Necesitamos Todavía El Concepto de Formación

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Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 35, No. 2, 2003

Blackwell Publishing LtdOxford, UKEPATEducational Philosophy and Theory0013-1857 2003 Philosophy of Education Society of AustralasiaApril 20033521000Original ArticleDo We (Still) Need the Concept ofBildung?Jan Masschelein & Norbert Ricken

Do We (Still) Need the Concept ofBildung?J

M

&

N

R

Katholieke Universiteit Leuven; Westflische Wilhelms-Universitt Mnster

Maybe the most certain of all philosophical problems is the problem ofthe present time, and of what we are, in this very moment. Maybe thetarget nowadays is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are.

We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal ofthis kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for severalcenturies. (M. Foucault, The Subject and Power, p. 216)

The question we want to deal with in this article is the question whether theconcept of Bildung

1

or cultivation/edification is still a concept which we can useto analyse and criticise actual developments in the field of education (both inthought/discourse and in action/technique) which are themselves related to broadersocial transformations often referred to as processes of globalisation and as develop-

ment towards a learning society. We will try to argue from the viewpoint offeredby Foucaults study of transformations of power and government; we may becomeclear that Bildung

does not define the opposite side of present power relations, butactually can be understood as a privileged medium through which a certain powerapparatus (un dispositif de pouvoir) has been invested. Even if at one moment inhistory it probably did play a critical role, Bildung

has long since lost the possibil-ity of functioning as a point of resistance and critical principle for analysing theways in which we conduct our lives and the ways in which our conduct is itselfconducted, i.e. the ways we are governed and also govern ourselves. In what followswe will argue that we should abandon the concept of Bildung

in order to inventpractical and theoretical ways to raise anewas Readings indicated

the question of

being-together

which has been masked in the emphasis on autonomy and contracts/consensus in the political and educational discourse of the past three centuries(Readings, 1996, p. 20).

The article is elaborated in four steps. We first 1) sketch briefly the actual useof the concept of Bildung

. We then 2) focus, following Foucault, on the problemof power and its conceptualisation and argue 3) that Bildung

functions as part ofa specific power-apparatus: an individualising (and immunising) apparatus. Weconclude 4) that the question of how to elude or escape this government of indi-vidualisation should constitute the horizon of educational/pedagogical thought.


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1. The Actual Use of the Concept of Bildung

as an Unkept Promise

At the end of the eighteenth century the concept of Bildung

was introduced inGerman educational and pedagogical discourses. This concept which was developedas a central category for thinking about human beings (about what was called, then,the destination of mankinddie Bestimmung des Menschen) was introducedmainly through Johann Gottfried Herder and Wilhelm von Humboldt (see Ruhloff,1997). Based on the theoretical conception of perfectibilit

as it was developed byJean-Jacques Rousseau in contrast to and as a transformation of the idea of per-fection, Bildung

was formulated as a critical principle of education in order torefuse specific and determining expectations of the old and new civil society (seee.g. Benner, 2001). It indicates an epigenetic (cultural) structure, in contrast to agenetic conception in which the origin is linked with (wo)mens development: humanbeings are not determined by their own nature or their metaphysical and religiousorigin as creatures but by their own practices. They have to determine themselves ina practical coping and interaction (

Auseinandersetzung

) with a world. Consequentlyit is not possible to specify any definite aim of human development: in fact Bildung

was given the endless task of developing, unfolding and enlightening the human mindand making real the independence of human will and action from natural and socialdeterminations, coercion and constraints (see Ricken, 2000). Bildung

is the endlessvoyage of the individual towards him/her self as part of an ideal humanity. It wasoriginally conceived as a critical and emancipatory enterprise, i.e. as a process inwhich human beings became truly free and in which they emancipated themselves

from all kinds of power including the power of the actual given State. This is true alsofor Humboldt even though he believed for a moment that this process could beorganised by the state if it held back from intervening in the actual content of theprocess (see Ruhloff, 1997) and even when in fact the process of Bildung

was leadingtowards the establishment of a new (national-German) culture and a new (nation)state (see Bollenbeck, 1996). In this context the pedagogical system is assigned thetask of promoting an autonomous and independent form of life starting from theEnlightenment programme of human self-liberation with regard to the unity ofmankind (Humboldt). In the framework of a historical analysis, Bildung

could there-

fore be described as a social figuration combining both elements: individuality andsociality. It is a programme of social transformation through the formation of individuals.

