Surveillance, Spectacle, and High-Stakes Testing as Social Control
Kevin D. Vinson, E. Wayne Ross, and John F. Welsh
Increasingly today conceptualizations of public schooling rest upon the influence of dominant and dominating images rather than on more authentic understandings of the complex realities of classroom life. We create our interpretations of what is, what was, and what should be based on what is presented within the mainstream “news” media and what we see in the movies and on television. This especially holds true in the ever more powerful contemporary social, cultural, political, economic, and pedagogical settings of standards-based educational reform,1 where the omnipresence of high-stakes standardized testing constitutes a regime in which both the cultural knowledge and the behavior of students, teachers, administrators, parents, classrooms, schools, and districts are (in)validated and disciplined. Simply, the convergence of a number of phenomena related to image and high-stakes testing, including various means by which scholars seek critical and practical insight, the mechanisms by which image and high-stakes testing both reflect and are reflected by societal circumstances, the enforcing consequences of such actualities, and the techniques by which both might be resisted define the scope of this chapter’s efforts.
This “hegemony of the image” mirrors and is mirrored by—is made possible by and is reinforced by/reinforcing of—several developments in contemporary U.S. and international society, particularly within the realms of technology and globalization. It is, for instance, consistent with the advent of the possibility of 24/7 access to video monitors and cameras, in terms both of seeing and of being seen. This emerges, for example, in the proliferation of web cams, around-the-clock broadcast and cable (and satellite and Internet) television, state-sponsored privacy-monitoring, the multiplication of media outlets, and the explosion of “reality” television programs. Moreover, it is constructed within an economic environment of conglomeration and oligopolification, a globalized setting in which media giants merge their abilities to control even more strongly access to both technology and the re/production of public images.
Contemporary regimes of high-stakes testing must be understood within such contexts, as mutually reinforcing and reproductive, and as specific instances of the hegemonic dominance of media images. How often, for example, do individuals and groups determine the “effectiveness” of particular schools by relying on reported test scores—media images—whether or not they have any firsthand information on what actually occurs in any unique school? As public education continues to be an important part of U.S. political discourse, to what extent do such standardization policies universalize the cultural and behavioral interests of the economically, politically, and culturally powerful, especially as “liberals” and “conservatives” continue to merge around a singular idealized view of schooling that is most clearly articulated in practices encouraged by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.2
As society’s rulers coalesce and more generally use both surveillance (the disciplinary observation of the many by the few) and spectacle (the disciplinary observation of the few by the many) as conjoint means of controlling individuals and groups, high-stakes testing represents not only the plane on which the school–society link is played out, but also a reinforcing context within which the interests of the wealthy and powerful work to legitimize what counts as both knowledge and appropriate behavior.3 This is particularly the case with national education policy, which continues to be determined by the representatives of elite cultural and economic ideologies. Post–A Nation at Risk era commissions have been comprised of key corporate leaders (e.g., IBM’s Lou Gerstner), teacher union chiefs, and politicians (e.g., the National Governors’ Association) convened for the purposes of determining the nature and meanings of U.S. public schooling. In effect, such powerful elites control not only public/media images of education, but also how they are reproduced vis-à-vis the contents of “official knowledge”4 and “proper” school behavior.5
In this chapter, we consider the mutual relationships between images of public schooling and the operations of high-stakes testing, particularly regarding the degree to which they work to enforce, control, and discipline both cultural knowledge and behavior. Moreover, we interrogate the extent to which both seek to “normalize” as “correct” the interests of the economically and politically powerful. Drawing on the literatures surrounding the notion of image, surveillance, spectacle, and high-stakes standardized testing, we examine: (1) the role of image in the contemporary societal merging (or coexistence) of surveillance and spectacle; (2) high-stakes testing as contextualized image; (3) the consequences of such conditions; and (4) Debord’s constructions of dérive and détournement as modes of resistance.
In short, our contention is that high-stakes testing and test scores work as, and must be perceived in terms of, image and how image is constructed environmentally within the existing surveillance-spectacle arrangement. High-stakes testing as spectacle-surveillance–induced image then works to control groups and individuals via the specific mechanisms and technologies of the gaze—of seeing and being seen—and operate in support of potentially dangerous and oppressive consequences that must be resisted. As we conclude, dérive and détournement provide an incomplete, yet plausible, counter-maneuver, one aimed toward superseding the lifeless pedagogical status of standardization and standardized test scores.
Critical social theory and the sociological study of political order have both discovered that images are a basic component of the social construction of reality and operate fundamentally to control human behavior and shape human thought within institutional contexts.6 Images are generated and located both physically and ideologically within the complex social and cultural totality of advanced state capitalism. They also tend to reinforce existing power and exchange relations on the level of human cognition and the structure of political power within advanced capitalism. Images are generally created by those who own and control the means of communications, particularly mass communications, or who are otherwise able to seize control of processes of reality construction in society. Image has a dialectical relationship with power: power creates and elevates images to hegemonic status and is bolstered by them, while images simultaneously create and are created by power. While the relationship between image and power is mutually reinforcing, this is not to say that image never contradicts power or that competing images never vie for predominance in the social and cultural totality. Hegemonic images are images that achieve a significant measure of control over human behavior and cognition, and are also controlled and manipulated by powerful social groups.
