Postcritical discourse analysis: examining the case of the student well-being discourse
Marina Schwimmer
Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 58, Issue 6, December 2024, Pages 1015–1028, https://doi.org/10.1093/jopedu/qhae077
Published: 13 November 2024 Article history
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Abstract
This article examines how the critical tradition initiated by Nietzsche and pursued through poststructuralism might be compatible with what is currently being described as postcritique. It does so by looking at the example of critical discourse analysis (CDA).
The first section gives some indications about the state of the methodology currently known as critical discourse analysis and introduces what a ‘postcritical’ reaction could look like.
The second section focuses on a concrete example and presents the main critical literature about the student well-being discourse, showing that it generally limits itself to a debunking attitude.
The third section explores how the affirmative and creative dimension of critique, its ‘postcritical’ dimension, has been and could be put forward to contribute to what could be called a postcritical discourse analysis methodology
Issue Section: Original Article
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Introduction
In response to what is often described as a fatigue of critique, postcritical approaches have emerged in several fields of the social sciences and humanities in recent years.1 For example, against a tendency to read texts with critical distance, detachment, through a hermeneutic of suspicion, Rita Felski (2015) argues for the rehabilitation of a more immanent form of reading that allows for aesthetic pleasure, enchantment, and reinvigoration. Laurent de Sutter (2019), in trying to identify cross-disciplinary aspects of postcriticality, has edited a book that brings together researchers from the fields of philosophy, law, literature, and anthropology. According to him, our current forms of critique (as lucidity) make us stupid, and we need to define other critical possibilities. For example, Armen Avenassian claims that postcritique is concerned with a speculative and poetic othering, involving abductive and recursive processes that testify to a new behaviour: the practice of thinking through doing2 (2019: 27).
In a similar way, the project of postcritical pedagogy initiated by Naomi Hodgson, Joris Vlieghe, and Piotr Zamojski rejects the tendency in critical pedagogy towards suspicion and advocates a different, affirmative, approach. Contrary to critical pedagogy which is centred around the unveiling and denunciation of unjust power relations to enlighten and bring about the conditions deemed necessary for social change (and may lead to cynicism or disenchantment), postcritical pedagogy considers that if there are indeed things in the world that we should hate, there is also a lot to be cherished and the role of a pedagogue is not one of rejection and refusal but one of care and initiation (Hodgson, Vlieghe and Zamojski 2018; Vlieghe and Zamojski 2019). Perhaps the main preoccupations of postcritical pedagogy can be put in three main categories: 1) postcritique is an ethos (vs a reflexive process). It recognizes that critique concerns living things and is a lived experience; 2) postcritique is about affirmation (vs denunciation). It is about love, care, preservation of the world in the Arendtian sense; 3) postcritique is about interruption and hope in the present through the initiation of something new. Perhaps this is a way of insisting on the matter that emancipation is not as a trajectory towards enlightenment that can be attained through the devising of plans but should be conceived as a capacity, again, to live in affirmation, here and now.
What the authors of the manifesto for a postcritical pedagogy are advocating is an understanding of education as initiation, initiation to the world through the study of that world, and for its own sake. Hence, it is itself a critique of critical pedagogy, which too often sums up, they claim, to a questioning and denouncing of the power structures that underlie education, its practices, as well as the knowledge it claims to transmit. Schooling, for example, is viewed as a possible time and space of interruption of the social and the political, a privileged time and space of study, a hopeful one, where students are not only introduced to the world by adults (pedagogues) who care for the world, but where they can learn to rely on themselves and initiate something new themselves. Hence, here again, we find a plea for a critique that is immanent, that does not come after the fact, a critique that, through affirmation, might open the possibility of producing, of building as Zamojski (2024) puts it in his article published in this same issue, something in the present.
