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Earlier in May of this year, I was invited by a professional doctorate (PD) student to visit him and to make observations of his work. Henry WestFootnote 1 is the financial director of a medium-sized enterprise, Mercury Housing,Footnote 2 established in the 1980s to provide social housing for individuals who have been hitherto living on the streets: people who have lost their way in society and who some may regard as being rejected from society. Through systems of competitive bidding for government funding, Mercury Housing provides such individuals with affordable accommodation, mostly in the form of flats located largely within terraced housing. In his practice, Henry West points out, with evident pride, to anyone who visits his organisation, the justice of his company’s policy, which is to provide such individuals with accommodation that anyone would be happy to live in. During the course of my visit to the company, we were able to see some of their latest housing, where the fresh new décor, carpeting and furnishings were all maintained at a very high standard; indeed, the pictures of events and places in the United States of America hanging on many of the walls helped to create a spirit that was present in all the properties we visited, of being at the frontier of something new. As financial director, Henry West has a love of all things American, he is determined that their clients are accommodated in housing where they can each gain a sense of admiration and respect for where they live.

Two weeks after my one-day appointment, during conversation with Henry, I had asked him what he had expected from my visit, and he had replied that he was ‘open to anything’. It was his tacit challenge that suggested the basis for this chapter. In writing and in debating, and so connecting more generally with the language of higher education, it attempts to make strange a number of dimensions of some of the familiar everyday events that had become part of Henry West’s practice, both as financial director of the company and as a researching professional who is currently working on a PD.

In guiding Henry as a professional doctorate student, and in reaching out to more general audience, I want to challenge readers with many forms of ‘interconnectivity’ (Antonacopoulou et al. 2005), not only in terms of practice, but more widely in opening consideration of the forms of language in which various practices are themselves immersed. Such learned connectivity, then, not only opens the uncertainties and complexities of societies in which PD research and ‘work-based learning’ is now situated (Nowotny et al. 2001: 30–47; Fell et al. 2011), it also constitutes grounds for the implicit ‘generic’ benchmarks of ‘doctoralness’ (Lester 2010) that structure the work of ‘researching professionals’ (Bourner et al. 2000), like Henry West, in exploring, examining and developing what may be regarded as the highest levels of professionalism in their own practices. It was such forms of learning that variously grounded and provided the basis for the continued development of Henry West’s skilled performance in the workplace; the developing ‘know-how’ that it represented had not only been distilled from, but found expression in, the performative enactment of developing such practice on the day of my visit.

Of particular interest here are questions that emerged about the language of practice (Schatzki et al. 2001), and in particular about the pedagogised forms of language that now tend to foreground the generation of knowledge in and from practice, which is the subject of this chapter.

Language and Practice

In empirical terms, Henry West’s office contains a number of entities that are familiar to anyone who has worked in such an environment: reference books, reports on the desk, an appointment diary, a computer, a printer, a telephone and so on. Ontologically, however, it is not these entities per se that are interesting but what comes into being from Henry’s embodied engagement with his world of practice. Moreover, and not surprisingly, though Henry had been keen to share some stories of events that had unfolded in the lives of the people who hitherto had lived on the streets and who desperately wanted accommodation that was affordable and more secure, the question of what it means to be human and more generally the question of being did not feature explicitly within his discourse. One such person, for example, had walked past his safe house – now presented as a well-appointed American style café – repeatedly every day for several months before he finally gained the courage to enter. The embodied anxieties that he had experienced were all too real. In the context of such experiences, tacitly and informally, questions concerning what it means to be human were almost unavoidable in Henry’s organisation; they kept bubbling up just below the surface of our conversation.

As an observer when I first met Henry and he prepared me for the day, I was made acutely aware of the presence of some of the ‘ready-to-hand’ equipment that was unfolding in Henry’s world. Such ‘equipment’ could not be characterised by a list of entities arranged in his office, nor even by two identifiable extracts from one of his reports that he drew upon to create a context for the day, nor a range of points that emerged from his experience of developing the company that he used to foreground my visit, nor even the hospitality that he showed to make me feel comfortable in his organisation.