Understanding the social reality of image under advanced state capitalism requires the study of the milieu in which images are produced, how they shape behavior, and the social, political, and economic interests they serve. This means that the study of images associated with schooling and education must focus attention on the relationship between the learning and the social and cultural patterns of the global totality of capitalism. Central to the global totality of advanced capitalism is the role of the state as the primary agent of social control through its activities in planning, reality definition, and the maintenance of social control through direct coercion. In the era of state capitalism, the essential role of the state is to mitigate the conflicts and contradictions that threaten the stability of this socio-historical formation. The core functions of the state under advanced capitalism include the enforcement of those norms and patterns that mitigate conflict, crisis, and contradiction, which occurs partially through the discipline of individuals, groups, and organizations that pose a potential challenge to existing power and exchange relations.
Discipline and enforcement occur under advanced state capitalism largely through the vehicles of surveillance and spectacle. In the contemporary milieu of advanced capitalism, the fusion of surveillance and spectacle produces, maintains, and propagates controlling images that enforce prevailing societal norms by disciplining the thoughts and behaviors of individuals and groups. As an image or an ensemble of images, high-stakes testing in particular (and test-driven educational reform in general) can never reflect the complexities of the social organization of schooling, but it does function as a mechanism of social control.
In his study of the birth of the prison, Michel Foucault identified the process of surveillance as a basic means by which power is exercised and social control is maintained in contemporary society.7 Foucault clearly views power not as an entity but as a network that operates within institutional contexts. While Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison is primarily concerned with the incipient social organization of the prison as a modern form of punishment, Foucault is extremely interested in discipline and enforcement as social processes situated in a broader socio-historical environment. The social organization of the prison becomes a means for understanding the structure of discipline and enforcement in society and the exercise of power through surveillance.
An important point of departure in Foucault’s discussion of surveillance is Jeremy Bentham’s design of the modern prison, the Panopticon, which is physically structured in a manner that enables the warders to observe continuously the behavior of the prisoners. The Panopticon is a social and cultural totality that physically permits the “hierarchical observation” of the many by the few, and socially and culturally supports the right of the few to make “normalizing judgments” about the behavior of the many. For Foucault, surveillance represents an enforcing and disciplinary power emergent from a technological base that provides infinite, automatic, and unobtrusive opportunities for the few to observe the many. Advanced telecommunications technologies offer cultural and political elites very sophisticated tools to monitor and track human behavior. Technologies such as “Carnivore,” which is the FBI’s e-mail tapping framework, and “Echelon,” which is the National Security Agency’s program for monitoring virtually all worldwide telecommunications, are sophisticated and powerful surveillance technologies at the service of the government. These macro-level surveillance technologies supplement some of the more mundane forms of surveillance found in surveillance cameras, cell phone cameras, “nanny cams,” radio telemetry, geographic information systems, global positioning systems, and “cookies” deposited by corporate and governmental web sites into the personal computers of customers and citizens.
The use and outcomes of these technologies must be understood contextually in terms of social, cultural, economic, and political trends. For instance, the War on Terrorism and the USA Patriot Act provide an important political and legal context for understanding the use and outcomes of Carnivore and Echelon since September 11, 2001. Each of these contexts, however, reflects and reinforces an important feature of cultural life in the twenty-first century in the United States: the desire and opportunity to observe and to be observed. The social imperative to see and be seen includes both (1) how we are seeing and being seen, and (2) the fact that we are seeing and being seen. This cultural imperative is referenced by cultural images such as Warhol’s “fifteen minutes of fame,” Orwell’s “Big Brother,” political polling, strategic marketing, “reality-based” television series such as Survivor and The Amazing Race, and talk shows that feature celebrity wannabes as their guests, such as Jerry Springer, Dr. Phil, and Judge Judy. The proliferation of surveillance cameras, webcams, and cell phones with digital cameras makes it possible to see and be seen simultaneously and continuously, suggesting a technological and cultural merging of voyeurism and exhibitionism.
For Foucault, surveillance resolves the problem of political order in the modern world because technology and cultural norms encourage the procurement of “the instantaneous view of a great multitude” for a small number of observers, or even a single individual. Foucault argues that community and public life in civil society are no longer significant mediators of human behavior in advanced societies. We are left, on the one hand, with individuals, whose selves, goals, and purposes are highly privatized and isolated, and, on the other hand, the state, which has become increasingly dominant among social institutions. As a consequence, social relations can be regulated only in the form of surveillance by the state and its collusion with large-scale organizations, which provide technological support for a social system that is based on the observation of the many by the few.
Foucault’s libertarian and antistatist theory of surveillance presents a compelling picture of the maintenance of political order in modern society. He argued that the role of surveillance in regulating social life increased in importance with the birth of the modern prison. He acknowledged that other forms of social control predominated in previous historical periods. Specifically, the spectacle was the primary vehicle for promulgating controlling images in antiquity. The spectacle is the obverse of surveillance, according to Foucault. While surveillance refers to the observation of the many by the few, spectacle is the observation of the few by the many. In Foucault’s terms, spectacle renders a small number of objects or images accessible to a multitude of people. Thus, architecture and communication strategies operated to ensure this form of observation was possible because of the predominance of public life over private life. Temples, theaters, circuses, festivals, and coliseums were constructed to form society into a single great body and to reinvigorate public life and public purposes. Foucault concluded that the spectacle as a form of social control became obsolete in the modern period because of the need to maintain order in a hierarchical society that lacks the mediating organizational structures of public life.
