A year or so ago I was trying to make sense of classification and framing
with respect to disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, and trying to trace
some of the movement in Berstein's work from Class, Codes and Control to
Power, Symbolic Control and Identity (1996). This is a small excerpt from
that paper; comments and arguments welcome.
In PSCI, Bernstein is interested in articulating theoretic concerns
that expand the contexts and issues of earlier work: "the processes
whereby symbolic control and its modalities are realized" (1996, p. 17),
and is prompted toward a consideration of broad forces, such as the
"regionalization of knowledge" over the past five decades, and
school-society power dialogues--the importance of seeing education not as a
"carrier of something other than itself" (p. 18). Bernstein suggests that
schooling creates a "mythological discourse" which disconnects the meaning
of success within its boundaries to social class hierarchies, while
borrowing from political ideology beyond the school. Integration itself is
articulated more strongly as participating in agendas that originate within
and beyond the school: "We have to ask, in whose interest is the apartness
of things, and in whose interest is the new togetherness of the new
integration?" (p. 26).
These and other examples demonstrate the degree to which Bernstein
is currently prompted to move outward to social contexts and discourses
well beyond schooling. While CCC borrowed from Durkheim and looked closely
at the realization of social theory within the context of the school, in
PSCI the boundaries of school and broad social theory become more permeable
and the interactions across these boundaries more dialogic. At the same
time, the impulse to look outward is checked in many ways: Bernstein
comments that his goal is not to consider macro-institutional goals, nor to
consider common histories of disciplines or contemporary knowledge systems.
Yet it seems that, within his movement toward a discursive theorizing, that
Bernstein is less able to defend what he chooses to write out of his
theoretic account. The tension between the macro and the micro, between
broad social discourses and school discourses, becomes greater.
Classification and framing are located within the context of this
boundary crossing; they are instantiations of the impulse to separate the
macro from the micro, and the tensions that this creates. I have already
begun to suggest ways in which classification and framing begin to expand
and interrelate as categories of codification within PSCI. Bernstein
theorizes change through this relationship, originating within the framed
pedagogical relationship, discursive practice, and potentially effecting
boundaries of classification. Both framing and especially classification
greatly expand in terms of the types of categories to which they apply, and
a kind of doubling also expands the concepts; Bernstein divides the
concepts at several turns into new sets of binaries. Classification and
framing themselves can be strong or weak, and internal or external,
discourses are classified as singular or regional, framing is a factor of
instructional over regulative discourse, etc. While this movement may be
argued to produce an even more structural system in its complexity, at
closer examination the opposite is actually the case, that in its internal
doubling and expansion the structure begins to fold in upon itself, begins
to be so thoroughly inflected and nuanced that the structures which contain
lose their theoretic boundaries.
As an illustration of this effect, consider Bernstein's example of
internal classification as the arrangement of space, objects, students and
tasks within a classroom. Framing, within the same essay, refers to the
nature of control within the pedagogical relationship, "how meanings are to
be put together, the forms in which they are to be made public, and the
nature of the social relationships that go with it" (1996, p. 37). What
principled way do we have of separating classification and framing here?
Clearly, spatial arrangements, and the arrangements of tasks, are little
distinguished from any sense of rules for putting meanings together and
relating socially. Spatial arrangement itself--the presence and positions
of bodies with desks, computers, lighting, etc.--speaks volumes about
control (framing) within pedagogical relationships. Or, to pose the
question differently, when Bernstein claims that classification
"establishes voice" and that "framing establishes the message," (1996, p.
27) how are we to understand these as separately operating categories of
codification? When are voices just voices, and not also messages, and when
are messages voiceless?
The direction of the remainder of this argument is to claim that
the blurring, cracking, and fading of classification and framing, which I
have posited is present within Bernstein's contemporary theorization, is
not a problematic requiring still more robust codification. Rather, within
Bernstein's overall movement from structural to discursive theory, the
power/control borders established through classification and framing are
necessarily continually traversed; power "between" categories and control
"within" them can only be understood through their co-articulation.
Further, for the central issues of integrated as compared with collection
knowledge "codes," we must formulate a more well-developed sense of how
power and knowledge are related in practice.
Kevin Leander
(217) 333-6604
http://lrs.ed.uiuc.edu/students/k-leand/homepage/index.html
"For every complicated problem, there is a solution that is short, simple,
and wrong."
--H. L. Mencken