With these postcritical claims, Stefano Oliverio and Bianca Thoilliez3 suggest that we might be witnessing the birth of a paradigmatic shift in our relationship to knowledge and critique. It is impossible to verify this claim in the present, but it seems important to point out that the call for what is called postcriticality here is not new. One can find similar calls all the way back in the texts of the Cynics in Antiquity (Sloterdijk 1988) and most significantly in Nietzsche’s call for learning to live affirmatively, ‘a disposition for trying to say yes to see what it does’4 (Astor 2019: 78), Indeed, Dorian Astor (2019) insists on the idea that researchers who undertake a pure hermeneutic of suspicion, using a methodology of uncertainty or a constructivist guidebook under the name of Nietzsche have misread (or never read) him. The same could be said of the poststructuralist tradition that postcritique defendants often attack as being too suspicious and leading to relativism, fatigue, and cynicism. Archaeology or deconstruction, as Michel Foucault (1969, 2001a), Jacques Derrida (1967; 1972), and others have practised, should in no way be reduced to a critical perspective understood as suspicion and liquidation of meaning constructions. The task of unveiling, debunking, or unmasking perspectivism was never the actual goal of most poststructuralist thinkers but only a means for something else. The whole point of destabilizing meanings through deconstruction or genealogy is thus not to undermine the possibility of meaning but to open new possibilities, to affirm and allow for something new to take shape. As Astor puts it, it is not about exclusion but about preference and love, about ‘the determination of what matters’5 (2019: 87). In other words, postcriticality, from this point of view, was always already a constitutive part of critique.
In what follows, the tradition of critical discourse analysis (CDA) will be examined to show how the critical tradition initiated by Nietzsche and pursued through poststructuralism, has been taken up and might have been lost on the way. The goal is to somehow contribute to the rehabilitation of the initial impetus (or conatus) of this critical tradition in current methodologies that are born from it and that might have crystallized in methodological orthodoxies. The first section will give some indications about the state of the methodology currently known as CDA and introduce what a ‘postcritical’ reaction could look like. The second section focuses on the concrete example of the critical discourse about student well-being, showing that it generally limits itself to a debunking attitude. The third section explores how the affirmative and creative dimension of critique, its ‘postcritical’ dimension, has been and could be put forward to contribute to what could be called a postcritical discourse analysis methodology.
Discourse analysis: the deciphering of meaning
Discourse analysis generally refers to the analysis of the meaning of discourses, understood as any contextualized expression of language, whether they are linguistic or not, including social practices (e.g. clothing, gestures, intonation) (Schiffrin et al. 2008). It is generally divided into descriptive and critical approaches.
The descriptive approach
The descriptive approach to discourse analysis is primarily linguistic and looks at the functioning of language, the grammar, the way sentences relate to one another, stylistic or rhetorical procedures, and may take at least two different forms: 1) Formal linguistic discourse analysis (such as sociolinguistics) looks at samples of written or oral texts to analyse the meaning and uses of language. This type of work would mainly be carried out by linguists (Hodges et al. 2008: 571). 2) Empirical discourse analysis (such as conversation analysis or genre analysis) looks at language not as a purely linguistic structure but as a practice in use. For example, it could look at the ways in which language is used in concrete social or cultural practices, such as communication between doctors and nurses (Hodges et al. 2008) or between teachers and students.
The critical approach
From a critical perspective, language is never neutral and always inevitably carries and installs power relations. Hence, discourse should never be analysed without considering the influence of the social and political contextual factors embedded in the discourse being analysed. This understanding of discourse analysis has been largely influenced by Foucault’s work according to whom discourse should be understood as a system of thought, an episteme, that makes certain things thinkable and sayable in a particular historical period, thus being the reflection of the social, cultural, and political norms of the period in question. Very often, when the social sciences undertake discourse analysis, they tend to adopt such a critical perspective to denounce and resist various forms of oppression. As such, according to Norman Fairclough, the main agenda of CDA is:
to systematically explore often opaque relationships of causality and determination between (a) discursive practices, events and texts, and (b) wider social and cultural structures, relations and processes; to investigate how such practices, events and texts arise out of and are ideologically shaped by relations of power and struggles over power. (Fairclough 1995: 132)
Because of this preoccupation, critical discourse analysts tend to analyse discourses that exercise dominant or hegemonic power on people, cultures, societies, for example, phallocentric discourses, ethnocentric or racist discourses, certain types of mediatic discourses, political discourses, dominant institutional and professional discourses (van Dijk, 2008). According to Teun van Dijk, the issue of discursive power can be split up into two basic questions addressed to the text: ‘1. How do (more) powerful groups control public discourse? 2. How does such discourse control the mind and action of less powerful groups, and what are the social consequences of such control, such as social inequality?’ (van Dijk, 2008: 355). In doing so, CDA is very effective in denaturalizing discourses, which although they are the product of ideological mechanisms appear as if they were natural (Fairclough 1995).