However, it should be noted that, although the concept was introduced at the endof the eighteenth century, it was only towards the end of the nineteenth centurythat it became articulated as the specific structure of education (Blankertz, 1982,p. 306). Since Dilthey, it has occupied a central place in educational practice andthought, referring to the incorporation of human beings into society through theirindividual self-production and spiritual self-formation (see Dilthey, 1960). Moreover,the idea of Bildung

points principally towards individual self-realisation and self-

elevation in all spheres of social reproduction and therefore breaks through theessentially affirmative character of Erziehung

.


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Do We (Still) Need the Concept of

Bildung

?

141

international context (see note 1) with a view to the critical analysis and also thepromotion of the meaning and function of education and the education system(including the educational sciences) within the currently emerging large-scaletransformations of societies which are often described under the key-term global-isation process

2

and increasingly associated with the establishment of learningsocieties (see, for example, UNESCO, 1996). Bildung

has become a key-term inpolitics representing the different competences which seem to be required forsurviving in such a learning society.

Now, what interests us here is not so much that this concept is still used andinvoked by administrators and politicians to accompany and legitimate the deeptransformation processes of (national) educational systems. What interests us moreis that the concept is still used by theorists as a category in educational discourseto interpret and to evaluate our actual situation.

3

Although nowadays its utility andadequacy is increasingly contestedwe will come back to this

Bildung

still seemsto remain for German educational and pedagogical thinking a leading concept.

4

However, the meaning of the concept has expanded and become a large field(Gnter Grass) covering nearly everything in pedagogical discourse. On the onehand, there is still a traditional interpretation of Bildung

indicating the culturalcontent of education formulated as a specific canon (cf. Schwanitz, 1998); on theother hand, Bildung

means a specific sort of self-experience and self-developmentsummarised in the phrasing of Sich-Bilden or self-education (cf. von Hentig,1996). Between those two opposite poles Bildung

is also used more and more torefer to a formal competency of acquiring currently required knowledge. As a result

of this expansion of its meaning, Bildung

has become the key-term of the educa-tional sciences. Erziehung

as a contrasting term in the German discourse, butwithout real parallel in English (maybe: raising like in raising to or raising abuilding, or upbringing)has lost its paradigmatic status: more and more Erziehung

is conceptualised as a specious practice pretending to more then it can achieve. Inparticular, Erziehung

has been linked with the issue of power and abuse and isincreasingly considered as a dirty term (cf. Meyer-Drawe, 1999); it is, rather,approached as an instrument to promote Bildung

.In consequence, the concept of Bildung

now occupies a lasting and prominent

but ambivalent critical role. Gruschkas recent article in one of the leading journalsof the German educational scene, the Zeitschr ift fr Pdagogik

, is an indication ofthis ambivalent role which is present also in the title: Bildung: Unvermeidbar undberholt, ohnmchtig und rettend

(

Bildung

: unavoidable and outdated, powerless andredeeming, Gruschka, 2001). Although Gruschka admits that the old idea of

Bildung

and of the Gebildete

(the educated woman or man) has become actually

outdated and dysfunctional, the same idea remains a central means for analysingand criticising what he diagnoses, following Adorno and Heydorn, as Halbbildung(half-edification) or Unbildung (un-edification). In this context the concept of

Bildung

is used, for example, to criticise the concepts of learning present in thediscourse on the learning society but also in criticism of many didactic and con-


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Jan Masschelein & Norbert Ricken

that world, which are recognised in Bildung

. In fact, Gruschkas article is illustrat-ive of a very common kind of argument. The idea of Bildung

here remains relatedto a kind of forgotten, negated, neglected, reduced, distorted, unfulfilled or evennot yet articulated promise which is, however, misused by some writers as alicence for introducing differentiations of rank and distinction into education. Eventhough, as Ruhloff states, Bildung

can be retained only as a non-normative conceptsince absolute foundations and teleological ambitions have to be rejected, this doesnot show that we can conceive of Bildung

without any normative connotation. Theconcept of Bildung

always contains an understanding of what is human (an under-standing of humanity) and how we can attain it. Bildung

always implies an idea ofhumanity and a knowledge or representation of that [which] is unsatisfactoryor insufficient (Ruhloff, 2000, p. 119, our translation). This idea of humanitywhich is contained in Bildung

remains fundamentally oriented towards the choiceof ones own form of life as an independent, emancipated and self-directed life. Itremains related to the Enlightenment ideas of autonomy and consensus (as theagreement between autonomous persons) since educated men, the Gebildete areessentially autonomous persons. And the ideal of Bildung

can serve then as a pointof resistance or a critical orientation which can be invoked against all kinds ofdistortion and negation of this independence and autonomy (in thinking andacting).

