Foreword

In conversation with the chapters of the book and the works of Michel Foucault, this Foreword brings to the attention of the reader what are, in my understanding, some (among many) particular traits of Ball’s ‘other art of academic existence’ that have to do with the three dimensions of critique, clinique, and ethics. In the theoretical and epistemological diffractions analysed in Part I, the dangerous acts of thinking and acting at the margins reported in Part II, and the exposing of education policies to critical scrutiny in Part III of this book, it is possible to see the deictic value of Ball’s works, their pedagogical power as point- ing gestures that have opened the possibility for a multiplication of spaces of ‘stubborn exteriority’, in which academic practice constructs points of resistance ‘independently’ of the weave of power-knowledge. Those spaces and practices share with Ball’s own academic practice a par- ticular kind of critical orientation, intended here in a Foucauldian sense as a problematising and transformative attitude towards ourselves and our educa- tional present. Critique here is the force that inspires a ‘patient labor’ to turn the educational present into an actuality. Recalling Foucault’s essay Nietzsche, Genealogy, History (1977a), Ball has often remarked that knowledge is made for cutting, not for understanding. Cutting has to be understood, in this case, as a transgressive and affirmative movement, that is intended to open up the possibility of difference in and at the limit of our experience, challenging stabilised norms and boundaries through revealing their historical contingency. Turning our academic present moment into an actuality involves to simultaneously inhabit it and constantly seek to move out of it, bringing ourselves and our subjectivities into an explicit relation with the forces which constitute them. This is an attitude that, in contrast with the normalising pressures of productivity, functionality, and conformity, strives for and welcomes one’s own undoing with the promise of becoming other. It solicits forms of counterconduct to established arts of governing in the field of education and in academic knowledge production. It implies to practice a kind of detachment that is only possible because of our belonging to a ‘we’ to which we attribute an ethico-political significance and from which we distance ourselves, contesting the contingent and specific effects of a particular kind of conflation between power, truth, and subjectivity, and affirming a transformative possibility.