Situationist philosopher Guy Debord argues that spectacle describes contemporary society as well as antiquity. In The Society of the Spectacle, Debord maintains that “(t)he whole of life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.”8 For Debord, the society of the spectacle defines a societal totality in which reality is replaced by image; life becomes advertised life. The images generated by information systems, marketing, advertising, and public relations obtain and pursue a reality sui generis. They are distinct from, not merged with, the lived experience of humans. The society of the spectacle is a form of alienation in which “being” is collapsed into “appearing,” in which the image becomes a distorted and disconnected form of communication that mediates all social relationships. 9
For Debord, the spectacle is not merely a collection of images. Instead, “it is a social relationship between people mediated by images.”10 Debord argues that the concept of spectacle helps to clarify a wide array of disparate social phenomena. “Understood on its own terms, the spectacle proclaims the predominance of appearances and asserts that all human life, which is to say all social life, is mere appearance.”11 In concert with Foucault, Debord understands that the mediating structures of civil society, community, and public life have disappeared. In Debord’s critique, there remains the isolated, privatized individual whose social relationships are mediated by and subjected to the state and the production process.
Economically, Debord asserts that the spectacle subjects living human beings to “its will to the extent that the economy has brought them under its sway. For the spectacle is simply the economic realm developing for itself—at once a faithful mirror held up to the production of things and a distorting objectification of the producers.”12 He notes that earlier stages of the economy’s domination of society included a downgrading of being into having. The present stage of social development, however, entails a shift in emphasis from having to appearing. He indicates that all effective having “must now derive both its immediate prestige and its ultimate raison d’etre from appearances.”13
At the base of the society of the spectacle is the division of labor produced by the specialization of political power. “The specialized role played by the spectacle is that of spokesperson for all other activities, … and the source of the only discourse which society allows itself to hear.”14
Politically, the spectacle is an endless discourse “upon itself in an uninterrupted monologue of self-praise. The spectacle is the self-portrait of power in the age of power’s totalitarian rule over the conditions of existence.”15 The spectacle’s division of society into those who wield power and those who passively observe or contemplate the spectacle “is inseparable from the modern State, which, as the product of the social division of labor and the organ of class rule, is the general form of all social division.” 16
For Debord, the spectacle maintains its own regime of control and discipline, differentiated from surveillance and the panopticon, based on the observation of the few by the many. The spectacle exists for its own reproduction and through the economic and political realms subordinates all human life to its needs. It controls by isolating and fragmenting, distorting communication, alienating human action, and restructuring communication to ensure one-way, instantaneous messaging. It operates to mitigate community and dialog and, thus, to control image, conflict, and change. Those who control images have the ability to mystify being and hierarchical power relations within the spectacle.
Both Foucault and Debord articulated libertarian and antistatist visions of power, authority, and control in contemporary society. Both are centrally concerned with the role of the state and the mechanisms it uses to ensure direct and ideological social control in a society characterized by a loss of community and the structures of civil society that mediate relationships among people. Foucault’s studies envisioned a Panopticon of surveillance, or the observation of the many by the few. Debord studies envisioned society as a collection of spectacles where appearance is more important than being and where the many observe the few. What is unique today is the merging of surveillance and spectacle where it is technologically possible and culturally desirable to see and be seen simultaneously and continuously. The potential of a totally administered society becomes more real as culture and technology become media through which everyone can watch everyone continuously across all time and space. At the extreme, society becomes nothing more than a totality of isolated (though seemingly connected via “social networking”) individuals forever under surveillance whose relationships are mediated by—are— images.
High-stakes testing provides one case in which the merger of surveillance and spectacle can be understood, and which can itself be understood as surveillance and spectacle.17 One example of the operation of surveillance is the hierarchical observation of the behavior and performance of institutions, programs, staff, and students when tests are administered. An example of spectacle occurs in the presentation and reporting of school and system performances via media reports of standardized test scores to public education’s many constituencies. Both surveillance and spectacle elevate image above authenticity and operate as vehicles of social control, political domination, and cultural conformity.
In the next section we consider high-stakes testing and media-reported test scores as images produced within the coalescence of spectacle and surveillance. And, we examine how within this environment high-stakes standardized testing functions as a regime of enforcement and how it operates according to controlling images.
High-stakes standardized testing is used to legitimize certain dominant and dominating images of culture, knowledge, behavior, economics, and politics in an effort to discipline and enforce certain “norms” consistent with the privileged interests of the wealthy and powerful. This is most often achieved by the publication of individual students’, schools’, districts’, and states’ scores or rankings. As such tests, and other elements of standards-based educational reform schemes, spread they warrant questions relevant to the power of surveillance and spectacle.18 High-stakes standardized tests enable a media-sponsored, hierarchical relationship between forceful groups of elites and schools, with their diversified range of stakeholders positioned simultaneously as both “the few” observed (disciplined) by the many and “the many” observed (disciplined) by the few.
High-stakes standardized testing and those who authorize and endorse it aim to impose a certain set of images relative to “good” or “effective” education, including those of the “good” student, the “good” teacher, the “good” school, the “good” parent, “good” curriculum, and “good” instruction. They strive to enact a certain standardized and standardizing semantics of knowledge, learning, and behavior that work organically in the interests of the economically and politically powerful. The pressures of surveillance-spectacle compel those involved to conform lest they be sanctioned. Sanctions include being categorized as “poor performing” or deficient, and in need of even greater authoritarian oversight such as state take-over, reconstitution, privatization, and so forth.19
More troubling though is the ethical dimension of the system. The implications are that some teachers, students, schools, curricula, and so forth are better than others. Undoubtedly this is true. Yet a problem emerges as these judgments are founded solely on reported test scores. The illusion is that without ever entering a given classroom one might be qualified to evaluate its inhabitants, their actions, their values or characters, and their relationships simply as a result of testing. This is the case with many policymakers and journalists (as well as other “seers” or “gazers”). Based on test scores, people draw conclusions about good and bad schools, effective and ineffective teachers, hardworking and lazy students, involved and uninvolved parents, and challenging and unchallenging curricula. They forget or ignore the fact that many low-scoring schools perform miracles, that their teachers and students are just as likely to be dedicated and committed and intelligent as those in other settings, that schools where test scores are high do not own a monopoly on caring parents, and that content—most likely standardized anyway—is neither necessarily “better” nor “worse” than in higher-scoring schools.
