: epistemic-semantic-pedagogic device This is an interesting move made in K & K. The criticisms of standpoint theories, ‘post-‘ theories (p.43), including poststructuralist feminisms, postcolonial theories, and critical race theories are
4 reactionary and demonstrate no serious engagement with the theoretical ideas proposed by scholars within these various disciplinary fields. To caricature the diverse complex ideas within these fields as ‘subjectivist doxa’ (14) seems strangely paradoxical given that scholars within these fields have debated the topics of essentialism, relativism and the emergent properties of knowledge over several decades (see Alcoff, 1997). Moreover, the conflation of developments in the NSE with different modes of radical pedagogy, fails to understand the complexity of the recontextualising principle or pedagogising of knowledge at the heart of the Bernsteinian project (see Lapping 2011; Tyler 2014). K & K claims that the logic of knowledge production within NSE can also be witnessed in the field of British Cultural Studies as exemplified by events at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). In the chapter titled, Languages of Legitimation and Gazes, K & K provides one account or representation of the evolution of the disciplinary field cultural studies. It does this work through the development and deployment of two concepts, knowledge codes and knower codes. Disciplinary knowledge is coded in terms of epistemic relations (ER) and social relations (SR). Epistemic relations are ‘between knowledge and its proclaimed objects of study; and social relations between knowledge and its authors or subjects’ (29). ER and SR are then coded in terms of strong or weak boundaries and strong or weak flows across boundaries, that is, the classic Bernsteinian principles of classification and framing. The neat, tidy logic of this framework is scaffolded to the level of the gaze, and four gazes are depicted and named: trained, cultivated, social and born. K & K states that in the 1970s Cultural Studies was subjected to a ‘reductionist form of critique’ (100) by feminists despite the fact that the founding fathers of the discipline were attempting to include women in its range of knowers. ‘The influence of standpoint theory saw feminist critiques of the emerging canon of cultural studies proclaim that not only its contents but also its basis of choice was patriarchal, denying the legitimacy of the gaze and those who possessed it’ (100). The social gaze of feminists used to critique Cultural Studies is contrasted to the cultivated gaze of the original designers of the discipline, which ‘affords greater opportunities for cumulative knowledge-building because more habituses can be integrated’ (104). Bernstein and the poststructural turn: subjectivity, gaze, desire, projections Critiques of Cultural Studies and the NSE are made throughout the book from the position of a neoBernsteinian scholar. This claim however is based on a return to 1970s code theory, which blindsides the last decade of post-structuralist scholarship undertaken in the Bernstein oeuvre (see Bernstein 1990, 1996, 2001; Ivinson 2014; Lapping 2011; Singh, 2014). As Tyler (2014) argues ‘the later Bernstein’s “poststructuralist turn” … problematises the processes of signification of the pedagogic device under various historical conditions of social and political autonomy, ranging from the pre-modern to that of the ‘Age of Information’. Yet this poststructural turn is not addressed by LCT. Rather, LCT’s ‘orientation to semantic - functional methodologies appears to mark a return to earlier and abandoned phases of Bernstein’s project’ (Tyler 2014, 1-2). Not only did Bernstein (1995, 2000) embrace the poststructuralist turn himself, but he engaged actively in response to feminist critiques of his work, not by denouncing these critiques as exercises in knowledge-blindness, knowledge myopic, essentialism, relativism or reductionism. Rather, he engaged respectively with these feminist critiques and wondered about the possibilities of a sociological project which could think with and about these ideas. Madeline Arnot raises the issue of masculine theorising colonising feminist research and thus speaking yet again through it. … as Madeline Arnot shows … licensing and
5 credentials are intrinsic to the intellectual field. In an important sense, gender relations are understood through inevitable projections, the deconstruction of which is trapped by the different specialisations of identity and power relations (Bernstein 1995, 417). Implicit in Sara Delamont’s chapter … is the criticism – justified – that the specialisation, ambiguities, and power positioning of women play a central role in the theory, yet this role is understated. Women certainly are likely to be relatively overrepresented in the dominant positions in the field of symbolic control compared with their positions in the economic field (Bernstein 1995, 418). Almost twenty years earlier when Bernstein himself was accused of silencing feminist accounts and the voices of women in his theoretical project (see Arnot 1995; Delamont 1995), his response was remarkably different to the position taken up in K & K. Bernstein addressed the issue of what K & K defines as the epistemic relation, that is, the relation between a theoretical project and its object of study. The clear point made by Bernstein relates to the construction and projection of desire in the social project of theory building, disciplinary formation and contestation. These social projects and contestations within intellectual fields are between different middle class factions constituting a social division of labour, itself underpinned by dynamic power and control relations. Bernstein (1995) argues ‘equality in relation to a common project does not exclude asymmetry within it’ (404). I suggest that a project building on and extending Bernstein’s sociological work may not be best served by categorising different participants as knowers with different gazes. Rather, a cumulative knowledge-building project might think about examining the social division of labour constituting different social factions, the strength of the boundaries between these factions, the flows of ideas within and between these factions, and the ways that these shift over time in struggles for power and control over what constitutes valid knowledge within the disciplinary field, and between one specialized field and other fields (see Bernstein 1996, 2000). Discussion In this essay, I take up the ‘invitation’ in K & K ‘to collaborate in creation’ given that ‘knowledgebuilding is an open-ended process’ (xii). K & K claims to address the knowledge paradox of relativism and essentialism in the NSE by innovating on Bernstein’s code theory. I have traced the logic of these ideas, examined the types of analyses and knowledge claims they generate, and suggest that LCT is itself at risk of ‘epistemological denial’ (Alcoff 1997, 7) because of its restricted interpretation of knowledge, ways of knowing, and knowledge growth, and its lack of engagement with the Bernsteinian project around onto-epistemology (Singh, 2014). Like Maton, I too think that the theoretical project commenced by Bernstein is radical and remarkable. But I depart from the position adopted in K & K in a number of ways. I encourage other scholars to read not only K & K, but also the original Bernsteinian oeuvre, as well as the growing corpus of social realist (Barrett & Rata, 2014); poststructuralist feminist (Ivinson, 2014) and psychoanalytic literature building on and extending Bernstein’s work (see Ivinson 2014; Lapping 2011).