What distinguishes such equipment from mere entities to be found in Henry’s office is its being ready-to-hand in Dasein’sFootnote 3 world of practice and the possibilities that come into being from its presence. One element of such equipment that was very close to home for Henry West was that entity we call signs that he variously drew upon in making sense of what comes to be his practice each day. As Paul Gorner (2007: 38) suggests, ‘what makes this comportment to entities’ in this case ‘possible’, ‘is the understanding of being’. ‘Being with’ me and in being ‘ready-to-hand’ in Henry’s world of practice, the various ‘equipment’ that he used ‘in-order-to’ prepare me for observing his work through the day was not fixed (Heidegger 1962: 96–98{68–69}, 118–122{86–88}, 153–168{118–130}): it was continually embodied in his changing responses to the holistic picture he was creating for me, reflecting his consummate know-how and skill in introducing a visitor – myself in the role of researcher – to his company. In this case, we might suggest more formally that his temporal engagements with multiple dimensions of his own historical experience brought into being a number of distinct registers of language mediating his practice. These in turn were already foregrounded by his strong interest in contributing to developments in his company, his love affair with American culture and his concerns for justice that for him is rooted in his own life experiences. In his relationship with his wife, for example, who is the head teacher of a large primary school in a community characterised by all of the classical hallmarks of socio-economic deprivation, he is concerned, on a professional level, with working for justice for the children in her school. In practical terms his company organise and contribute to events for the children in his wife’s school. The equipment – in this case, the signs he drew upon – only made sense as a holistic picture created by the language in which he was immersed. The temporal unfolding of such equipment – involving looking towards future possibilities and on the basis of many layers of past experiences, from which we make sense of the present – in pragmatic terms created a context in which we could work together for the day.

Here was the beginning of a phenomenology of multiple layers of practice that are not easily rendered into identifiable objects or subjects of science. The simple yet sophisticated basis upon which entities can be involved with one another constitutes Henry’s world of practice, which, in historical terms, is a mark of his own particular ‘style’ in business (Spinosa et al. 1997: 20–25). In this case, in the multiple layers of his practice, its style and his character as a manager reflect his own ‘techne’Footnote 4 and his ready-to-hand involvement with equipment, which is nearly always foregrounded by one ubiquitous form of equipment, the sign.

The Work and Play of Signs Mediating Knowledge Generation in Practice

According to the classical metaphysical principle of being, ‘something is repeatable to the extent that it is’ (Caputo 1987, p. 123; emphasis added). It is this standpoint that creates the grounds for the conventional modus operandi of science as research developed from work-based learning; it makes demands for nothing less than the generation of valid, reliable and trustworthy knowledge of what is. It also points towards an explanation for the ontic and epistemological structuring of practices and discourses of work-based learning (Flint 2012c). Except, as a structure for the crucible of the modern knowledge economy, in at least one layer of our practices at the workplace, if the classical metaphysical principle were held to be true, it would hardly seem to warrant the conflation of the languages of modern education with such ontic and epistemological structuring of beings around the axis of practice at the workplace. At issue in what follows is the question of why the language of education has come to nearly always foreground the production and dissemination of knowledge at the workplace.

Many of the conventions of social research, and indeed the classical metaphysical principle of being itself, have their roots in a philosophical tradition running from Plato and Aristotle and culminating in Husserl’s philosophy (Flint 2011). However, from Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of Husserl’s writings in Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays, another principle of being has emerged following the foregrounding of language as systems of signs in social theory. He writes ‘the presence of the present is derived from repetition of signs and not the reverse’ (Derrida 1973: 52). Something is – for example, ‘the revealing of science through research’ at the workplace – takes on the unity of an identity, to the extent that it is brought forth by repetition; being or identity in this reading of practice is ‘proportionate to repetition’ (Caputo 1987: 123).

Once we begin to examine such repetition of signs in any detail, a number of issues come into view. From Derrida’s (1978) deconstruction of Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, there emerge two possible repetitions of signs mediating practice. In practice, it turns out that we only ever repeat ideas, thoughts and observations in the workplace, given different particular contexts. According to Husserl’s conception of our conscious intentions at the workplace, ‘this is a metaphysical idea of repetition which moves backwards’ – but in Derrida’s reading it turns out to be ‘a repetition which comes later and is reproductive of prior presence’ (Caputo 1987: 121), which ‘Derrida identifies with the rabbi (Husserl in disguise)’ because it is always directed towards attempts to repeat exactly what had first been stated. Husserl wants to hold onto those metaphysical guardrails and to remain within the tradition. But, Derrida’s deconstruction also identifies with ‘the poet, disguised as James Joyce’, to uncover the more radical side of Husserl in a repetition that ‘exploits the buried potential in each word’ following a ‘generalised equivocity’ in teasing out the ‘nuances’ and interconnections of words and phrases. The repetition of language in Joyce’s Ulysses is a case in point. This is a repetition which ‘is prior to presence and productive of it, and as a kind of reading, is therefore free to produce as it reads’ – here is a deconstructive and ‘critical idea of repetition’ – which in the context of the knowledge economy actualizes links, consonances and associations, ‘settling into rather than reducing this labyrinthine field’ (Caputo 1987: 121, 128). We might be tempted to say that herein lays the basis for any innovation in, or development of, practice.