Understood as such, the critical methodology, although useful to uncover the ideological nature of our discourses and thoughts, has its limits. Firstly, it may prove constraining for the analyst because they pretty much know in advance what they will find. There is no doubt that if you look for male, white, or English domination, you will find it. This is not to say that such analysis is unimportant, on the contrary, it is crucial to uncover new and more refined forms of domination. Secondly, since it can be argued that all discourses are social and historical formations, then they all become suspicious and must be put into question. This suspicion is important to some extent, but it can also lead to excesses and relativism. As such, analysing all discourses through this form of critical lens only may lead to the rejection of practices and traditions that looked at from a different perspective may well prove to be worth preserving.
Towards a postcritical approach?
A postcritical approach to discourse analysis could consider that examining the historical nature of our discourses itself deconstructs and attention to this could help to justify the importance of what we contribute to construct and preserve. Indeed, although it is often thought that poststructuralism is predominantly a critical tool used to demystify, I would argue that it is postcritical as well. Demystification, for the poststructuralist, is only a first step in the understanding of a discourse. When the analyst uncovers the multiple layers embedded in a discourse, they do not only show its constructed nature, they also make visible its accumulated possibilities of meaning, many often forgotten. This allows us to rework that discourse, to see how it might be transgressed and perhaps become more fruitful. Inspirations for this type of methodology might be found in the work of Homi Bhabha (1994) who has reworked the discourse about nationalism or the work of Aimé Césaire (1971) with the political and literary trend of ‘négritude’, a term coined to reclaim the otherwise often pejorative meaning of blackness and assert the beauty of the cultural values of Africa.
What the two examples have in common is a particular understanding of language as open to the reassignation of meaning. Critical approaches tend to focus on the normalized meaning of signs. Certain signs are deemed offensive and as perpetuating forms of violence and domination and should be denounced and avoided at all costs. However, this dimension of language, which may be described as ‘communicative’, or as simply transmitting predefined meaning is not the only one. Language is also in large part a creative enterprise and meaning is always evolving. Jacques Derrida (1972), Roland Barthes (1986), and others have shown this fundamental ambiguity at the heart of the functioning of signs, ambiguity that allows them to indeed acquire a specific meaning in a specific context to be communicable, but also allows them to be reworked and produce new meanings. Hence a discourse analysis can look at social, political, and historical contexts and the power relations that are productive at a certain period in time and that influence the production of a text, but it can also try to be sensitive to the veiled possibilities of meaning a text encloses and may be able to transgress previous and accepted ones.
To develop this further, and away from classical cases related to cultural, gender, or racial identities, I now want to turn to another type of discourse that is gaining more and more traction nowadays, the well-being discourse. Here, CDA takes a particular form: what is analysed and criticized is the hegemony of a certain scientific and professional discourse based on positive psychology and neurosciences. It is relevant to note that CDA here also draws to some extent on critical policy analysis since governmental policies and programmes are central to the analysis of this discourse. Contrary to policy analysis, which focuses mostly on the analysis of policies to enhance them and make them more efficient, critical policy analysis is concerned with: ‘a) the educational, moral and social concerns underlying the policy studies, b) the broad conception of policy, including politics, the mechanisms of power and the relation with the wider social context, and c) the diverse forms of critical advocacy’ (Simons et al. 2009: 17). Critical policy analysis and CDA intersect in this regard.
Enough of the discourse of student well-being!
Since it was popularized in the 1960s and ’70s, most notably through the thriving field of humanist psychology and the human potential movement and was reframed around the 1990s through the developments of positive psychology and neuroscience, the well-being discourse has spread widely (Wright 2014). This is highlighted by the proliferation of self-help books, workshops and therapies, scientific research, policy documents, TV shows, centred around the pursuit of happiness, that are promoted by psychologists, economists, policymakers, educators, and society.
Although there is not one clear conception of well-being guiding this important trend, it remains possible to identify a general ‘discourse’ about well-being in the sense suggested by Foucault of an epistemological construction that allows certain statements and thoughts and excludes others. Nicolas Marquis (2014) who analysed a wide range of self-help books has shown that although they are diverse (some focus on health while others on self-confidence or on communication), they still share the same goal: helping individuals find their inner strengths to transcend themselves and change their lives proactively. Certain ideas of autonomy, authenticity, responsibility, self-reliance, self-regulation, resilience, or optimism that have been neutralized in some way and have come to represent a particular, idealized way of life, run through all of them. It seems important to point out that the way in which these ideas have come to be understood through the well-being discourse are rather nihilistic because they discourage richer and stronger accounts of what it could mean to live authentically or with self-reliance, that is to say probably more defiantly. And there is no doubt that this well-being vocabulary translates quite intactly in the field of education through notions of building resilience, cultivating social and emotional skills, and helping every student fulfil their full potential.