Such frameworks employ representatives of dominant political and economic ideologies to reflect their own interests via the public schools (often with token representation among the less powerful). They present a standardized purpose (e.g., a mission statement), standardized content (e.g., mandated curriculum standards and guides), standardized methodologies (in some cases, for instance, “scripting” or even legislating how a subject is to be taught), and standardized assessments (high-stakes tests).20 Elite and hegemonic images of the good are standardized. High-stakes testing is a means of enforcement of these images and interests. Teachers, students, parents, and principals are coerced toward such images via the tools of surveillance and spectacle. Surveillance operates principally on the micro level as educational managers observe and encourage particular activities and procedures. Spectacle operates principally on the macro level as the media report specific test scores frequently identified school-by-school and district-by-district. With respect to schooling, surveillance and spectacle are mutually empowering, circular, leaving teachers and students and other stakeholders in an unfortunate position relative to the disciplinary/deterring gaze—observed by small numbers of powerful officials and by large numbers of the general public. Needless to say the pressures to “appear” a certain way, to conform to the dominant image, are immense.
This arrangement ignores the complex multiplicities of context, of the interplay among economics, histories, beliefs, traditions, cultures, ideologies, and so on. They obfuscate or neglect the fact that in most cases test scores indicate not “learning” per se, but instead prevailing circumstances, including conditions of local wealth, political might, and racial, cultural, ethnic, and linguistic diversity—not, as high-stakes testing supporters claim, merit, intelligence, or hard work, but rather the extent to which teachers and students (and communities) are “like” the testmakers.21 They make possible, in fact, a state of increased privilege for the already privileged and inordinately reflect and reward the norms of domination.
The works of theorists such as Bakhtin, Barthes, Boorstin, McLuhan, and Baudrillard provide valuable insights into understanding the intricacies of high-stakes testing and the scores they produce not only as images but also as instruments of sociopedagogical enforcement. Bakhtin challenges us to pursue the processes by which such images implicate a certain representation of space-time—the “chronotope”—one that perhaps benefits the contextual reality of those who wish to strategically control our access to and interpretation of time, space, and schooling. Barthes asks that we critique not only the denoted or literal representations of pedagogical images (e.g., test scores—“objectively,” for instance, whether they have increased or decreased, or whether “achievement” is higher or lower) but their connoted or cultural representations as well (e.g., that some children are inherently “better” than others). Boorstin begs the issue of testing as “pseudo-event,” that which is “unreal,” and exists principally for the purposes of its own publication and circulation, particularly given that “somebody [the media themselves, government officials] has an interest in disseminating, magnifying, advertising, and extolling [tests] as events worth watching or worth believing” so that someone might at some point ultimately “get [his or her] money’s worth.” McLuhan implies a set of consequences specific to the specific medium—newspaper reports of school success, for example—and argues that we confront their effects on human interaction, as “extensions” of our senses, and on their ability to “eliminate time and space factors in human association” such that the very social and psychological characteristics of schooling are altered—“the medium is the message.” And Baudrillard compels the public to consider how test scores may in fact be “more real” than the “reality” of classrooms, schools, teachers, and students themselves—the extent to which they exist as copies or images without originals and in reference to no underlying reality—as “simulacra” and simulations.22
Many potential consequences of this image/high-stakes testing/surveillance-spectacle conglomeration are already well known. As critics have pointed out, under such a regime both curriculum and instruction narrow, pedagogy weakens, innovation declines, “achievement gaps” expand, teacher-centeredness increases, and (perhaps most ironically these days) more children are in fact “left behind.”23 And, as we have already pointed out, connections between formal school knowledge and the economy generally solidify (often via the involvement with politicians and educational managers of corporate and financial leaders). As we also note, however, there are of course risks to the extent that SBER (curriculum standards, high-stakes testing) may be oppressive,24 disciplinary,25 antidemocratic,26 inauthentic, and opposed to the collective good.27
Further, though, there are consequences more specifically connected to the association of and between surveillance and spectacle. The spiral or circular (if not convergent) and mutually reproductive character of the relationship helps ensure: (1) that both in fact are strengthened; and (2) that, therefore, school discipline and enforcement, in terms both of content and behavior, are tightened and subsequently made more effective, especially via the technologies of image.28
Resisting the enforcing characteristics of controlling images, such as those inherent in high-stakes standardized testing regimes, presents a number of somewhat new and unique pedagogical challenges. The first rests with the odd and relatively broad coalition of elites who support them. This group includes wealthy and powerful groups and individuals located across the political-economic spectrum. (Note that President Barack Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan support NCLB as strongly as did President George W. Bush and Secretary of Education Rod Paige.) Within this context “natural” alliances lose their meaning. It is increasingly difficult here to recognize one’s supporters and one’s adversaries.29 The second, perhaps more important challenge exists via the very pervasiveness of the surveillance-spectacle complex. Although the various philosophies of image presented by Bakhtin, Barthes, Boorstin, McLuhan, and Baudrillard offer insights into what questions to ask and what answers to pursue, it is the theoretical work of Foucault and (especially) Debord and his colleagues that provides the critical starting points for contesting the authority of the technological, political, pedagogical, and socioeconomic gaze.