6 References Alcoff Martin, L. (1997). The politics of postmodern feminism, revisited. Cultural Critique, 36(Spring), 5-27. Arnot, M. (1995). Bernstein's theory of educational codes and feminist theories of education: A personal view. In Knowledge and pedagogy. The sociology of Basil Bernstein, edited by A. Sadnovik, 297-322. Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex Publishing Corporation. Barrett, B. D., and E. Rata. (2014). Knowledge and the future of the curriculum. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bernstein, B. (1975). Towards a theory of educational transmissions (Class, codes and control, Vol. 3). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Bernstein, B. (1990). The structuring of pedagogic discourse. London: Routledge. Bernstein, B. (1995). A response. In Knowledge and pedagogy. The sociology of Basil Bernstein, edited by A. Sadnovik, 385-424. Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex Publishing Corporation. Bernstein, B. (1996). Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity. Theory, research, critique. London, New York: Taylor and Francis. Bernstein, B. (2001). From pedagogies to knowledges. In Towards a sociology of pedagogy. The contribution of Basil Bernstein to research, edited by A. Morais, I. Neves, B. Davies and H. Daniels,363-368. New York: Peter Lang. Cheng, K. W., and S. Pan. (2006). Transition of moral education in China: Towards regulated individualism. Citizenship Teaching and Learning, 2(2):27-50. Delamont, S. (1995). Bernstein and the analysis of gender inequality: Consideration and applications. In Knowledge and pedagogy. The sociology of Basil Bernstein, edited by A. Sadnovik, 323336.Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex Publishing Corporation. Diaz, M. V. (1984). A model of pedagogic discourse with special application to the Colombian primary level of education. PhD dissertation, University of London, London. Douglas, M. (1996). Natural symbols. Explorations in cosmology with a new introduction .2nd ed. London, New York: Routledge. Hasan, R. (1999). Society, language and the mind: The meta-dialogism of Basil Bernstein's theory. In Pedagogy and the shaping of consciousness. Linguistic and social processes, edited by F. Christie, 10-30. London, New York: Continuum. Ivinson, G. (2014). Pedagogy of improvised choreography and dance: Restricted codes revisited – developing pedagogies for the corporeal device. Paper presented at the 8th International Basil Bernstein Symposium 2014, Nanzan University, Nagoya Campus, Nagoya, Japan. Lapping, C. (2011). Psychoanalysis in social research. Shifting theories and reframing concepts. London, New York: Routledge. Moore, R. (2013). Basil Bernstein: The thinker and the field. Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge. Muller, J. and U. Hoadley. (2010). Pedagogy and moral order. In Toolkits, translation devices and conceptual accounts: Essays on Basil Bernstein's sociology of knowledge, edited by P. Singh, A. Sadnovik and S. Semel, 161-175. New York: Peter Lang. Singh, P. (1995a). Discourses of computing competence, evaluation and gender: The case of computer use in the primary classroom. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics in Education, 16(1): 81-110.
7 Singh, P. (1995b). Voicing the `Other'. Speaking for the `self'. Disrupting the metanarratives of educational theorizing with poststructural feminism(s). In After postmodernism: Educational politics and institutional identities, edited by P. Wexler and R. Smith, 182-206. London: Falmer Press. Singh, P. (2014). Performativity and pedagogising knowledge: Globalising educational policy formation, dissemination and enactment. Journal of Education Policy (2014): 1-22. doi:10.1080/02680939.2014.961968 Tyler, W. (2014). Legitimation Code Theory and the social semiotics of pedagogic discourse: a Bernsteinian critique. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/William_Tyler, ResearchGate: 12 Young, M. and J. Muller. (2014). From the sociology of professions to the sociology of professional knowledge. In Knowledge, expertise and the professions, edited by M. Young and J. Muller, 3-15. London: Routledge.
