‘Acceptance of the limits of knowability in oneself and others’: performative politics and relational ethics in the primary school classroom

This paper takes up Judith Butler's calls to suspend the desire to completely know theother, and discusses these in relation to the pedagogic relationship in the classroom. It draws upon existing accounts of performative reinscription as a politics to disrupt exclusionary schooling practices and discusses these alongside Butler's theories of relationality. In so doing, it argues that the pedagogic relationship is the space withinwhich performative reinscription occurs and which holds the potential for more ethicalencounters between self and other. Acknowledging the impossibility of completelyknowing the other is not an easy position to hold in the institution of the primaryschool, where policies and practices are based on the concept of rational, knowingsubjects. However, this paper suggests that suspending the desire for the other to provide a coherent account of themselves has important implications for performative politics in the primary school classroom.