Indeed, this discourse is not only promoted by major international organizations such as UNESCO (2016) and the OECD (2018) but is also clearly discernible in most Western societies more broadly. In Quebec, for example, the well-being discourse emerged in the 1970s and has gained much prevalence in past decades. Discourse analysis of documents such as educational curricula, research reports for governmental use, official teachers’ association communications, professional journals, teacher interviews, and the like can illustrate the evolution of this discourse (Schwimmer 2018; 2021). As such, in the ’70s an important report published by the Conseil supérieur de l’Éducation (CSE 1971), following a similar one in the curricular reform of the 1960s (Québec, 1966), asked educators to be more concerned with ‘students’ inner life’ and their ‘whole development’ as a person, including their ‘emotional and affective needs’. In the following decades, this progressive discourse became prevalent. The official school programme produced in 2006 affirmed the centrality of ‘students’ needs’ and of helping them fulfil their ‘full potential’ (Québec, 2006). Although it was never made explicit in the discourse, anyone familiar with the dominant language of humanist psychology (with proponents such as Abraham Maslow or Carl Rogers, for example) will recognize its underlying presence, what Annemarie Mol calls its ‘resonance’ (Mol 2020). Then in the past two decades, the well-being discourse has evolved in line with a more medical, and later neuroscientific stance. In 2005, a report on well-being insisted on the importance of promoting good health habits and preventing bullying (Québec, 2005). In 2019, much in line with the OECD report (2018), the CSE published a new report promoting the ‘cultivation of social and emotional skills’, which mostly relied on arguments borrowed from positive psychology and neurosciences (CSE 2020).
This discourse has given rise to critical work, including CDA, denouncing its socio-cultural pervasiveness. Critics have argued that it reflects a general tendency towards psychologization (overanalysing through the lens of psychology), depersonalization (fragmentation of the self in the context of cultural relativism), and neoliberal normalization (inculcating of neoliberal values) (Furedi 2004; Illouz 2008; Ahmed 2010). In the field of education, similar criticisms take place. For example, Steadman Rice deplores that young people in the USA are educated ‘in the vocabulary of emotion and the practice of self-absorption’ and that education is less and less about instruction (2002). Although they recognize that education and therapy are inevitably connected, Paul Smeyers, Richard Smith, and Paul Standish (2010) argue that the rhetoric of therapeutic education, with its emphasis on self-esteem, confidence, or stress management, ‘conceals the complexity of human existence’ (p. 24). Problems encountered by students are understood as coming from the self and having to be solved in the self, through the mastery of certain skills, instead of being explored as matters of the world that come to matter to students, in terms of their identity and what motivates them. At the heart of this, and following the line of thought developed by Nicolas Rose (1998), lies the idea that the professional power exerted by the field of psychology has grown to such an extent that it has imposed a view of how subjects understand their lives and should govern themselves (see e.g. Gagen 2015; Brunila and Siivonen 2016).
Many contemporary critics denounce that this psychologized educational experience also reflects a will to optimize students’ psychological development. This line of thought insists not only on the pervasiveness of the psychological discourse, but on its complicity with the neoliberal one as well. As Catherine Kingfisher (2013) argues, it is not a coincidence that positive thinking, self-regulation, self-examination, and entrepreneurialism are also the qualities required for the neoliberal economy. Hence, the well-being discourse is shown to contribute to the fabrication of entrepreneurial subjects who are flexible, responsible, and proactive (Bradbury 2019; Schwimmer 2021). Young people thus become the target of a managerial power that gains from ensuring that citizens are formed to govern themselves to be productive and competitive.
Moreover, some critics have shown how this discourse may be even more detrimental to underprivileged groups. Referring to the work of Sara Ahmed (2010), Liz Jackson and Charles Bingham (2018) note that the expectation that every student develops the skills to be happy fails to acknowledge how unjust pre-existing social and political relations might understandably prevent flourishing to a certain degree. Ahmed has shown convincingly how happiness has served historically as a justification for colonialism. On the pretext that native people were not ‘happy’ according to established expectations, it seemed justified to civilize them. Even if the wish for them to find happiness might have been sincere, what was wished for is that they find happiness without compromising the established equilibrium, thus imposing a moral order and maintaining the status quo.
