The Schools: Caught Between Colonization and Psychoanalysis

Colonization/the colony is at the horizons always to an education system (or, schools), and also it is always far away from where the action, where the stuff, for psychoanalysis takes place. It is always at the best vantage point to the education system: it is able to discern what is going on in the practice of teaching, and it disrupts this action if it is too dangerous to the colony in order to fulfill its own goals. For psychoanalysis, the effect of colonization arrives through the mediation of the education system: psychoanalysis relies on the techniques perfected in the education system, namely the techniques of narrativizing episodes (“literature”), converting persons into characters (“history”), identifying context (“sociology”) and more, enlisting, by the end, and especially in the mathemes and symbols of Lacan, even mathematics and the hard sciences. So that when colonization disrupts the education system, as a second-hand effect, it disrupts psychoanalysis; or perhaps the disruption of psychoanalysis is the intended goal, where the education system is disrupted only because it is close to psychoanalysis.

But perhaps colonization is even closer to the education system than psychoanalysis is, for as much as psychoanalysis is dependent on the education system for its raw materials and “research,” colonization has the closeness to actively disrupt the education system, as if it were a direct parent to it. Yet in another way colonization is also far away, for it puts the figure of the colonist-power/colonizer at the horizons while sending through a messenger figure of this colonist-power to do the disruptive work on the education system. Psychoanalysis seeks talking figures to conduct the talking cure, but colonization never presents subjects as talking figures, those that speak are only there to deliver prepared messages after the briefest of interactions, so that the content of their speech is second-hand, and the main reason the messengers are there is to present a written text, a written text prepared with great effort by the colonist-power to erase his/her own mark in it. As written, the text fits well with the education system (or, the textual system) as well as avoiding psychoanalysis (or, the non-textual talking cure) in a single stroke.

With the colony firmly at the horizons of the education system, the expansion of the education system is pre-figured, for it is to go towards colonization itself, it is to further “colonize,” submit to the mentality of colonialism, become colonial. The education system which in smaller form looked to be resistant to the system of colonization and the influence of the colony, upon expansion becomes a prominent force of colonialism itself. The colonized becomes the colony, and psychoanalysis now steps in to record the changes to wider society: the dilution of characters (“the end of history”), the undifferentiated space as replacement for specific context (“the beginning of an inaccurate sociology”), and more, culminating with the abandonment of the psychoanalyst by the education system which once supported it, for in a twist it is the psychoanalyst which now fulfills the role of a historical figure with a narrative and a context. The psychoanalyst becomes an object of knowledge and not the subject who fed off of or even demanded knowledge.