Foucault’s work on “resistance” is perhaps more straightforward than might be expected, even though, arguably, he never laid out an explicit program for liberation or revolution. As Gordon rightly suggests, “it may be objected that Foucault never locates his theoretical enterprise ‘on the side of’ resistance by undertaking to formulate a strategy of resistance.” This means, in effect, the possibility that “the cunning of [any given revolutionary] strategy is taken as being the exclusive property of [distinct] forms of domination.”30 It is, in other words, localized and specific, contingent. But for Foucault this doesn’t mean that revolutionary resistance can’t occur—it does occur, period—but only that any resistant act is neither inherently and universally good nor inherently and universally bad; it is inherently neither better nor worse than any other. “People do revolt …”31 Revolution and resistance are neither predictable, inevitable, nor objective. But they do happen.
Foucault’s thinking rests on a number of premises, most importantly the understanding “that power, with its mechanisms, is infinite,” though not necessarily “evil” or “omnipotent.”32 Foucault cautions against various resistant tendencies in which some individuals have the authority to distinguish appropriate or proper revolutionary behaviors at the expense of others, and recognizes that revolutionaries must take into account not only those actions that are most directly “political,” but also those that are “merely” of “evasion or defense.” He warns of the problematics of some revolutionary strategies by which one regime charged with normalizing is replaced by another charged with the same coercive capacities. And yet, for Foucault power in all its guises demands some mode of resistance of the strongest sort: “The rules that exist to limit [power] can never be stringent enough; the universal principles for dispossessing it of all the occasions it seizes are never sufficiently rigorous. Against power one must always set inviolable laws and unrestricted rights.”33 He implies, subtly, the potential of an even more anarchic or hyperdemocratic and “profounder logic of revolt” in which the “whole species of rationality and the status of a whole regime of truth can be made to open itself to interrogation,”34 a striking and radical resistance aimed toward the entirety of disciplinary power.
With respect to high-stakes testing as image, and within the convergence of surveillance and spectacle, this view allows for a number of tangible and more typical techniques, including those of boycott, refusal, organizing, political action, and so on. What Foucault frankly contests is the universal and immanent or natural rightness of one over the other, the preeminence of some action as against other action, the certainty that what replaces today’s system will necessarily be an improvement, and the rash confidence that the essential problematics of pedagogical power will simply fade away.
Guy Debord and other members of the Situationist International (SI)35 indicate other, less widely known techniques relevant to superseding “the society of the spectacle” and its effects, techniques not yet extensively explored for their conceivable and critical pedagogical significance, yet of special interest given their promise vis-à-vis the controlling and enforcing propensities of high-stakes testing.
The first, the dérive, literally “drifting,” implies “[a] mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: [it is] a technique of transient passage through varied ambiances.”36 According to Debord:
The dérive entails playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects; which completely distinguishes it from the classical notions of the journey and the stroll. In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. The element of chance is less determinant than one might think: from the dérive point of view cities have a psychogeographical relief, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes which strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.37
For the SI “psychogeography” referred to “the study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.”38 On the second, détournement, literally “diversion,” the SI wrote:
Short for: détournement of preexisting aesthetic elements. The integration of present or past artistic production into a superior construction of a milieu. In this sense there can be no situationist painting or music [per se], but only a situationist use of these means. In a more primitive sense, détournement within the old cultural spheres is a method of propaganda, a method that testifies to the wearing out and loss of importance of those spheres.39
It “involves,” according to Jappe, “a quotation, or more generally a re-use, that ‘adapts’ the original element to a new context.”40
It is [moreover] also a way of transcending the bourgeois cult of originality and the private ownership of thought. In some cases the products of bourgeois civilization, even the most insignificant ones, such as advertisements, may be reemployed in such a way as to modify their meaning; in other cases, the effect may be to reinforce the real meaning of an original element … by changing its form.41
For Debord himself détournement suggested
the reuse of preexisting artistic elements in a new ensemble [via t]he two fundamental laws of détournement … the loss of importance of each détourned autonomous element—which may go so far as to lose its original sense completely—and at the same time the organization of another meaningful ensemble that confers on each element its new scope and effect.42
Together dérive and détournement sprang from Debord and his colleagues’ “dreams of a reinvented world” where one might “supersede dead time,” a world of experiment and play, of “discovering that a world of permanent novelty could exist, and finding the means to start it up.”43 According to Marcus:
These means were two: [jointly] the “dérive,” a drift down city streets in search of signs of attraction or repulsion, and “détournement,” the theft of aesthetic artifacts from their contexts and their diversion into contexts of one’s own device ….
[Ideally] to practice détournement—to write new speech balloons for newspaper comic strips, or for that matter old masters, to insist simultaneously on a “devaluation” of art and its “reinvestment” in a new kind of social speech, a “communication containing its own criticism,” a technique that could not mystify because its very form was a demystification—and to pursue the dérive—to give yourself up to the promises of the city, and then to find them wanting—to drift through the city, allowing its signs to divert, to “détourn,” your steps, and then to divert those signs yourself, forcing them to give up routes that never existed before—there would be no end to it. It would be to begin to live a truly modern way of life, made out of pavement and pictures, words and weather: a way of life anyone could understand and anyone could use.44
As techniques of resistance aimed toward the enforcement elements of high-stakes testing (as controlling images, within the setting of surveillance-spectacle), what might dérive and détournement mean? What might they look like? How might they be applied? And how might they work?