5

The large field of meanings and uses of Bildung

has itself provoked differentreactions in the German discourse. According to Lenzen for example the concepthas become superfluous and useless because, due to its dependency on the practical

educational context in which it appears, it no longer allows us to create clarityor meaningful differentiation within the discipline and its theoretical discourse. Hetherefore argues, following Luhmanns system theory, that we should abandon theconcept of Bildung

and introduce the concept of autopoiesis

or self-organisation(Lenzen & Luhmann, 1997; Lenzen, 2000). In contrast to Lenzen, Tenorth pleadsfor maintaining the concept, since it would be the only concept which is sufficientlypoly-referential and multi-valent to put the different disciplinary and non-disciplinary,practical and professional pedagogical domains in relation to each other andsince it could function as leading concept for the sciences of culture in a broad

sense (Tenorth, 2000). However, both Lenzen and Tenorth seem to forget thatacademic disciplines are themselves very specific projects whose interpretationspenetrate deeply into our lives; i.e. they seem to neglect the role of disciplines andtheir concepts in the development of power. Indeed, the pedagogical/educationalsciences in the broadest sense can be analysed as truth games involved in theformation of actual power relations. In this context, we want to suggest that start-ing from the analytical framework offered by Foucault, it is possible to reveal andunravel a complicity between Bildung

(in practice and theory) and the birth of themodern subject within the establishment of the government of individualization

as a form of power (Foucault, 1982, p. 212).

6

This form of power or powerapparatus (dispositif de pouvoir) can be characterised as the strategic operation


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Do We (Still) Need the Concept of

Bildung

?

143

This means that we suggest looking at both the history of Bildung

and the historyof educational/pedagogical discourse in which it is so central as being part of thehistory of the ways in which human beings conduct and govern themselves andothers in the light of specific truth games. Here the notion of Bildung

is regardedas connected to a certain kind of knowledge about and relation towards ourselvesand others. The idea of Bildung

then implies a very specific kind of interpellation(Althusser, quoted by Butler, 1997), i.e. a very specific way in which we areaddressed as social beings and in which we are supposed to address ourselves andothers. Bildung

, with its epigenetical (cultural) and social connotation, appears asa social programme formulated in a specific historical and social context in whichit becomes the key-term of bourgeois society. This programme articulates itself asa transformation from the anthropological perspective (what kind of beings arewe?), from the social perspective (how, through which techniques and strategies,are we related to the other(s)?), both linked together in a transformation of theepistemological perspective (what kind of knowledge is possible and expected?).(See also Ricken, 2000.) In order to further develop this relation between Bildungand power, we first have to clarify briefly how we can analyse power.

2. The Power of Power, or: How to Understand Power?

The question of how to analyse power in its historical transformation and its logicwithout implying a single causality (e.g. just economics) or a centralistic reduction(e.g. only with respect to a state) is a controversial and still unresolved question.

Normally power is interpreted as the ability to carry through and to enforce onesown will in a social relation, i.e. to determine the will of the other(s) (see Weber,1972, pp. 2829). In this traditional perspective, power is linked with, but distin-guished from, dominance (as a concrete and legalised ability to bind obedientpeople) and discipline (as an automatic and trained obedience) and it is based onand in an individual as his/her ability. In this perspective, freedom is conceptualisedas the opposite of power: firstly, as the absence of power, force and violence and,secondly, as the ability to act on my own. Kants practical conception of freedomas it is formulated in his Kritik der praktischen Vernunftthe capacity to initiate

something new by myselfimplies this traditional opposition: not to be determinedby the outside. This is the condition of autonomyformulated as the capacity toact under a self-given law of reason and rationalityincluding heteronomy asits contrast. In this traditional perspective Bildunghas indeed been conceptualisedas a specific practical programme of reflexive autonomy. The Gebildete as aneducated man (cf. Burbules, 2001) is the prototype of the subject of rationaland aesthetic-autonomy.

