Educational Research - the Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics

178 I. Munday
etc. on a PowerPoint presentation. This involves a comparison with previous results
and results that were predicted by various computer programmes based on comparative
statistics. Generally speaking, this will either be followed by congratulation
for success at meeting targets, or a telling off, thinly veiled in managerial language,
for ‘failure’. To be an ‘effective’ professional one must maximise student potential
and produce positive statistics.
The picture illustrated above clearly demonstrates that what teachers do is largely
regulated by, or in relation to, technological systems that determine an expected
outcome/result. The methodologies for achieving these results are homogenised as
far as is humanly possible and the shape of the year leads to annual regulation of
success. The language that shapes and surrounds these procedures is replete with
acronyms, technical terminology and the language of business. This exemplifies
what Lyotard refers to as performativity. The grand narratives of modernity (pertaining
to truth and justice) have undergone a process of delegitimation and the
postmodern world behaves in accordance with a system that has exiled those grand
narratives. Such narratives have been supplanted by the logic of performativity,
which has taken hold of knowledge.
The production of proof, which is in principle only part of an argumentation process
designed to win agreement from the addressees of scientific messages, thus falls under the
control of another language game, in which the goal is no longer truth but performativity –
that is the best possible input/output equation. The State and/or company must abandon the
idealist and humanist narratives of legitimation in order to justify the new goal ...(Lyotard,
1984, p. 46)
We can easily see how the scene from schooling described at the start of this chapter
embodies Lyotard’s description of performativity. Schools put in massive efforts
to ensure that they gain value on their statistics and demonstrate the best possible
input/output equation. As Gordon Bearn notes, Lyotard, despite giving his assent
to the plurality that accompanies the demise of all-encompassing theories, does
not celebrate what has appeared in their place. It is interesting that Bearn presents
Lyotard’s philosophy in ‘aesthetic’ terms maintaining that ‘it is not painted in the
slack polychromatic colours of eclecticism’ and neither is it ‘painted the reassuring
black of a glorious tragedy’. Ultimately, we are told, ‘Lyotard’s philosophy is
painted a melancholic grey’ (Bearn, 2000, p. 232).
Bearn does not say as much, but Lyotard’s philosophy cannot embrace ‘tragedy’
for several reasons. First, tragedy would imply a nostalgia for something substantial
that has now been lost. When Lyotard notes the postmodern incredulity to grand
narratives he is not suggesting that all-encompassing systems were ever fit for purpose
– they simply appeared credible. Consequently, nostalgia gets us nowhere in
either a philosophical or practical sense. Why then, can we not celebrate the current
state of society and education?
The problem can perhaps be stated in this way – performativity is a grand narrative
of sorts, just a hollowed out one. Performativity ‘functions’ like a grand
narrative, ‘If a form of knowledge could not be translated into bits of information,
it was bound to become more and more invisible to the system ...’ (ibid., p. 231).
Consequently, performativity provides just as overwhelming and brutal a systematic