Applied to schooling and high-stakes testing, the dérive, the more difficult of the two, demands first a reunderstanding of the geographical shifts brought on by changes in gaze-based technologies and advanced state capitalism. It requires further a consideration of the architectural evolution induced by surveillance-spectacle and its effects (as discussed above). Today, with respect to education, dérive necessitates “drifting” not only through the “teletecture” and “cosmotecture” of contemporary schools (schools as virtual space, schools as casinos), but also through the cyberspace “city” of the Internet. It begs a critical confrontation with an entirely new set of psychogeographies.
In each instance, note that images dominate and that surveillance and spectacle converge or coexist. This means, in that dérive is a social act, that students and teachers would move communally, cooperatively, drifting as it were through buildings but also through cyberspace/virtual space/hyperspace, through the cosmotecture and teletecture of contemporary schooling, as they were attracted or repelled, as their emotions and behaviors were piqued. These drifters would, for instance, be free to enter or exit testing sites (both physical and virtual) as they were encouraged or discouraged to do so, and they would seek simply to experience, to disrupt, and to play. They would surf websites, confronting relevant images, come and go, utilize monitors and web cams for “travel,” compelled toward or away from various zones, from, say, “official” image bases, from control, and from the enforcing effects of standardization schemes. Conceivably, albeit in the extreme, they could drift in and out of—even hack into—testing locales and interrupt them, create with them, toy with them.45 They could, moreover, enter and exit classrooms, schools, central offices, government domains, and media positions where high-stakes testing is enacted and where, in the end, controlling images are most oppressively enacted. All as a means of resistance.
With respect to détournement, the implications for resistance are perhaps clearer, especially within the contexts of image, surveillance, and spectacle. Again, to quote Jappe, détournement involves “a quotation, or more generally a re-use, that ‘adapts’ the original element to a new context” such that a given image either: (1) “may be reemployed in such a way as to modify [its] meaning”; or (2) such that “the effect may be to reinforce the real meaning of an element … by changing its form.”46 Consider, for example, this plausible (though made-up) newspaper headline:
PRESIDENT OBAMA ANNOUNCES EDUCATION PACKAGE— CALLED “RACE TO THE TOP”—PLAN EMPHASIZES PAYING TEACHERS BASED ON STUDENT TEST SCORES
In and of itself, this seems (or may seem to some) innocuous, even positive, in that the administration will be devoting attention to schools and seeking to ensure that data collection tells us whether improvements are actually happening and tying student achievement to assessments of teachers. Suppose, however, that as a mode of resistance the headline is juxtaposed next to a poster illustrating what we know about the history of paying teachers for student performance, which is that pay for performance gains are mostly illusions:
• In England, when payment-for-results was finally dropped in the 1890s, the overwhelming judgment was that it was unsound policy. Cynics referred to schools as “grant factories” and children as “grant-earning units.”
• Payment-by-results appeared briefly in Canada in 1876, causing conservatives to rejoice because it made teachers and students work harder to avoid failure. The Canadian experience showed that test scores could be increased quickly, so long as the subject matter could be narrowed and measured. But, as in England, the system caused teachers to focus their energies on students who were most likely to succeed, helping them cram for examinations while ignoring the others. In 1883, a public outcry ended the experiment abruptly.
• Nearly a century later in the U.S., a “performance contracting” experiment in Arkansas produced only scandal and the lack of results ultimately doomed performance contracting, and it was declared a failure. Like the earlier English and Canadian experiments, performance contracting once again showed how financial incentives failed to produce expected gains, while at the same time generating damaging educational effects.47
As a second example, imagine this newspaper headline:
STATE ASSESSMENT SCORES SHOW MANY SCHOOLS FAILING
Suppose, further, an accompanying chart with the names of schools or districts in one column and mean standardized test scores in a second column, perhaps with pass–fail cutoff scores indicated.
Now consider recent (mind-boggling but true) news reports that within a particular state funding has been provided to equip school system management with smart phones at a cost of thousands of dollars, while because of budget cuts at the school level parents have been asked to donate supplies, including toilet paper, as a means to save money that might otherwise have to be diverted from instruction. (According to some reports, some schools actually have engaged in a system of bartering donated supplies, again including toilet paper, in order to obtain necessary educational material.) Now, reimagine the image. The headline:
STATE ASSESSMENT SCORES SHOW MANY SCHOOLS FAILING
The chart? Column one, names of schools or districts; column two, number of rolls of donated toilet paper (with appropriately arbitrary pass–fail levels reported). As with the first case, both meaning and significance have been changed.
At the heart of détournement rests the notion that in all instances either the image is altered to “fit” the context, or the context is altered to “fit” the image. Such processes—or pedagogical strategies—enable students, teachers, and others to confront and combat the enforcing/enforcement properties of high-stakes testing as image. What they require, though, are access to and facility with those technologies that make such enforcement possible—computers, the Internet, web cams, and so forth—as well as an understanding—a critical consciousness—of controlling images, surveillance, and spectacle. Joined with dérive and Foucauldian techniques, détournement provides an untapped mode of relatively and authentically situated and critical resistance, praxis. (We should note also that there is no reason why this would not apply to other images, for example those promulgated via film, television, and so on.)