But, herein, there are at least two further dilemmas which were easily resolved in every layer of Henry’s own practice. The logic of Husserl’s repetition demands that researchers consciously repeat and re-enact with perfect fidelity what had been written or said by earlier workers in their practice – so that nothing new could be passed on and there would be no regeneration of their tradition. Equally, Joycean equivocity would make ‘the very text of its repetition unintelligible’ (Derrida 1978: 105), because every statement in this case about workplace practice would be so deprived of any depth; it would in effect be ‘scattered to the four winds’ (Caputo 1987: 128).

In fact, Derrida’s deconstruction resolves these apparent dilemmas by recognising that there is a ‘constituting value’ (Derrida 1973: 5) of ‘non-presence’ that is built right into consciousness – a principle of deferral in time and difference in space expressed in the French word, différance – that is always already at play in all we do or say. In fact, for the most part, any such play is constrained in the discourses in which we are variously embedded at the workplace to the work of signs in helping us to make sense of our everyday world. It was such play of différance that was at work in Henry’s conscious techne in the unfolding historicity of the multiple layers of practice seen earlier. It has been in operation, almost without thinking, from the very start of reading and writing this text.

On this reading, despite the rigours of research structures, the work of ‘repetition’ of signs at each particular workplace as grounds for the temporal unfolding of practices, where the play of différance is always at work in any identity, constitutes a particular challenge for epistemological structuring of research. In fact, the play of différance presents significant difficulties for the teleology of fulfilment of any identities constituted in every layer of practice. The objects and subjects of workplace discourse, indeed the truth of, the history of and what comes into being as a presence in workplace practice, are all effects constituted by the work or play of signs in the temporal unfolding of différance. Also, any possible origin, itself the product of repetition, is recognised as pure illusion; we each remain cut off from our past at the workplace, or in life more generally, and we continue in the throw of the ‘empire of signs’ (Trifonas 2001) that dominates our modern world.

Historically, against this, many philosophers and most social scientists appear to aspire to a form of mastery over past events, on the basis of either the tacit or explicit assumption that given time, the history of such events, such as my own meeting with Henry, can be recollected in their totality and completeness without remainder. In a book Geoffrey Bennington co-wrote with him entitled Jacques Derrida (1993), which is the closest he came to writing a memoir, Derrida makes clear that ‘no human being can ever completely recover the multiple layers of history that make up a life’ (Dooley and Kavanagh 2007: 3). In that initial meeting with Henry, and in trying to make sense of each other, it might be supposed that we were each working with fragments of the various layers of our past histories, with any identities being cut off from the teleology of fulfilment by what Derrida calls ‘the catastrophe of memory’:

I would say that what I suffer from inconsolably always has the form, not only of loss, which is often! – but of the loss of memory: that what I am living cannot be kept, thus repeated, and – how to put it? – decipherable, as if an appeal for a witness had no witness, in some way, not even the witness that I could be for what I have lived. This is for me the very experience of death, of catastrophe. (Derrida 1995: 207)

Such catastrophe for Derrida leaves what comes into being, including identities of knowledge generated at the workplace, as no more than mere ‘traces’, ‘fragments’ or ‘cinders’ deposited from some earlier events: it is impossible to recreate a historical presence. In Signature, Event, Context Derrida uses the term ‘iteration’ to describe this impossible relation: in place of repetition in a Joycean move, he speaks of reiteration that nuances repetition with a difference (from the Sanskrit, itera) in our language (Austin 1962; Derrida 1982: 309–330). The Canadian writer, Norman Levine, in conversation often remarked that ‘in order to remember something, we have to change it slightly’. His apparently simple comment nevertheless acknowledges both the impossibility of absolute repetition and the pervasive presence of our very being. In the light of this, what Henry and I were doing in our opening conversation was simply trying to make sense of each other’s attempts at reiteration of our past experiences.