However, in our analysis we want to approach the question of Bildungand powerusing a different conception of power proposed by Michel Foucault. Let us recall

briefly some elements of this conception. According to Foucault, power cannot bestudied solely on the basis of a juridical model of sovereignty and law, a model


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144 Jan Masschelein & Norbert Ricken

relations as a productive technique and mechanism. Power is not a substance.Neither is it a mysterious property whose origin must be delved into. Power is onlya certain type of relations between individuals (Foucault, 1981a, p. 253). Powerrelations are rooted deep in the social nexus (Foucault, 1982, p. 222). Theexercise of power is a way in which certain actions modify others. Power is notan objective ability, it exists only when it is put in action, even if, of course, it isintegrated into a disparate field of possibilities brought to bear upon permanentstructures (ibid., p. 219). Power is not about direct action on others, but aboutactions upon their actions, upon the possibilities of their actions, both existing andcoming. This implies that others are recognised as persons who themselves actfreely, it implies free subjects for whom there opens up a field of possibilities ofresponses and ways of behaving.

In his later work, Foucault suggests using the term conduct of conducts (con-duite des conduites) to describe power as government. For to conduct is atthe same time to lead others and a way of behaving within a more or less openfield of possibilities. To govern therefore means to structure the possible field ofaction of others (ibid., pp. 220221).

In this perspective, power relations can be understood as productive processes offormation of conduct and as relations of subjectivation which operate throughconcrete techniques and concrete forms of knowledge and discourse. Power is notonly suppressive or oppressive, but productive. It produces objects, truth gamesand political spaces, which determine what the individual and his/her knowledgemean, how the individual relates to him/her self and to others.

Foucault wants to investigate how power works and which kind of effects it has.Power is but the name for the different moving and changing assemblages ofdifferent techniques, discourses and forms of knowledge (or of problematisation)with a common effect. And, according to Foucault, individuality is one of theeffects of a specific modern power apparatus, which in fact produces individuals.

Il ne faut donc pas concevoir lindividu comme une sorte de noyaulmentaire sur laquelle viendrait sappliquer le pouvoir, quisoumettrait les individus ou les briserait. En ralit lindividu nest

pas le vis--vis du pouvoir; il en est lun des effets premiers et il esten mme temps le relais: le pouvoir transite par lindividu quil aconstitu. (Foucault, 1997, pp. 2627).

In his later work, Foucault focuses his investigations on the history of the differentmodes [of objectification] by which, in our culture, human beings are made sub-jects (1982, p. 208), the history in which he says we are trapped. As a centralconcern in these investigations, he emphasises more and more what he calls thegovernment of individualization (1982, p. 212) or the problem of individualizingpower (1981, p. 227) which separates out the individual, breaking his links with

others, and yet which also undermines that which makes individuals truly individual.This government imposes a specific form of subjection and includes a specific


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Do We (Still) Need the Concept ofBildung? 145

and administrative procedures which determine who one is, and through economicand ideological state violence which ignores who we are. It closes and masks thequestion who we are. It is a form of power which categorizes the individual,marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity whichmakes individuals subjects (ibid., p. 212).

In order to analyse how this governmentality came about and how it is exercised,Foucault has elaborated several models of power which cant be synthesised intoone consistent and systematical framework. What is important to us, is to recallvery briefly some of these different forms of power and to indicate that Foucaultrelates the birth of the government of individualisation precisely to transformationsin the eighteenth century.

Since the sixteenth century, according to Foucault, a new political form of powerhas been developing, namely the state, which exercised a sovereign power of repres-sion and regulation and included le droit de faire mourir ou de laisser vivre(Foucault, 1976, p. 178). Around the eighteenth century the state starts to integ-rate what he calls the old pastoral power. This pastoral power is an individualisingpower wherein the pastor, like the shepherd in relation to his flock, not only knowshis community as a whole, but also pays individual attention to each member andhis/her life. A pastoral power is a power whose role is to constantly ensure, sustain,and improve the lives of each and every one (Foucault, 1981a, p. 235). The newpastoral power implies a knowledge of peoples minds and their interiority andtherefore produces the truth of the individual. In order to produce this knowledgeof individuals, different techniques of self-examination and self-objectivation were

developed, investing a specific and paradoxicalrelation of the self to the self. Thisform of power is the government of individuals by their own verity (1981a, p. 240).Around the eighteenth century the modern state thus integrates individuals underthe condition that this individuality is shaped (and relates to itself) in a very spe-cific form. But the new pastoral power involved also an approach to the flockconsidered as a population. Pastoral power was directed to ensure salvation in thisworld, it multiplied its pastors or agents and involved a double focus on theknowledge of man around two roles: one globalising and quantitative, concerningthe population, the other, analytical, concerning the individual (1982, p. 215). So

the establishment of the modern (nation) state is characterised by the double bondof individualisation and totalisation (which by the way was accompanied also bythe appearance of new practices of resistance).