These lines of criticism are important in showing how dominant discourses such as psychology and management, come to influence the way we conceive well-being and thus how we understand ourselves, work on ourselves, and expect others to do so. However, by insisting primarily on issues of power imbalance they produce, they fail to recognize the other possibilities they may contain. From a postcritical perspective, discourse analysis should not only describe and reveal the (hidden) meaning of discourses. Other ways to relate to it may be more productive, for example, looking at the different layers or possibilities of meanings that can historically be found in a discourse, as Derrida’s or Foucault’s approaches have shown, or how they resonate, as Mol points out (2020), when analysing how the word schoon, (which means clean) loses its Dutch resonances when translated in English. As she puts it: ‘Such resonances are not simply characteristics of ‘a language’—an allegedly well-rounded system of signs that may be caught within the confines of a dictionary. Instead, they have to do with all kinds of particularities of the practices in which words participate’ (p.386). She then goes on to develop how they may refer to cultural, material, semantic, or multilingual resonances.
Indeed, it might be fruitful to ask the question: what remains educational in the well-being discourse? Is the well-being discourse entirely wrong and miseducative in essence or is there still something to be rescued? Certainly, there is much to want to preserve. Indeed, technologies of well-being can also be conceived as pedagogical exercises that can help students explore and define who they are or might become through expression, attention, and conversation. Hence, I will argue that it might be helpful to rework the analysis of the well-being discourses and reconsider the technologies they promote through frameworks that put their possibilities to the front. Hence, the next section aims at understanding how from a methodological point of view we can go beyond CDA and articulate a postcritical discourse analysis (PCDA) framework.
PCDA: reclaiming the affirmative aspect of criticism
Much in line with the poststructuralist tradition, two aspects are explored in this section. First, it describes the poststructuralist gesture as a way of paying attention to the layers of meaning of a discourse. Then, it looks at what happens when this first gesture has been performed, how new meanings and experiences come to be possible. In line with postcritical methodologies, it is suggested that discourses contain more than first appear, not in terms of hidden power struggles, but in terms of possibilities of meaning (which are never fixed once and for all). The idea is to look at texts and traditions and to engage with them diffractively in a free and unprogrammed way. As Geerts and Van der Tuin put it, following Karen Barad:
diffractively engaging with texts and intellectual traditions means that they are dialogically read ‘through one another’ to engender creative, and unexpected outcomes (…) Rather than flat-out rejecting what has been theorised before, the foundations of the old, so to say, are being re-used to think anew. (2021: 30)
For the critic, adhering to well-being discourse uncritically is naïve and ill-informed. In a way, the critic believes they know better because they can see what is hidden, the underlying structure of power relations underneath the well-being discourse. But surely, critique is more than trying to uncover the meaning hidden between the lines. A richer account of critique, one we could call criticism to mark the difference towards an account that integrates fully the postcritical dimension, might look at what is there, what is also manifest, enabled, made possible, through the discourse.
Katie Wright (2014) analysed the well-being discourse in the Australian context going back to its origins in the 1960s and ’70s to show how the well-being discourse was not primarily of an unacknowledged ‘therapeutic turn’, as many put it, but also, and very explicitly, of a growing democratic concern for justice in Western societies. A major part of her paper is devoted to acknowledging the important critical work that has been done about the well-being discourse. Hence, she cannot be said to adopt a naïve view of the phenomenon. However, against the sociological and philosophical critique of the pervasiveness of a culture that psychologizes social life, that promotes narcissism, self-absorption, and victimhood, and that has shifted away from the traditional goals of schooling, she shows how the concern for students’ social and emotional well-being is actually historically tied up to new priorities in the 1960s and ’70s to conceive forms of schooling that were less traditional and more equitable, less authoritarian and more sensitive to children’s needs and differences, and hence where every child could truly participate in the educational project. It seems important to note that the fact that the democratic discourse of well-being evolved and stabilized to become a discourse about equality of opportunities and individualized needs was never a necessity. One could try to imagine other ways of defining what is a democratic education, not one that seeks to equalize every child’s opportunities, but perhaps one that seeks to acknowledge every child’s dignity and foster capabilities (Sen 1995), or perhaps one that seeks to initiate each one to the world through its collective study (Vlieghe and Zamojski 2019). Indeed, the meaning of a democratic education could be different as long as the concern (the matter of concern) for an education that is available to all remains. Hence, at the heart of the therapeutic turn in education, there would be, according to Wright, a democratic aspect worth preserving from a critical perspective.
