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Poststructural Marxisms,
the Politics of Difference
and Educational Theory
Michael A. Peters
University of Glasgow
Presentation to special
conference on Postmodernism
and Education, Taiwan, October
2004

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Orientation
The world is a work of art that gives
birth to itself
Friedrich Nietzsche, 1968, #796
Poststructural Marxisms is the
pedagogical practice of (re)reading
and (re)writing Marx in a critical
manner

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First Lesson: Always
Historicize
 The genealogy of methods
 The true co-ordinates of
poststructualism in structural
linguistics in pre-Revolutionary
Russia and European avant garde
 Narratology and the application of
structuralism to narrative
 Historicizing discourse

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Second Lesson: Always
Materialize (or nearly
always)
 The linguistic turn and philosophical
modernism
 The birth of literary culture
 Texts and speech as cultural ‘materials’
fashioning the self, individual and identity
 Narrative as textual analogue for the self
 Materializing self-consciousness: the
embodied self

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Third Lesson: Do Not
Prioritize Power Over
Desire (or vice versa)
 Marx, Freud and Nietzsche as
‘masters of suspicion’
 Repudiation of the dream of an
innocent language
 The discursive operation of power
and desire in the constitution of
human subjects, practices and
social institutions.

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Fourth Lesson: From
Political to Symbolic
Economy
 The ‘culturalization’ of the economy and
the ‘economization’ of culture
 The collapse of the base-superstructure
model
 The digitalization of communication and
its increasing compression and speed
 The emergence of the knowledge
economy

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Fifth Lesson: From the
Knowledge to the Learning
Economy
 ‘Fast capitalism’ and the
McDonaldization of education
 Increased knowledge turnover and rapid
change of knowledge stock with strong
emphasis on links between
organizational learning and innovation
 New ICT-based learning processes have
emerged in the post-Fordist era which
have reduced the costs of transmission,
storage, archiving, and retrieval of
information, and made different kinds of
networking possible

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Fifth Lesson:
Capitalization of the Self
 The growth of intellectual, human and
social capital and increasing importance
of all forms of capitalisation of the self
 Accent on ‘logic of performativity’
(Lyotard) and epistemologies of
performance
 Role for government in developing
learning infrastructure, providing
incentives, promoting access to
knowledge, and decreasing costs of
forgetting

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Sixth Lesson: Affinities
with Structuralism
 The critique of humanist (liberal)
philosophy and the decentering of
the rational, autonomous, self-
transparent, subject of humanist
thought.
 A general theoretical
understanding of language and
culture in terms of linguistic and
symbolic systems.

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Seventh Lesson:
Differences with
Structuralism
New Historicism
 The reintroduction of history as
genealogy
 The challenge to scientism and
essentialism in the human sciences, anti-
foundationalism in epistemology and
ethics, and a new emphasis upon
perspectivism
 The rediscovery of Nietzsche and the
significance of ‘the death of God’

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Seventh Lesson (continued)
The Critique of Reason
 The critique of classical reason and
suspicion of official metanarratives
 The diagnosis of ‘power/knowledge’ and
the exposure of technologies of
domination based upon Foucault’s
analytics of power
 A critical philosophy of techno-science
 Understanding the emerging geopolitics
of the global knowledge economy

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Seventh Lesson (continued)
Politics of difference
 A deepening of democracy through a
political critique of Enlightenment values
 Understanding of ‘governmentality’ as
political reason linking forms of
governance and the self-regulating
individual (cf. couplization)
 Emergent forms of postcoloniality,an
emphasis on philosophies of difference
and the encounter with the Other
 ‘The multitude’ – the coming of world
democracy (Derrida, Hardt & Negri)

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References
Peters,M.A. & Besley, T. (2005) Building Knowledge
Cultures: Education & Development in an Age of
Knowledge Capitalism. Lanham & Oxford, Rowman &
Littlefield.
Peters, M.A. & Burbules, N. (2004) Poststructuralism and
Educational Research. Lanham & Oxford, Rowman &
Littlefield.
Peters, M.A. (2001) Poststructuralism, Marixism and
Neoliberalism. Lanham & Oxford, Rowman & Littlefield.
Peters, M.A. (1996) Poststructuralism, Politics and
Education. Westport, CT & London, Bergin & Garvey.