End Of Education: Toward Posthumanism (Volume 1)

by William V. Spanos

In this groundbreaking work, William V. Spanos offers a powerful contribution to the impassioned debates about the crisis of the humanities. Drawing from various discourses of contemporary theory (primarily from Heidegger and Foucault), The End of Education constitutes a deconstruction of the discourse and practice of the modern humanist university. Spanos uses and transforms Heidegger's critique of the centered circle of Being in metaphysical, scientific, and humanist discourses and Foucault's critique of the panoptic gaze of disciplinary society to disclose the interplay between ontology and sociopolitics and between the so-called disinterested pursuit of Truth and the development of an ideological state. Spanos argues that both the left ("liberal") and the right ("conservative") are in complicity in appropriating emergent and different texts and social groups in such a way as to reaffirm the validity of the humanist tradition and thereby the validity of the universalist logic of the project of the Enlightenment that continues to govern our idea of politics and social transformation.

Genres: Philosophy

304 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1992

Reviews

[Manuel Correa · Rating 5 out of 5]

La premisa que desentraña que los presupuestos detrás de las instituciones que legitiman el poder y le sirven como instrumentos de perpetuidad es impactante. La relación lingüística "onto-teo-logía" es profundamente ideológica. Destruir/desarticular (Heidegger) la metafísica occidental sigue siendo fundamental, sobre todo en los armazones institucionales y aún en las posturas críticas que no logran, como dice Spanos, teorizar la hegemonía.

Algo similar me hace pensar la ironía, de acuerdo a Marcuse, que el pensamiento platónico, como crítica de la cultura no logra superar, dando lugar a la utopia: la crítica de las jerarquías que, finalmente Aristóteles terminará legitimando en la ontología, es la marca de occidente y de nuestro tiempo.

[Alex Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a pretty great book although it is somewhat dated (early 90s).

Here Spanos examines how the educational crisis from the student protests of the Vietnam War led towards the partial dissolution of humanism. Humanism is the image of the ideal form of a human, which led towards slavery and other forms of injustices as the ideal form often excluded large swathes of people (women, people of other races and cultures). With these protests the universities and the US government started to include "others" into its fold of legitimacy such as instituting "African-American studies" and so on. However such victories were partial as they left untouched the larger apparatuses of power and ideology, such as the power structure and the very modernist assumptions of truth and rationality, which had latent ideological content from humanism. Essentially universities became machines to "white-wash" people's identities so that they could join in the ranks of those who would uphold white-American "traditional" values as upheld by their British predecessors.

In that sense postmodernism is essentially window dressing on modernist institutions. Spanos ends his remark in the early 90s talking about the fragmentation of humanism as in "identities are not identical" wherein each voice is liberated from the cage of humanist principles. We get into now, in the 21st century with a humanism for each race, in which there is a metaphysics of presence for each identity... at the most extreme this is an unassailable subjectivity wherein "to me it's my truth" which forbids any other kind of objection.

To that end, Spanos explains a period of early postmodernism, ending in a posthumanism that of a mid-stage of postmodernism where it promised a larger victory to come. That victory as we know never really came, as late stage postmodernism has degraded into many unwanted and wrongheaded actions, even further alienating the very people it is supposed to help.

While Spanos recognizes that early stage postmodernism was elitist, often students from Ivy League universities failed to connect with and account for the perspectives of the working class-- this is made even further alienating as late stage postmodernism still fails to truly challenge the power structures it protects as those forms of authority were preserved with the initial compromises that started postmodernism as a cultural critique in the first place.

All in all this is an instructive textbook on the history of this period, and how latent humanism persists in academia despite the ideals of inclusion and awakening.