In this context Foucault distinguishes between two kinds of power technologies.On the one hand there are disciplinary technologies which impact upon theindividuals body and behaviour. They develop around the questions: Commentsurveiller quelquun, comment contrler sa conduite, son comportement, sesaptitudes, comment intensifier sa performance, multiplier ses capacits, commentle mettre la place o il sera le plus utile (Foucault, 1981b, p. 1010). On the

other hand there are the technologies which are directed towards people as apopulation, i.e. a group of living beings traversed by biological laws and processes


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functioning of biological entities. This means that a society of normalisation (unesocit de normalisation, 1981b, p. 1018) now replaces a juridical society of lawand that a new power apparatus develops: a facilitating bio-power instead ofsovereign juridical power of oppression and determination. This bio-power as lepouvoir de fairevivre (Foucault, 1976, p. 181) regulates the conditions (the need forsecurity, health, mobility) and processes operating on the population and not theindividuals as such. Juridical power is about norms which are prescriptive (anddisciplining in this context is about adjusting reality to the norm and thus includesrepression), whereas bio-power is about what is normal in the population, it isnot about norming but normalisation (and disciplining in this context is aboutfunctionalisation, whereby empirical norms and not legal ones assume dominance).Bio-power can be described as the coalition of the political anatomy of bodies withthe bio-politics of the population whereby knowledge of the body assumes imme-diate political relevance (Meyer-Drawe, 2001). Taking up Foucaults line, Deleuzewill develop the concept of control power as the kind of power which relievesdiscipline power within the context of bio-power. According to Deleuze, disciplinepower governs through the structuration of the parameters of the limits of think-ing and acting, by institutionally sanctioning and prescribing normal/deviantbehaviour. In control-society, power is exercised through machines which directlyorganise brains (in systems of communication, information networks, etc.) andbodies (monitoring). Control leaves institutions and spreads all over the socialbody through flexible and fluctuating networks. Globalisation processes, includingthe impetus they give to learning societies, can also be analysed on these lines as

articulations of a bio-power characterised by the double bond of individualisationand totalisation and sustaining and developing a government of individualisationas a specific power apparatus or dispositif de pouvoir (Deleuze, 1990; Hardt &Negri, 2000; Masschelein, 2001). For us it is here that the importance ofFoucaults work lies for an analysis of the relation between power and Bildung.7

3. Bildungand Power: Some Elements of a Deconstruction of the Idea

of Bildung

Taking up his brief sketch of transformations in the mechanisms of power, indic-ated by Foucault, we will now try to relate the concept of Bildung to this trans-formation. In fact, the concept of Bildungwas not only articulated, formulated andincluded in the same historical context as these transformations, but it can even besaid to have occupied a strategic position in the elaboration and development ofthose new wide-ranging mechanisms of the construction of sociality. In its rupturewith the prevailing and determining definition of humanity and with the stratifyingsocial order of the time, the idea of Bildung denoted, by contrast, an endless taskof practical self-determination in and through the world. It was considered by its

proponents a constitutive moment of enlightenment, its aim being to enable freeself-realisation. In the prevalent current interpretations of the concept of Bildung


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situation around 1800can be understood as a theoretical and practical pro-gramme of social transformation through the (trans)formation of individuals andtherefore has to be regarded as a moment in the transformation of the powerapparatus. This involvement and implication in power relations is not external tothe idea of Bildung, as often assumed, but inscribed in it from the very start.Therefore its strategic use in German educated civil society (Bildungsbrgertum)to institute new distinctions and classes and its incorporation in the power pro-cedures of the state as the professed main orientation for an increasingly institu-tionalised school system should not be considered as simply a betrayal or abuseof the concept and cannot be read only as a kind of decline or unkept promise(see Peukert, 1988). Such a reading obscures the specific implication of the conceptof Bildung in power relations. It is precisely the theoretically ambitious, not to sayvery successful establishment in practice of the idea of Bildung as a claim underwhich almost all individuals may conduct their lives8 which establishes an under-standing of the life of the individual as a dynamic, rather than fixed or defined,endless process of self-development, i.e. an understanding which is highly func-tional in and for actual social transformation processes.