But, the context for my short-opening everyday conversation in Henry’s practice had been far removed from the place of any academic discipline at the university, involving the possibility of some shared mastery of social theory. At the workplace, as exemplified by Henry’s organisation, there are none of the academic institutions that create the basis for mastery and control over the production and dissemination of knowledge. Here, in preparing for my day, we were both separated geographically and to a large extent, politically, from any institution of higher education. Moreover, if it had ever been our intention, there certainly would not have been sufficient time for us even to begin unpicking and deconstructing the many layers of our own histories that were played out in our conversation. In practice, however, what came into being in preparing for the day had been a number of clear subjects and objects that structured our day – a range of meetings that Henry had planned, including visits to some of their new accommodation and a safe house organised by his company where we called during the afternoon. In fact, what came into being, almost without thinking for both of us in our initial meeting, had been our immersion in a pedagogised discourse that in the pragmatics of everyday work defined our practice for the day, connecting a number of identifiable subjects and objects on a timeline that we had negotiated.

As a particular discursive practice, then, in one layer of our practices, what has come into being in what are now regarded as the highest forms of education and training at the workplace are manifold forms of the ‘governmental’ apparatus of work-based learning. Such forms, ‘corresponding closely with Foucault’s account of biopower’ at the workplace, ‘put major emphasis on training and dispositions’ to produce ‘a self-managing’ workforce who are in possession of appropriate knowledge and skills (Peim 2012: 18). Moreover, the discursive practice for such apparatus, also constituting a pedagogised discourse in which Henry and I had been immersed, involved nothing less than the re-contextualisation, re-presentation, and re-ordering of the world of beings in their being (Cerbone, 2008). For the sociologist, Basil Bernstein (2000: 33), pedagogy is not a discourse at all but rather a principle, the principle of re-contextualisation – ‘the selective appropriation, alignment and refocusing’ of work-based learning upon relationships between subjects and objects (Flint 2012a: 181–182). In its re-contextualisation of the world of Dasein, in one stroke, rather than considering the temporal relationship between beings and being, such pedagogised discourse purports to constitute the basis for a relationship between an individual as subject and object on grounds of the principle of reason – although the precise basis for such a relationship outside the mantra of reason has never been explicated (except by recourse to Heidegger’s (1962) thesis regarding temporality). It is this very ‘governmental’Footnote 5 apparatus of public education and training in the workplace in the so-called developed and developing world that now constitutes the hegemonic public face of ‘technological framing’ (Flint and Peim 2012).

Heidegger’s original term for technological framing was das Ge-stell, which in the German language derives from the verb, stellen, to place, to challenge, and is connected with a number of compounds – verstellen, to disguise; vorstellen, to represent; zustellen, to render…. As Heidegger (1977b: 4) noted, cryptically, ‘the essence of technology is by no means anything technological’. More recently within the field of education, the meaning of this term has been developed beyond what Heidegger had originally presented (in the context of hard technologies of atomic power, boat building, bridges, aircraft, etc.) more than 50 years ago to provide a focus upon the soft technological language of das Ge-stell found in modern forms of education, which is itself seen as ‘governmental apparatus’ (Peim and Flint 2009; Flint and Peim 2012).

It is such governmental apparatus that has now come to assume the place for dissemination of public research, which has come into being as the very crucible of the late modern knowledge economy (Heidegger 1977c). Significantly, governmental apparatus, which, in and through the theology created by the highest form of education and training constitutes grounds for the ‘conduct of conduct’ of bodies, of populations, in one layer of our practices, is always in danger of inaugurating only one way of revealing the world around an axis represented by the principle reason (Heidegger 1991; Flint and Peim 2012). Tacitly, it is such a governmental apparatus, which, some would argue, the film-maker, Cathartic Studios, was exploring in the 1999 box-office smash The Matrix. Here is an apparatus that is forever at risk of reducing Dasein to a ‘watchfully earnest, focused and productive’ (Fielding 2001: 9) subject and object – a puppet of the framing found in a multiplicity of economies.