Child-centred pedagogies are generally described as opposed to ‘postcritical pedagogy’ (PCP) (Vlieghe and Zamojski 2019). Indeed, PCP values education for education’s sake, the love of a subject matter, and tries to turn away from pedagogies that are seen as instrumental and overly concerned with learning processes. Education should not, in this view, be a learning device, but a milieu of study of the world we share. However, the gesture of identifying the progressive layer of meaning embedded in the well-being discourse should by no means be read as a will to vindicate or legitimize a certain type of discourse over other ones. The point here is to destabilize the notion that the well-being discourse should necessarily be reduced to the idea of a hegemony of the therapeutic culture by showing that there are other less discussed aspects in this discourse that a different form of critique, let’s say criticism, might help to identify and work through: in this instance a democratic aspect identified by Wright (2014).
One may claim that the progressive aspect of well-being discourses is far from being silenced nowadays since positive psychologists and educational managers do claim that learning some emotional skills or attending to students’ individual affective needs is an important factor for developing autonomy and for achievement, especially for young people from underprivileged backgrounds. This is precisely the explicit and dominant discourse critical discourse analysts denounce in the first place. So what does Wright’s analysis add to the story? Perhaps, it is a recontextualization of where and how this discourse emerged in the first place, not as an instrumental tool to increase individualized achievement, but as a counter-discourse to programmes that have a strong traditionalist orientation. In a way, Wright’s work provides an example of Latour’s postcritical call to treat things not as matters of facts (as CDA often does) and more as matters of concern, as living and socially relevant things that concern us here and now, a call to reconnect those things to the network of productive associations and interactions that gave them life in the first place and not as determined and fixed categories of thought (Latour 2004). Her work seeks to understand the movement or vitality underlying the ramifications of the discourse. Hence, she insists on the importance of taking a historical stance and being open to the web of traditions of thought and disciplinary perspectives that informs the discourse and that might help to see other possibilities of meaning that are linked to democratic values. This differs from classic CDA by drawing attention to the somehow silenced or unacknowledged aspects of the discourse (vs only uncovering the hidden power relations).
Furthermore, the meaning of the well-being discourse could be understood in many other ways as one could look all the way back to ancient notions of care for the self in different philosophical schools, to Buddhist or other traditions of thought such as psychoanalysis. One could look at what I would call, following Gilles Deleuze (1975), ‘minor discourses’. A concrete example could be found in the work of the late Foucault, who explored at length the various practices founded on the precept of care for the self (epimeleia heautou) that was initiated in antiquity and became the matrix of Christian ascetism and later of modern thought (2001a: 6–16). Foucault was concerned with the necessity to reverse the ‘Cartesian moment’ and to redefine this tradition of care for the self, and of moral philosophy in general, as a way of living (spirituality) rather than as theoretical discourse (philosophy), retrieving the Greek wisdom in a sense (p. 16). To live well, in this tradition, is to ask the question of how one ought to live, and thus how to live deliberately, not following imposed rules and conventions, but affirming the self through transformation, through certain technologies of the self that ‘allow individuals to act on their body and soul, their thoughts, their conducts, and ways of being … to reach a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection or immortality’6 (2001b: 1,604). This language resonates in a particular way when considered in the backdrop of the contemporary discourses in education that claims that education should help students understand who they are, construct their identities, and plan their life projects. Contrary to this view, where identity construction is seen as a rational and autonomous endeavour, Foucault shows that ‘self-construction’ can also be about refusing the self as it is, as it has already been constructed, and experimenting with it. Transformation, in this view, can occur in two ways: through love (erôs) and through ascetism (askêsis). Erôs comes from the outside, from an illumination that can induce a form of ascension, whereas askêsis is a work on the self for which the self is responsible (2001a: 17). As such, at the heart of this notion of care for the self, there are notions of attitude, of conversion, of love, and of self-transformation (p. 12) that echo the postcritical notions of ethos and affirmation mentioned earlier. Critique, again, does not only take the form of a refusal of principles, but is seen as having to be incarnated, practised, in daily life, if one is to live well and deliberately so as to be able to attain some form of bliss or tranquillity, which are different ways of approaching the question of well-being.