Ours is an age of image, and of “image profiteers,”48 a time and place where seeing and being seen matter, where visual media rule and where the tools exist to make possible an absurd if not frightening new world in which everyone can watch (can control) everyone all the time, Brave New World and 1984, a new world that is neither neutral nor predictable, one rife with unseen and untheorized problems, possibilities, dangers, and consequences. It is an age characterized in part by what Frank Rich calls “the mediathon,” the “all coverage all the time” mediaworld. It is an age of hyperreality, of the endless bombardment of individuals by an evermore exhausting array of never-ending, at times indistinguishable, multimedia images, an age in which seemingly the copy can and does function as more real and authentic than the original (if such a distinction even still exists) and in which even “serious” media and image purveyors often are deservedly suspect.49
As fads and fashions, endorsements and sponsorship deals, cosmetic surgery, Hollywood special effects, “reality” television, and even military operations demonstrate, image matters. Consider, for example, the words of Lieutenant Colonel Gregory C. Sieminski on the importance of image even in the naming of military operations:
Applying the four guidelines [for choosing a name] will result in an effectively nicknamed operation, an outcome that can help win the war of images. In that war, the operation name is the first—and quite possibly the decisive—bullet to be fired. Mold and aim it with care.50
The military establishment and its backers know that “reality” itself may not be enough to garner support on behalf of any given mission, and that therefore the public must be “convinced” (or coerced) to follow along on other, more “imaginary” grounds (e.g., Operation Enduring Freedom and not Operation Kill bin Laden, or the Department of Homeland Security and not the Department of Homeland Surveillance). It is about looks and appearances at least as much as it is about the characteristics and importance of aim, threat, strategy, and tactics. Unfortunately, the same may be said perhaps about schooling and high-stakes testing.
The predominance of image must be understood within the prevailing context of surveillance and spectacle, a context that reinforces and is in turn reinforced by the presence of dominant and dominating images. Within this setting the mechanisms and technologies of seeing and being seen struggle against those of not seeing and not being seen according to a multiple and complex interplay among desire, possibility, existence, and necessity.
Contemporary schooling as a contested site moves within and across these borders. Its participants engage in oppression and resistance, a disciplinary drama in which they are positioned simultaneously as both the many observed by the few and the few observed by the many. Standardization regimes coerce educational stakeholders toward a privileged image supported by and supportive of the interests of the most wealthy and powerful among us, all in the name—the appearance—of democracy, achievement, and economic opportunity. And, not surprisingly, the “copy” frequently is more “real” than the “original.”
Within the convergence of surveillance and spectacle high-stakes testing functions as a mechanism of enforcement, proceeding as a matter both of control by images and control of images, a circularity in which power is an effect of image and image is an effect of power—image-power or power-image. Certain dominant images, established and maintained by elite educational managers, force a disciplinary and antidemocratic conformity on the part of (among others) teachers, students, and schools toward the interests of the (same) wealthy and powerful minority who sanction the contents, policies, procedures, and consequences of high-stakes testing in the first place. Those who control images produce images that control—power produces (and maintains and reinforces) images, images produce (and maintain and reinforce) power—all in their own power-laden interests.
We offer the practices of dérive and détournement not as absolutes or final statements, but as quotidian and incremental praxis, a tentative set of steps toward reestablishing the place of living and authenticity as against alienation, passivity, antidemocracy, conformity, and injustice. For in the end, high-stakes testing is not the whole story but merely a piece of the bigger story, one in which we and our children are author and character, subject and object, player and played on. Perhaps this is our true test. If so, then the stakes are high indeed.
1 See Kevin D. Vinson and E. Wayne Ross, “In Search of the Social Studies Curriculum: Standardization, Diversity, and a Conflict of Appearances,” in Critical Issues in Social Studies Research for the Twenty-first Century, edited by W. B. Stanley (Greenwich, Conn.: Information Age Publishing, 2001); Kevin D. Vinson, Rich Gibson, and E. Wayne Ross, High-Stakes Testing and Standardization: The Threat to Authenticity (Burlington, Vt.: John Dewey Project on Progressive Education /University of Vermont, 2001), available at www.uvm.edu/~dewey/monographs/ProPer3n2.html (accessed April 25, 2010); and E. Wayne Ross and Rich Gibson (Eds.), Neoliberalism and Education Reform (Cresskill, N.J.: Hampton Press, 2007).
2 See also Kevin D. Vinson, “Image, Authenticity, and the Collective Good: The Problematics of Standards-Based Reform,” in Theory and Research in Social Education 29 (2001): 363–74; and Vinson and Ross, “In Search of the Social Studies Curriculum.”
3 See Kevin D. Vinson and E. Wayne Ross, “Education and the New Disciplinarity,” in E. Wayne Ross and Rich Gibson (Eds.), Neoliberalism and Education Reform (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2007), 59–86; E. Wayne Ross, “The Spectacle of Standards and Summits,” Theory and Research in Social Education 27 (1999): 440–46.
4 See for example, Michael W. Apple, Official Knowledge: Democratic Education in a Conservative Age (New York: Routledge, 1993).
5 See for example, Alfie Kohn, The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and “Tougher Standards” (Boston and New York: Houghton Miflin, 1999).
6 See for example, Kevin D. Vinson and E. Wayne Ross, Image and Education: Teaching in the Face of the New Disciplinarity (New York: Peter Lang, 2003).