Indeed, as the crucible of the knowledge economy in one layer of our practices, such governmental apparatus of education and training has not been produced as a matter of policy, nor an edict from modern governments, nor by some apparently subtle and strategic managerialist manoeuvre undertaken by educationalists in attempting to raise further the standing of their own professionalism, and certainly not by the work of philosophers who continue to debate some of the issues arising from technological framing. But, philosophy itself does provide some important clues as to the significance of this apparatus, for it was Derrida who first came to appreciate that all identities – as we have seen already in this chapter – are inhabited by a ‘ghostliness that renders all totalisation, fulfilment, plenitude impossible’ (1988: 116); what comes into being and the multiplicity of beings found in our modern world are, at best, only ever traces. And, it is the presence of modern education and training at the workplace, which in its mythology, de jure, or so it would seem, has now come to assume the place in one dominant layer of our practices as the governmental apparatus used in order to maintain the fidelity of such identities de facto. It does so in the name of education by creating the very grounds for Dasein, continually pushing against the impossibility of the completeness and totalisation of any identity (Flint and Peim 2012).

Mythologies is Roland Barthes’ (2000{1972}) account of how myth takes hold of a historical object, in this case the myth of ‘education as the principle of being’ (Flint and Peim 2012: 278, emphasis added), and turns it into a trope of universal value at the workplace. For societies of people increasingly required to complete annual training and development work proscribed by others, in some cases as a condition of employment, in this one layer of our practices, education through work-based and lifelong forms of learning encourages us to think of ourselves as ‘work in progress’. In such a layer of our practices – the language being predicated on claims to be the principal or even the exclusive layer of practices – it would seem the new late modern theology enshrined in the mythology of the highest forms of education and training at the workplace is coming to persuade us that we are each a less than perfect organic project that only education in one or more of its many guises can remedy.

In this one particular layer of practice permeating the production of knowledge more generally at the workplace, such theologically structured mythologies of “education and training” also gather together all of the apparatus that marks the very presence of ‘technological framing’, colonising other bodies and making such framing accessible for consumption by a multiplicity of publics in our society. Providing we remain locked into this one layer of modern practices, it is apparent that knowledge products in all modern economies can only gain legitimacy on grounds of their authentication by rigorous officially recognised means of assessment. Herein lies the basis for much wider concerns about the ‘principle of assessment’ (Peim and Flint 2009), born out of the ‘principle of reason’ that purports to provide the only valid way of revealing the world (Heidegger 1991).

Education and training, too, in this particular layer of practice, have come to symbolise what is valued at the workplace, and as the ‘pivotal’ expressions of the will-to-power (Heidegger 1977d; Thomson 2000, 2005) in the framing (Heidegger 1977a), the learning that is engendered also provides a medium for the resocialisation of populations of individuals. Such docile bodies are always at risk, however, of becoming programmed as puppets of the very same hegemony, in what are essentially technologies of representation (Foucault 1977: 135–169). The docile bodies are always at risk of becoming reduced to ‘standing reserve’ (Heidegger 1977b: 17; Flint and Peim 2012) – that is, a locus of excess energy that is ‘available for use’ in an ‘intelligible order’ of subjects and objects created in the economy (Caputo 1987; Thomson 2000).

Moreover, in remaining in this one particular layer now built into many practices, here, the pedagogic re-contextualisation of the temporal unfolding of beings in their being into subjects and objects of education and training at the workplace constitutes grounds for another dimension of the framing in the production, dissemination and commodification of research (Heidegger 1977e; Flint and Barnard 2012). In this one layer of practices what really distinguishes modern education and training as the crucible of knowledge production and dissemination, without which there could be no commodification, are the ‘panoptic’ and ‘synoptic’ apparatuses of surveillance and monitoring that education and training provides. It is these apparatuses that now create the ongoing basis for maintaining the fidelity of identities in the emergent late modern theology of the various mythological objects and subjects to be found in our economies.

In this way of thinking, which attempts to clarify the blurring of different practices at the workplace, it can be seen that it is essentially education and training at the workplace which, in constituting the grounds for the maintenance of the fidelity of the identities of knowledge products in one layer of practices, has come to assume a new position in late modern economies. If this argument has validity, then it is pedagogised discourse born out of education and training that increasingly is coming to provide the major locus of foreknowledge that structures Dasein’s ‘being-in-the-world’ of the workplace. Is it not deeply ironic that this should be so, because pedagogic discourse in constituting grounds for defined subjects and objects of economies is always in danger of alienating Dasein from itself?

