Abstract
This text, occasioned by a critical reading of Mathematics Education and Subjectivity (Brown, 2011) and constituting a response to the book, aims at contributing to the building of (post-structuralist) theory in mathematics education. Its purpose was to re/write two major positions that Mathematics Education and Subjectivity articulates: that which it takes with respect to (a) L. S. Vygotsky and the activity theory he gave rise to, which are subject and subjected to critique, and (b) Lacan and his theory of the subject, which radically change signification in and through their adoption in the book. Moving between languages becomes a major issue of theory building captured in the diction “traduttore, traditore” (translating is committing treason). The present text should be read as a contribution to an ongoing dialogue on theory, incomplete and partial, as (perfectly) imperfect as Mathematics Education and Subjectivity itself.
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Notes
A text always belongs to the speaker and listener, author (signatory) and reader (counter-signatory) (Bakhtine [Volochinov], 1977; Derrida, 1988; Vygotskij, 1934/2005b). I therefore refer to MES rather than to its author. “MES” is an acronym that refers to this reading (i.e., co-authoring) of a text authored (signed) by Tony Brown, which, in a very strong sense, implies that any critique is as much a critique of the reader as it is of the author. At issue, therefore, is nothing but the text denoted by the acronym, a position that should be entirely consistent with Brown’s intent.
This is also the way in which Lacan (1966) reads Piaget, who “accustoms us to interrogate the genesis of the social world in individual consciousness” (p. 652).
The pre-Socratic thinkers—Anaximander (610–546 BCE), Heraclitus (535–475 BCE), Parmenides (~540/535–483/575 BCE)—still could think in a different way, thinking as a form of Being, but with Plato (428–348 BCE), ideas and the ideal came to have their own realm separate from material life (Heidegger, 2000).
On the evening of the day when I wrote this phrase, the French news reported high unemployment rates among Italian university graduates and periods spanning years before they find a first job. The same was reported several months earlier by BBC online: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12058434 (viewed June 23, 2011).
The term différance embodies an entire philosophy of difference as there is a difference that cannot be heard when the word is pronounced, as Derrida would while giving a talk—we might say that there is an indifferent difference, a differential (deferring) indifference. The idea is the same as that denoted by the term khôra (see Section 2.4).
Mathematics educators are familiar with transposition and translations by means of which representations are transformed into each other (Janvier, 1987).
Actually, Wittgenstein uses the term “Vorstellung,” which, in English versions of Kant, is translated as “representation.” This would then lead to the statement that “‘meaning’ is at home in a primitive representation of the manner in which language functions.”
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Roth, WM. Re/writing the subject: a contribution to post-structuralist theory in mathematics education. Educ Stud Math 80, 451–473 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10649-011-9375-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10649-011-9375-5