Knowledge-Power, Mastery-Institution: Re-Thinking Some Music Education Certainties Through Reflections on Hegel, Foucault, Rancière and Derrida

Things are not as clear and straightforward as (we once thought) they used to be. Both progressive and critical approaches to educational theory and practice have been emphasizing the existence of an integral relationship between knowledge, equality, and emancipation. According to this narrative, liberating people from the darkness of ignorance is a secure means for achieving a wider distribution of power while knowledge, via its role in contributing to the development of critical understanding, functions as a means for emancipation. Poststructuralism has sought to untie the straightforward character of this set of conceptual relationships (for example, Foucault’s analysis of knowledge/power, Rancière’s equality and emancipatory politics, Badiou’s proletarian aristocracy, Derrida’s aporia and radical “hospitality”). At the same time, the emergence of the knowledge economy and neo-liberal conceptions of education have not only questioned the validity of the Enlightenment educational narrative, but also have managed to subvert the radical potential of poststructuralist readings of post-enlightenment educational visions, turning knowledge into a commodified entity in the service of an entrepreneurial regime where “all is management,”¹ and where modernist key-terms such as “‘learning,’ ‘reflection’ or ‘development’ . . . often implicitly . . . reproduce the neoliberal values of individualism, success and competition.”² Critical educational theorist Henry Giroux has suggested that a necessary and urgent response to this situation lies in

resurrecting the living, though blemished traditions, of Enlightenment thought that affirmed issues of freedom, equality, liberty, self-determination, and civic agency. On the other hand, critical theory’s engagement with Enlightenment thought must be expanded through those postmodern discourses that problematize modernity’s universal project of citizenship, its narrow understanding of domination, its obsession with order, and its refusal to expand both the meaning of the political and the sites in which political struggles and possibilities might occur.³

Music education scholarship’s response to this state of affairs has been a rather uneasy one. The dominance of academic rationalism,⁴ coupled by “the unreasonable reverence and blind faith that amounts to idolatry”⁵ that accompanies music educators’ adherence to their chosen methods has led to the development of rather restrictive views of (a) music education’s contribution to self-actualization as well as of (b) the social efficiency of music curricula.⁶ Moreover, it has led to a neglect of daring theorization of the relationships between knowledge and power, authority and tradition, the powerful role of canonic impositions, as well as of institutionalized practices of domination and of the impact of the neo-liberal attack on education that is currently under way. It seems that there is a pressing need to move beyond discourses of legitimation of the value of music education towards more messy theorizing which looks for ideas, problematics, and inspiration on a much wider range of philosophical and social theory discourses, while at the same time closely theorizing neglected, marginal music educative practices.

This constellation of papers has it beginning in a panel presented at the International Society for Philosophy of Music Education (ISPME) 2013 Symposium, hosted by Teachers College, Columbia University, U.S.A. The papers that emerged as a result of this collective endeavor embark on an effort to revisit the assumptions that underpin academic rationalism in both progressive and critical versions, posing the issue of the relationships between knowledge and power as well as between mastery and institution of practices that induce particular power-knowledge configurations in music education, aiming to analyze them through perspectives informed by theorists such as Michel Foucault, Axel Honneth, Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou, and Jacques Derrida. As a result, four pieces emerged with highly idiosyncratic outlooks, but all are vehemently supporting the view that we should dare develop our thinking in a courageous, uncompromising way, not being afraid to expose our limitations, but also not being afraid to resist singing pleasurable tunes to the authorities’ ears in music education.

In the opening piece, Patrick Schmidt examines the relationship between authority and music. The article starts with the proposition that the notion of music as an art or an educative enterprise...