The point here is to reconstruct the concept of Bildungin the context of its ownoriginal programme as a constitutive and in so far non-critical moment of modernpower transformation processes, in other words to deconstruct it. In such a per-spective, we neither understand Bildung in the context of social history as purelythe hallmark of the practices securing the bourgeois class (see Bollenbeck, 1996),nor do we read it in the context of the history of ideas as a critical utopian concept

involving contradiction or objection to domination and power (Widerspruch zuHerrschaft, Heydorn), but we attempt to denote Bildunggenealogically as a basicstructure of a newly established and transformed power apparatus, as a specificform of conduct of conducts.

The establishment of the idea of Bildungcan inform an analysis of the construc-tion and establishment of a government of individualisation or of an apparatusof individuality as a power mechanism which still operates. Foucaults concept ofapparatus (dispositif) attempts to embrace different domains which are notseparated methodologically and by discipline, but are jointly encompassed as the-

oretical and practical conditions. Foucault clarifies this concept of dispositif asfollows. It refers firstly to

un ensemble rsolument htrogne, comportant des discours, desinstitutions, des amnagements architecturaux, des dcisions rglement-aires, des lois, des mesures administratives, des noncs scientifiques, despropositions philosophiques, morales, philanthropiques, bref: du dit, aussibien que du non-dit. (Foucault, 1977, p. 299)

Secondly, he wants to indicate in the apparatus la nature du lien qui peut exister

entre ces lments htrognes and the game of their shifting positions and modi-fication of their functions. And thirdly, the apparatus has to be understood as a


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of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, which has been evoked time andagain as a central period of transformation, can also be read as a (slow) restructur-ing of just such an encompassing apparatus or dispositif in which, in a modernway, individuality and therefore also subjectivity become established categoricallyand practically as structuring principles.9

In particular, it is difficult to deny that the concept of Bildung is accomplice tothe birth of the modern subject, which Foucault time and again described as astrategic operation of individualisation and totalisation, in which separation andparticularisation cannot be disconnected from generalisation and homogenisation.In this context, and through the indeterminate relation which Foucault alwaysmaintained between power and thought practices, we can understand the subjectas fundamentum inconcussum (Descartes) both in the epistemological and socialperspective. It can be understood as the last point of reference of both discourses.The subject counts not only methodologically as the a prioriconstitutive conditionof all experience and thus as the transcendental structure of all knowledge (seeKant), it appears in the same period also as the object of the human sciences (seeFoucault, 1966, pp. 314354) and counts as an irreducible element of every order,especially in a social respect.

In this perspective, we can relate the thought structures which are introducedwith or transformed in modernity to practices and technologies of power in sucha way that they can be understood as analogous instruments of simultaneousprocesses of both individualisation and totalisation. Consequently, we can readthe philosophical pursuit of analytic reduction to elementary units (in the search

for foundations) and of the synthetic construction of the whole as a (universallybinding) totality, alongside the analogous power strategies of individualising andseparating individuals and of the construction of the social through internalisedgeneralisation (for example in the contractualist theories of the modern times), asmoments of one encompassing apparatus. Here we can put forward the thesis thatBildungconstitutes a central structure of this theoretical/practical power apparatus.Bildung can in fact be designated as central moment of a pedagogically orientedpastoral power (see also Ricken, 2000). Under this idea of Bildung, educationfocuses on the relation of the self to the self as a permanent and non-teleological

ability of self-edification and self-development. It establishes a paradoxical rela-tion in which the self is interpellated both to affirm and to negate itself (as self-transgression and self-transformation) at the same time and in which the individualcan only be regarded as a particularisation of the general. Moreover, it establishesan immunisation: while recognising the relationality of knowledge and the centralrole of the human relation to the world as media of Bildung (see also further), itnevertheless interpellates the individual as an individual divided from the other,impeding his/her constitution as one affected by and dependent on (the) others.

Of course the idea of Bildung referred not only to the individual but also, in its

political articulation, to sociality. It was formulated as critique of absolutist repres-sion and philanthropic utilitarianism, and promoted as a perspective of reform.


