Meetings, Dialogs and Interconnections in a Theoretical-analytical Perspective Design

Abstract

This study aims to present the theoretical concept that supports the researches I develop in the curriculum field starting from what I assume to be its central core: the curriculum as a statement, a discursive practice. Therefore I’ve established a dialog between Homi Bhabha and Ernesto Laclau’s Theory of Discourse. Bhabha’s emphasis on the enunciation issue highlights the shift he proposes. That means it is not a matter of image referring to a transcendental reality, but actually a continuous process of significance. Thus, he also points out that such ambiguity creates a division, duplicity which emerges from the notion of the enunciation disjunctive time: the tension between what he calls pedagogic and performing dimension, such as shift and ambivalence, founded on indetermination. Owing to he undecidability that distinguishes the political game, the decision is made through the other, by relating with the difference. The ideas of undecidability and temporary closures allow to articulate Bhabha’s propositions with Laclau’s proposed analysis. Placing the curriculum issue in this theoretical framework allows to avoid understanding curricular policy production as a polarized fight of excluding forces, the hegemonic one (prescription emerging from power) and the couter-hegemonic (pedagogic practice of schools) as fixed entities. Such apprehension enables to understand that curricular production contexts are established and informed by multiple discursive significances as well as that inside such contexts the difference moves and is identified by contingent demands, which produce temporary articulations, instituting momentary agreement forged by what the authors denominate as significance work.