It is important to see such practices against the backdrop of ontology and epistemology which still stand as grounds for understanding the production of knowledge in the higher education academy. The theology of the highest forms of education and training does not somehow displace ontology and epistemology at the workplace; in constituting the essentially technological apparatus for the ontic structuring of beings in one layer of many practices, they have now emerged as grounds for the ‘ontotheological’ structuring of our world: as the only significant locus for gathering together all of the dimensions of the framing in the late modern workplace (Heidegger 1977a; Thomson 2000, 2005; Peim and Flint 2009). Such structuring is embodied in the new emphasis placed upon performativity and the development of associated competencies and in the tacit emergence of the language of the framing that has come to regard itself as the principal locus of all our workplace practices.

As the opening meeting with Henry illustrated, there are multiple layers of practices in every workplace; the temporal unfolding of his know-how revealed in the tacit forms of techne from his opening practice, as we began to witness earlier, always bears the fruit of a number of dimensions of Dasein’s historicity.

In sociological terms, however, against a backdrop of the intention to produce objects and subjects at the workplace, more conventionally the apparatus of ‘work-based learning’ is there to confront the concomitant shifts from the older apparent certainties and the supposed ‘linearity’ of organisational change to emerging issues of the ‘volatility’ and ‘complexities’ of practice. This is especially so when confronted with the ‘hidden side’ of developing knowledge in the Risk Society (Beck 1992; Nowotny et al. 2001, p. 47), which can now be seen arising from that ghostliness in language that is always at work in the play of différance, rendering the mythology of fulfilment and the totalisation of identities reproduced in every layer of practice impossible.

Commercially, too, it also now clear why there has been considerable interest in expropriating tacit forms of knowledge, of the form exhibited in Henry West’s practice, and translating and transforming it into subjects and objects of knowledge, now recognised as the very acme of pedagogised forms of discourses found at the workplace. For example, The

Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi’s (1995) account of knowledge management, has proved an important contribution in many forms of commercial practice (Easterby-Smith and Lyles 2003). Nonaka and Takeuchi’s work spearheaded a flurry of publications concerning the management of knowledge within organisations (Drucker 1999) and at the frontiers of knowledge production, dissemination and application (vide Derrida 1981; Despres and Chavel 2000; Edvinsson and Malone 1997; Flint 2012b). While suggesting the basis for the ‘enabling conditions’ necessary for knowledge production in the economy (Flint 2011: 132–133), it is difficult to find any reflexive consciousness of the ontotheological structuring of the framing in the literature concerning such economies of practice.

What is passed over completely in such structuring is the very movement of temporality itself that was there right from the start, in Henry West’s practice. The play of différance, too, as we have seen already, has been at work in any readings and the writing of this text. Such movement of ‘temporality’ is perhaps Heidegger’s (1962: 400–403 {349–352}) big idea in his influential account of Being and Time. It arose from his deconstructive reading of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. ‘Temporality is not, strictly speaking, a process’. It cannot be measured empirically. ‘It is a structure of occurrence’ (Stambaugh 1986: 88), which in Henry’s practice at the workplace and in our lives more generally, structures a continually unfolding relationship between the future and the past, from where we make sense of the present. For Heidegger, ‘temporality temporalises as a future, which makes present in the process of having been’ (Heidegger 1962: 401 {350}). What do these words mean in practice?

Addressing this question in the brief examination of temporality that follows shows that the ontotheological structuring in the framing not only creates grounds for mythologies of work-based learning, it is also based upon an illusion.

Temporalising does not mean a succession of the ecstases – a series of expressions of what has been the present and the future. The future is not later than beenness, and this is not earlier than present (Heidegger 1962: 401 {350}). Such temporality has already been connected with Dasein’s existential possibility, for example, in the techne of Henry’s workplace practice. Possibility, which Dasein in each case is existentially, is distinguished just as much from empty, logical possibility as from the contingency of something occurrent (vorhanden), in so far as with the latter this and that can ‘happen’ (passieren)’ (Heidegger 1962: 182 {143}). In other words, what had been witnessed at Henry West’s workplace in that possibility of being a financial director is ‘futural’,Footnote 6 not because it is merely a statistical measure of possibility rather than the actuality of what happened. Instead, such existential possibility witnessed in the workplace expresses a prospect that can never be actualised in the present; it expresses a future that can never be present. ‘Future’ does not mean a ‘now’, which not yet having become ‘actual’ sometime will be, but rather the coming in which ‘Dasein comes towards itself in its ownmost ability to be’ (Heidegger 1962: 401 {350}).