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state should be limited to purely negative actions. It marks for him the possibilityof a social transformation through the formation and cultivation of the individual,through which humankind could elevate itself above the existing stage of cul-ture (Humboldt, 1903a, p. 142). The state is nothing but a means to promoteBildung (of the citizen as human being) (ibid., p. 24) and transforms itselfthrough that promotion into a more efficiently organised machine which is keptin motion by the inner force of her motives and does not require continuouslynew outer actions (Humboldt, 1960, p. 27, our translation). Bildung, according toHumboldt, can reconcile the freedom of men with the coercion of the state sincein a subtle way it realises the state in men themselves.

It was the University as the privileged locus of Bildung which was charged byHumboldt with watching over the spiritual life of the people and thus tied toGerman nation-state (Readings, 1996, p. 15). The University (Bildung) would givereason to the common life of the people by aiming to produce autonomous subjectswho are supposedly made into free subjects (of the state) by what they learn.Humboldts ideas illuminate the ambivalence of the concept of Bildungwhich stillobtains today: that which on the one hand can be read as a critique of definitionsand determinations which ascribe identity, becomes a positively formulated projectin its articulation as a defence of a permanent non-identity, oriented towardsstructured progress as the principle of social transformation. In this way critiqueis seen as the practical realisation of the project of Bildung, so that its negatingmoment is transformed into a new positivity and therefore becomes obsolete ascritique. In this line of development, schools have become indispensable for an

individualised and generalised form of life (which can only be lead reflexivelyand critically). And they could therefore be seen as paradoxical institutions inwhich disciplinary power and pastoral power are conjoined as part of a bio-powerapparatus.

4. Abandoning the Concept of Bildung?

Apparently, as we have seen, the concept of Bildung remains attractive, especiallyfrom a pedagogical point of view. Although it is sometimes considered theoretically

useless, it is nonetheless often invoked as being practically indispensable. We recalltwo reasons: one is that it marks the point where educational theorists and practi-tioners descry opportunities to participate in actual practical and political debates(for example on the learning society); the other, that it marks the establishment ofa specific distinction in the field of knowledge by relating knowledge to subjectivityand thus relativising its objectivity. Indeed, the idea of Bildung includes a criticalpoint which we ought not to abandon even if we want to question the usefulnessof the idea itself, as we do. This point stresses the relational character of know-ledge. Knowledge always involves a double relation: it is given, but always given

to someone, gegeben (given) and aufgegeben (assigned). Therefore educationalpractices which orient themselves to the concept of Bildunghave to indicate always


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which could be described as a new absolutism of subjectivity (see Ricken, 2002;Masschelein, 2000). The present boom of radical constructivism can be read asan indication of this development. This brings us to our main point.

In fact, although we want to acknowledge that the critical element in the conceptof Bildungin relation to the epistemological dimension has still a certain thrust, wedo want to question the social and anthropological dimension which hides behindthe epistemological dimension. More precisely, as we have indicated above, wewant to stress the complicity of the idea of Bildung with the establishment of agovernment of individualisation which obfuscates the difficulty that our subjectiv-ity can only be conceptualised with reference to alterity; that our subjectivity alwaysimplies an irreducible withdrawal from oneself, a difference, a being captured inrelations of dependency and obligation which cannot be recovered or evaded by theindividual. Notwithstanding its critical element, the idea of Bildung which wasintroduced in the eighteenth and articulated in the nineteenth century thereforeseems to continue something which is apparently as central as it is problematic toour Western form of life. Nothing indicates that this form of life can be generalisedworldwide. On the contrary, it is a form of self-preservation through permanentexclusion which cannot be generalised.

Of course we do not expect that our simple declaration that we should abandonthe concept of Bildung will meet with much sympathy. Our attempt to refuse theconcept aims rather at drawing attention to ideas which are present in the conceptof Bildungonly in a negative sense: the idea of contingency as human finitude andof plurality as differential sociality. This would mean seeing the meaning of life in

nothing other than in this life itself (Rorty) and rejecting each form of higherdevelopment as a supposed promise for escaping actual existencewithout how-ever turning towards a resigned cynism which can do no more than acknowledgethe absurdity of existence.

