The politics of choice in education, theorizing a post-liberal choosing subject

grantor: University of TorontoOver the last thirty years there has been increasing debate over the issue of the extension of choice in education. This issue has been taken up by constituents of a diverse range of discursive positions, but has recently been claimed by the neoliberal and neoconservative right, especially in the United States. Hence, the question of choice in education has been framed in relation to a critique of the welfare state based on a very particular notion of a generalized choosing subject: the rational, autonomous individual set in a free market of goods and services. Arguments against choice in education are most often launched as a critique of this construct, resulting in the theoretical negation of the choosing subject as such in favour of structural analyses. My dissertation attempts to disrupt this dialectic between the noumenal self and the constructed self on a theoretical level. I argue that a choosing subjectivity can theoretically be recouped from its structuralist critique without taking on the ontological and epistemological presuppositions of the discourses of modernity. An alternatively and strategically conceived model will draw from both modern and postmodern redescriptions, of subjectivity, which present choice not as the ability to decide rationally among a finite "menu" of goods within a competitive market from the basis of an always already "given" rational subjectivity, but rather as the constitutive act of selfhood itself: choice then describes not the result of a rational subject's will, but the constitution of the self as distinct entity within particular contingent conditions. Choice and the chooser co-arise, giving the effect of a subject at once constituted and constituting. I take this redescription and apply it to theories of radical post-liberal democracy, which include the reformulation, rather than rejection, of welfare state rationales and justifications, in terms of disrupting the ostensible opposition between the right (private choice) and the good (public institutions). Here I rely on the categories of culture and community, which describe the "sites" where people concretely live their lives, in contrast the other.Ph.D