What generally leads critical theorists to criticize and denounce a discourse is generally its hegemonic function. Hence, CDA often concentrates on dominant discourses (political, institutional, mainstream media, or major research traditions). However, at the periphery, there are dissident voices, different intakes and sensitivities that testify to discursive irregularities (2001a). These discourses are crucial because they provide examples of ways in which the discourse of well-being may be translated or reappropriated differently. This phase of translation, is a time and space where interruption can occur, a time for what matters and should concern us, where one can affirm aspects of well-being over others, with the understanding of the political and historical aspects that influence it, and a preoccupation for what is, or is not, educational in them.
A postcritical analysis of the student well-being discourse is attentive to what happens in the breach when dominant meanings have been destabilized, and something needs to be enacted, when teachers or other educationists are concerned with students’ well-being, here and now. By indefinitely taking us back to the problem of fixing or determining meaning, this places the very possibility of meaning into tension, and consequently submits us to the experience of the impossibility of meaning, or as Derrida (1996) calls it, ‘the experience of aporia’. Therefore, it is not ultimately an act of understanding (of the meaning) but more importantly an act of opening new possibilities that we cannot fully predict or control. This is an ethical moment requiring to decide what matters and what to do next and to be responsible for what is to come. It is not a situation of planning for an anticipated future to realize according to a plan. It is about enabling, enacting, affirming an experience of well-being here and now, ways of living deliberately, of living in common also, that might not have yet been imagined, acting as if it were a genuine possibility, with no telos in view, and see what happens. Put differently, the postcritical moment is one of exploring and being able to perceive what is made possible, what may emerge from the destabilization of meaning in terms of experiences.
The examples examined here seem fruitful not only because they offer ways of enabling richer and more complex ways of thinking, of discussing and practising well-being but also because they are compatible with the very project of postcritical pedagogy. They exemplify a way of caring for the world through the initiation of something that matters to us as human beings, as cultural beings, as teachers of a subject matter. Such a methodology allows a ‘diffractive reading’ of well-being discourses, putting different ways to think about what it means to live well together and seeing what it does. In turn, this makes for a relevant subject of study, it also allows experimentation and could hopefully engender creative and unexpected well-being discourses and practices. This could be truly educational in that it could constitute an initiation to a dimension of the world that can be seen as worth caring for and preserving. Well-being is not currently constituted as a subject matter in schools; however, it could be argued that it would offer a richness of language for thinking, discussing about well-being, or about what it means to live well, to care for the self or the world, to live in common, to risk ourselves, etc., and perhaps even for experimenting with them. These are undoubtedly important issues for any human being.
Conclusion
A general result of the contemporary spread of well-being discourses around the world has been the development of a technological language and apparatus to address well-being issues such as self-regulation (mindfulness, conflict resolution, cardiac coherency, cognitive behaviour therapy) or self-expression (identification of emotions, expression of feelings, reflective journaling). As CDA has extensively shown, this language is to be questioned because it often privileges adaptation to an unjust world, blindly reaffirming capitalist values and contributing to forms of normalization that may prove alienating, especially for underprivileged groups. A postcritical response would put forward a different way to live in language, a different attitude towards meaning, recognizing the way it works, in an open way, open to new uses and in constant translation. It would try to resist forms of crystallization into discourses that would again induce instrumental and constraining ways of understanding well-being. It is impossible to predict or programme what a postcritical language of well-being would look like exactly, for this would go against the very spirit of postcriticality. However, it can be said that it would not emerge from a particular theory of well-being, it would rather be experimental and try to affirm something worth caring for in the present.
Perhaps some will wonder if what has just been described can really be construed as postcritical discourse analysis? Some could argue that PCDA should abandon a hermeneutical stance, that it should be postdiscursive because postcriticality is fundamentally anti-linguistic and materialistic, it seeks to establish ‘an affective bond … an embodied relation … to understand how it exerts its conatus’ (Croce in Oliverio and Thoilliez, in this issue). Perhaps, what could be answered is that discourse and language do have materiality as well, they not only produce discursive meaning, but concrete effects in terms of affects, resonances, and relations. To conclude, the work of imagination that is required if we are truly concerned about allowing the next generation to explore other potentialities of existence might involve initiating them to the study of well-being (or other related concepts), to what it means as well as to what it produces on the self.