7 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
8 Guy Debord. The Society of the Spectacle, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995), 12–13.
9 Steven Best, “The Commodification of Reality and the Reality of Commodification: Baudrillard, Debord and Postmodern Theory,” in Baudrillard: A Critical Reader, edited by Douglas Kellner (Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1994.); Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, trans. M. Imrie (New York: Verso, 1998); Debord, The Society of the Spectacle.
10 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 12.
11 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 14.
12 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 16.
13 Ibid.
14 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 28.
15 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 29.
16 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 30.
17 We have also explored the merging of surveillance and spectacle in the context of post-secondary education reform, see: John F. Welsh, E. Wayne Ross, and Kevin D. Vinson, “To Discipline and Enforce: Surveillance and Spectacle in State Reform of Higher Education,” New Proposals: A Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry 3, 2 (2009): 17–32.
18 See Vinson and Ross, Image and Education.
19 See, for example, Dorothea Anagnostopoulos and Stacey A. Rutledge, “Making Sense of School Sanctioning Policies in Urban High Schools: Charting the Depth and Drift of School and Classroom Change,” Teachers College Record 109 (2007): 1261–1302; Peter Burns, “Race and Support for State Takeovers of Local School Districts,” Urban Education 45, 3 (2010): 274–292.
20 The October 2, 2001, headline in the Baltimore Sun proclaimed: “Uniform Teaching Program Advances: Panel, national group recommend statewide curriculum for Md.; A call for ‘consistency.’”
21 See Sandra Mathison and E. Wayne Ross (Eds.), The Nature and Limits of Standards-Based Reform and Assessment (New York: Teachers College Press, 2008); David Hursh, High-Stakes Testing and the Decline of Teaching and Learning (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008); Sharon Lynn Nichols and David C. Berliner, Collateral Damage: How High-Stakes Testing Corrupts America’s Schools (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2007).
22 Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, edited by Michael Holquist, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981); Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, trans. S. Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977); Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1987), 40; Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, Mass. and London, UK: MIT Press, 1994), 9; Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. S. F. Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994).
23 See, for example, Mathison and Ross, The Nature and Limits of Standards-Based Reform and Assessment; Walt Haney, “The Myth of the Texas Miracle in Education,” Education Policy Analysis Archives 8, 41 (2000), available at http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/432 (accessed April 25, 2010); Alfie Kohn, The Case Against Standardized Testing: Raising the Scores, Ruining the Schools (New York: Heinemann, 2000); Linda McNeil, Contradictions of School Reform: Educational Costs of Standardized Testing (New York and London: Routledge, 2000); Susan Ohanian, One Size Fits Few: The Folly of Educational Standards (New York: Heinemann, 1999).
24 See Iris Marion Young, “ Five Faces of Oppression,” in Rethinking Power, edited by T. E. Wartenberg (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992); and Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 1970).
25 See Foucault, Discipline and Punish.
26 John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (New York: Macmillan, 1966).
27 See Vinson, “Image, Authenticity, and the Collective Good”; and Vinson, “National Curriculum Standards and Social Studies Education: Dewey, Freire, Foucault, and the Construction of a Radical Critique,” Theory and Research in Social Education 23 (1999): 50–82.
28 See Kevin Vinson and E. Wayne Ross, “In Search of the Social Studies Curriculum.”
29 Sandra Mathison, E. Wayne Ross, and Kevin D. Vinson, “Defining the Social Studies: The Influence of and Resistance to Curriculum Standards and Testing in Social Studies,” in The Social Studies Curriculum: Purposes, Problems and Possibilities 3rd edition, edited by E. Wayne Ross (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006): 87–102.
30 Colin Gordon, “Afterword,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, edited by Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 256.
31 Michel Foucault, Michel Foucault: Power, edited by J. Faubion, trans. R. Hurley et al., (New York: New Press, 2000), 452.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid., 453.
34 Gordon, “Afterword,” 258.
35 For example, see Len Bracken, Guy Debord: Revolutionary (Venice, Calif.: Feral House, 1997); Anselm Jappe, Guy Debord, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Ken Knabb, Situationist International Anthology, edited by and trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, Calif.: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981); and Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History Of The Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).
36 Situationist International, “Definitions,” in Situationist International Anthology, edited by Ken Knabb (Berkeley, Calif.: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), 45.
37 Guy Debord, “Theory of the Dérive,” in Situationist International Anthology, edited by Ken Knabb (Berkeley, Calif.: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), 50.
38 Situationist International, “Definitions,” 45.
39 Ibid., 45–46.
40 Jappe, Guy Debord, 59.
41 Ibid.
42 Debord, “Theory of the Dérive,” 55.
43 Marcus, Lipstick Traces, 168, 170.
44 Ibid., 170.
45 We see connections here with anarchist sabotage, e.g., Abraham DeLeon, “Oh No, Not the “A” Word! Proposing an “Anarchism” for Education,” Educational Studies 44, 2 (2009): 122–144.
46 Jappe, Guy Debord, 59.
47 Welford W. Wilms and Richard R. Chapleau, “The Illusion of Paying Teachers for Student Performance,” Education Week (November 3, 1999): 34, 48.
48 Maureen Dowd, “We Love the Liberties They Hate,” New York Times (September 30, 2001): 13.
49 Frank Rich, “The Age of the Mediathon,” New York Times Magazine 84 (October 29, 2000): 13.
50 Gregory C. Sieminski, “The Art of Naming Operations,” Parameters (U.S. Army War College Quarterly) (Autumn 1995): 81–98, available at http://www.carlisle.army.mil/USAWC/Parameters/1995/sieminsk.htm (accessed April 25, 2010).