Dasein’s possibilities that had been witnessed in Henry’s practice and in reflecting upon the relationship between knowledge production and research at the workplace had not constituted objects that can be actualized in practice. In being in the workplace as a financial director, manager or researcher, my own and Henry’s existential possibilities are always futural; such traces of identity do not somehow constitute endpoints at which Dasein aims. As William Blattner’s (2005, p. 314) ‘Unattainability Thesis’ suggests, even though I continually press ahead to become a researcher (or any other given identity in the workplace), in practice I can never become those objects, because in each case the temporal structure of my being as care is always ‘futural’.

However, in the crucible of technological framing constituted by education and training at the workplace, the ontotheological structuring of governmental practices of research, of work-based learning and of lifelong learning in the knowledge economy – as epistemologists have always claimed (Caputo 1987; Rouse 2005) – subjects and objects are generally treated as unproblematic. Consequently, my earlier observations of Henry’s practice could have been construed in terms of a relationship between distinct entities:

  • Myself as the author; the ‘knower’ in this case

  • The objects ‘known’ – the skills, know-how, performance, motivation, research and knowledge generated from his practice

  • The ‘knower’s representation of the known’ in this case inscribed in my formal observations taken from the workplace

But, the foregoing brief examination of temporality has shown that all such objects are illusions. It points towards the ‘unexamined and erroneous propositions’ that underlie ‘any conception of knowers as a special kind of entity – a mind, a consciousness, language speaker or rational agent – and of knowledge as a relationship between entities’ (Rouse 2005: 174), or indeed, of knowledge as an object of the economy. As a leading translator of Heidegger’s work, Joan Stambaugh (1986: 93) noted: ‘temporality is’ also ‘centrally instrumental’ ‘in pulling the rug out from under the concept of man as sub-ject because there is no standing-under (substance) involved’.

Having arrived at this point and in being in Henry’s workplace, we have yet to make clear the meaning of being in such a place and of what it means to be more generally. This reading of Heidegger’s discourse suggests that, rather than a pedagogised discourse connecting subjects and objects of the knowledge economy, ‘an entity, or being is anything that in any sense is’ (Gorner 2007: 15). The foregoing examination of the temporality of being has also uncovered such beings in their ‘enpresenting’ as primary projections of the possibility of understanding. What it means to be in the knowledge economy is easily lost.

The question of the meaning of being is also one that is often passed over in readings of Heidegger’s (1962) Being and Time (Caputo 1987; Dreyfus and Wrathall 2005). In fact, Heidegger (1962) draws out not just an ontological difference between beings and being but a tripartite distinction involving the meaning of being. For Heidegger, preliminary projections of understanding the workplace are projected upon their horizon of being, for example, in being in the workplace. In this tripartite distinction, meaning is that which constitutes what is understood (Heidegger 1962, 193 {152}) in the workplace, ‘giving it an axis around which it can organise itself’. So, ‘meaning signifies the “upon which”Footnote 7 of a primary projection in terms of which an issue’, in this case the unfolding pedagogisation of workplace practices in the knowledge economy, ‘can be conceived in its possibility as that which it is’ (Heidegger 1962: 371 {324}).

As Heidegger (1962: 371 {324}) makes plain, what is required now is no less than that we study the vectors in the hidden projection which underlies the interpretation of knowledge as objects in the economy. In a series of lectures presented as The Principle of Reason, Heidegger (1991: 28) answers his own earlier question; namely, for him it is that eponymous principle ‘that bepowers everything insofar as reason’ and in ‘complete fulfilment of the demand for reason’. For Heidegger, what continually unfolds from the mighty principle of reason ‘is that modern technology pushes towards the greatest possible perfection’ (Heidegger 1991: 121).