Besides, the establishment of a government of individualisation makes the pro-spect of answers to last questions increasingly impossible. Of course and for sure,no timeless answers can be given by theory (as positive religion and teleologicalthinking assume time and again), but nevertheless what seems crucial to us is tomake possible new practical answers to the question of our being as the question of

being-together.In other words, we doubt whether the idea of Bildung as it is invoked and used

in our present situation is really able to provoke the development of an alternativeto our actual dominant form of life and dominant form of subjection, i.e. to playa role in those struggles which, following Foucault, question the status of theindividual, asserting the right to be different and underlining everything whichmakes individuals truly individuals, while at the same time attacking everythingwhich separates the individual, breaks his links with others forces the individualback on himself and ties him to his own identity in a constraining way (Foucault,

1982, pp. 211212). We should try to contribute to a search for ways and wordsto attack the lack of real alternatives to a specific form of life which now seems to


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In this respect, it is not possible to reduce pedagogical/educational theory andthought to neutral observation from outside or to pure historical reconstruction,because the very mode and content of present pedagogical/educational thinking is infact itself involved in that process of construction of sociality (see also Masschelein& Ricken, 2002). In this perspective, our suggestion of giving up this modernconcept of Bildungor, if you prefer, of liberal education and cultivationas acritical pedagogical concept for the analysis of (post)modern learning societies isbut a provocation to discussion and thought about other categories and other waysof analysing our present time in a pedagogical/educational perspective of permanent(re-)construction of sociality.10

Notes

1. It is difficult to translate the word Bildung in other languages. It seems to be tied very

strongly to the particular history of Germany (both as the history of the formation anddevelopment of the nation and as the history of the German thought and language).Referring to Rorty (1979, p. 360), one could use the word edification; others use theterm cultivation (Lvlie, 2000; Sennett, 1990; Readings, 1996). However, we preferhere to use mainly the German term, which is also increasingly appearing in the Anglo-Saxon discussions in philosophy of education (see, for example, Lvlie, 2000; Burbules,2001; Cleary & Hogan, 2001theJournal of Philosophy of Educationpublished a specialissue on the topic of Bildung in 2002). In a recent introductory comment on thetranslation of H. G. Gadamers address Education is Self-Education in the Journal ofPhilosophy of Education, J. Cleary and P. Hogan explain how Bildung could maybe betranslated as liberal education. However, as they rightly state, this translation, too,

would miss a lot of aspects which a historical review, like Gadamers own review inTruth and Method, recover (Cleary & Hogan, 2001, pp. 525527). Therefore, we tryto keep as much as possible to the German Bildung.

2. See for example the special issue of Educational Theoryon Globalization and Education(Rizvi & Lingard, 2000) and the issue of the Jahrbuch fr Bildungs- undErziehungsphilosophie on Globalisierung: Perspektiven, Paradoxien, Verwerfungen (Bauer,1999).

3. As an illustration, we can refer also to the latest special issue (supplement 43) of theZeitschr ift fr Pdagogikwhich is dedicated to the Zukunftsfragen der Bildung (Questionsabout the future of and in Bildung) (see Oelkers, 2001) and to the title of the bi-annualmeeting of the Deutsche Gesellschaft fr Erziehungswissenschaft in March 2002:Innnovation durch Bildung (innovation through education).

4. This astonishing ambivalence and in fact contradicting and inconsistent (theoretical)practice could be interpreted as a result of (post)modern strategies of power which canbe described as different forms of inclusion and exclusion (cf. Masschelein & Simons,2003).

5. We should not forget of course that autonomy means to be obedient to the law whichis given by the self to itself (as it recognises itself as part of the universal or idealhumanity).

6. The concept of Bildungitself is strongly bounded to the German tradition but, althoughconcrete research would be necessary, we suspect that the concepts of cultivation and

liberal education occupy very similar strategic positions in other discourses.7. The problematic of a pedagogical/educational power has received a lot of attention.However, very often these educational power mechanisms have been analysed and


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power operations and concentrate more on the concept of Bildungthen on the conceptof Erziehung as was often the case.

8. See for example article 14 on the fundamental right of Bildung/education in theEuropean Charter of Fundamental Rights, given on 7 December 2000, for a contem-porary assertion of the universality of this right.

9. See the detailed and encompassing studies by Dlmen (1997, 2001).10. We want to thank Nigel Blake for his help with the English and for his inspiringcomments.

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Necesitamos Todavía El Concepto de Formación

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