Part of the issue can be understood on the basis of the ‘calculability of objects’ (Heidegger 1991: 121) and the very fact, as we have witnessed already, that in all forms of pedagogised discourse:

The ‘subject’ demands that a ‘reason’ be brought forth for the ‘object’ only because the subject has long ceased to let the being be in its own ground.Footnote 8 (Caputo 1987: 223; Heidegger 1991: 26–27)

What Heidegger could not have seen in the early part of the twentieth century, however, was the ontotheological structuring afforded by late modern forms of education and training as the crucible of the knowledge economy at the workplace that now gathers together every element of the framing identified by him (Heidegger 1977a, 1991). What distinguishes modern education and training as the crucible of the framing is not only its capacity to create pedagogised discourse. As the place for such scientific and theorised narratives of what is done in practice, the pedagogic apparatus used to drive this science in being grounded in the principle of reason and in being always incomplete and unfulfilled is, in fact, paradoxically, the very locus driving development effort at the workplace (Flint and Peim 2012: 61). The desire to overcome the impossible and to make good the perfection and totality of all identities arises from being itself, which in its historicity in all manner of work-based science, indeed, in all forms of social science, is only ever a trace. There still remains, too, another paradox in the unfolding practices of technological framing found in the highest forms of education and training at the workplace. Until now, such specialised practices, themselves necessary products of the framing, have remained almost exclusively subjects of discussion in specialist forms of philosophy and theology. Indeed, the absent presence of such framing in the workplace is a mark of its power in the late modern world.

In Heidegger’s attempt to rethink the history of western thinking (Mulhall 2003), which this chapter has sought to capture in microcosm by opening reflection on the temporal structures of being in the workplace, his writings serve to put in question our very sense of what is and our temporal relationship with being. In so doing, it is hoped this chapter serves in ‘making strange’Footnote 9 our everyday sense that we make of the world of the workplace. For Brecht, such strangeness engenders an attitude of thoughtfulness and questioning, which it is hoped here will be directed towards the possible dangers of the current hegemony of the means-ends structured technological ‘framing’ which apparently provides only one way of revealing our world in workplace practices (Peim and Flint 2009).

One fact may seem immediately obvious from this deconstruction of the structures of Henry West’s involvement in the knowledge economy, and that is the need to make clear the distinctions between education and pedagogy, and between education and being. Indeed what this statement represents is always at risk of becoming pedagogised until, as we have seen already, it is made plain it is the temporal structuring of language and the play of différance that open the possibility of a quite different metaphysics for the production of knowledge claims. Such metaphysics is already palpable in the newly emerging geometries of crystallisationFootnote 10 and of the rhizomeFootnote 11 used to legitimate the truth of knowledge claims. In this way language and these new geometries serve to provide a basis upon which to challenge any possible binary distinctions between education and pedagogy or between education and being.

Such pedagogisation of many of the layers of our ‘liquid modern world’ (Bauman 2000) is also deeply ironic because in the framing in the highest forms of education and training available at the workplace, which now has come to assume the position of an ‘ontological principle’, and as such a significant locus of desire – all involved in the workplace are encouraged to see themselves as ‘unfinished entities’, ‘works in progress’ where only the governmental apparatus of education and training can ‘remediate such a lack’. But, the real paradox arises from the realisation that in this way Dasein is always in danger of being reduced to ‘standing reserve’, subjects and objects of the knowledge economy constituting a source of excess energy that is ‘available for use’ in the coming into being of an ‘intelligible order’.

Some of the layers of Henry West’s practice also contain a significant challenge for thinking in other ways than those proscribed in such framing. In some of his layers of practice, it was temporality itself and the play of différance that created grounds for the historicity of his unfolding techne. Here, in being with him at the workplace, was another axis of understanding around which beings could be organised without being reduced to standing reserve.

Tacitly, also, Henry’s company constitutes the basis of another challenge for the late modern knowledge economy in that as a developing business it provides respected and high quality social housing for people who have hitherto being living on the streets; the accommodation itself, therefore, opens significant possibilities for individuals. In other words Henry’s company is working primarily with human beings who are open to possibilities, rather than with subjects and objects that are part of the calculus of the knowledge economy. Eric Maslow (1987{1954}) would recognise this as perhaps the first step towards ‘self-actualisation’ in what he identified as a ‘hierarchy of needs’. But, in being a psychologist, Maslow had not primarily concerned himself with questioning and thinking about our home in the language of modern education and training and the ontology of our relationship with being. For work-based learning, such thinking opens the challenge of further possibilities for questioning much of the mythological pedagogy of modern practices.