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Tropological Curriculum Studies: Puppets and 

Statues of Curriculum Quagmires
1
 

 

Peter Appelbaum
2
 

Arcadia University, USA 
 

 

There is a never-ending tension between conceiving of educational experience as enabling and 

as constraining. We seem locked into this dichotomy with no escape: In The Character of 

Curriculum Studies, William Pinar (2011) notes that the sociology of education, so dominant 

in the field of curriculum studies, has seemingly “won out” as the clearest interpretation of 

schooling: schools are institutions of social reproduction. Rather than accepting this idea and 

moving on, we perseverate, constantly creating new research projects that reconfirm the 

hypothesis, which of course, in Foucauldian terms, makes for a successful perpetuation of 

practice and guarantees a career. But what would it mean to “move on”? A psychoanalyst 

would define repeated behaviors with no “results” as psychosis. If reproduction studies as 

social change is the result sought, then yes, we would have to recommend serious therapy for 

curriculum studies. If the goal is to establish careers in a field that excels at critiquing 

schooling, then we might instead celebrate our field as fairly healthy. Regarding the possibility 

of “therapy” for our field of research:  In his introduction to The Puppet and the Dwarf, Žižek 

evokes Hegel’s assertion that it is folly to alter a corrupt ethical system without changing the 

religion, to make a revolution without a reformation. The basic tension is not so much between 

reason and feeling, but instead between knowledge and a disavowed belief embodied in 

external ritual. That is, between logical consistency and the notion that “I know what I am 

doing, but nevertheless I am doing it.” 

 

Bildung and the Bildungsroman 
The origins of curriculum studies are comingled with the culture of the Bildungsroman, a 

genre of literature in which a young person becomes an adult member of society, and through 

which one can understand or propose a form of education of the individual as a member of 

society. The premise is that there is a dialectic between the education of the individual in the 

broadest sense of education and the ongoing creation of a good society. I claim that most if not 

all of our efforts in curriculum studies accepts the “theology” of Bildung and enacts the 

Bildungsroman over and over again. In doing so, curriculum studies perpetuates the 

assumptions, tensions, and paradoxes of the genre ad infinitum. 

A quick geneaology begins with Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister books, usually considered 

the first of the Bildungsroman literary genre. The first of two books opens with Wilhelm 

playing for countless hours with a miniature puppet theater. Later, Wilhelm secretly defies his 

parents’ expectations of working in the family business, and instead becomes a director of a 

traveling theater, realizing his childhood dream with live-action, human puppets that follow 

his direction. Still later we come to realize that Wilhelm’s defiance of his parents is critical to 



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the “most appropriate” education of all. A team of adults has spent years overseeing his 

adventures, like puppet masters behind the scenes, making sure that life-threatening yet 

important learning experiences don’t actually lead to death. In this way, fulfillment is achieved 

through practical activity that promotes the development of one’s own individual talents and 

abilities, which in turn lead to the development of society. 

In this way, Goethe’s articulation of Bildung, the education of the young adult, does 

not simply accept the socio-political status quo, but rather includes the ability to engage in a 

critique of one’s society, and to ultimately challenge the society to actualize its own highest 

ideals. Perhaps ironically, in the end, Wilhelm has been prepared by such critique to accept 

and embrace his social role. We see, thanks to Goethe, that this seemingly liberating pedagogy 

but conserving philosophy relies on the careful crafting of the puppet show of life by well-

meaning adults. If I am right, that the historical genealogy of Bildung and the Bildungsroman 

might be a useful exercise, then one theme of such scholarship would be the unpacking of 

education as social reproduction, present in the ostensibly liberating and socially ameliorative 

idea of Bildung itself. Goethe’s well-known conservative politics set such an intimate link in 

motion from the start. 

As I have written elsewhere (Appelbaum 2008), the Bildungsroman literature, even as 

recent as the Harry Potter novels and films, repeatedly serves the function of facilitating our 

perseveration with the apparent paradox of a liberating pedagogy of autonomy for a 

conservative, social reproduction ad infinitum. Our perseveration is a critical quagmire, a 

stutter that never stops. Goethe’s genius, which can be applied to the analysis of this quagmire, 

is evident in the trope of the puppets. Indeed, puppets are the metaphor endemic to pretty 

much all educational thought, from the teacher as crafter of a classroom theater to the use of 

objects and stories in the classroom to represent concepts and relationships. The artifacts of 

classroom life take on metaphorical puppet elements all of the time: a graph in a mathematics 

classroom becomes a voice through which a child explains her argument for or against an 

interpretation of the original word problem; a beaker and a Styrofoam cup in Biology lab 

allows a student to step outside of her assumptions about heat and cold in much the same way 

that a storyteller might use a potato prince to try on characteristics of a benevolent despot; 

base-ten blocks personify place value while the number of books in one’s stack of “those I’ve 

read” works like money in a theatrical candy store. Much theorizing, from Judith Butler to 

Anthony Giddens to De Certeau to Louis Althusser to Simone de Beauvoir, has helped us to 

perfect a discourse for demonstrating the simultaneous ideological limitations and 

revolutionary potential of such everyday practice. The difference emphasized by the puppet 

trope is between an actor who embodies roles, and a puppet that externalizes a self or an idea 

that can be looked at, as if in a mirror, or located on a map. It’s uncanny in the Freudian sense. 

As we play this kind of teacher of that kind of student, we see ourselves and not ourselves in 

the bifurcation. And when we externalize a concept via a model, we are both outside ourselves 

and inside ourselves at the same time. We also become ourselves as we perform a self, always 

becoming and re-becoming ourselves in and with everyday practices. 

To treat oneself as a puppet in a puppet show is not quite the same thing as performing 

with or through puppets, because of the uncanny bifurcation as distinct from the very 

embodiment of our becoming. In this sense, we might more fully capture the spirit of a 

classroom if we think of the actors as statues come to life. Before the classroom encounter, the 

students and teacher are ossified, so to speak, awaiting animation off-stage. The educational 



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encounter is a fantasy of animation, bringing the actors and the curriculum to life. Terms such 

as motivation are stand-ins for the magic of animation, of the bringing to life of sleeping or 

not-yet-born “learners” and “teachers.” A curriculum – in the sense of Ralph Tyler, the set of 

concepts and skills to be learned, something made and sculpted, something that “represents” 

cultural traditions, legacies, fears and fantasies -- is usefully understood as a statue, fossilized 

and ossified until a school community gives it life, dead until reborn. An educational 

encounter is a Pygmalion kiss. 

Puppets and statues help us recognize that knowledge is sometimes mistakenly 

theorized as technology. It can become a prosthesis. Attached to a human being, it gives him 

or her super powers beyond what could be done without the knowledge. More nuanced 

theories understand humans as co-emerging with their technologies. Cyborgs, mixtures of the 

biological and the machine, digital and organic, are caught in webs of signification and 

complexification. Yet in either case, prosthetic super-powers or cyborg mutation, we are stuck 

unable to understand the tensions and paradoxes among the individual and the group, structure 

and agency, signifier and signification. Whether we imagine strapping on prostheses or 

transforming with our technologies, we are always also using puppets, communicating through 

and with puppets and statues, interacting with our puppets and statues, creating puppets and 

statues that are “real”, imagined, still and moving, things in themselves and representations. 

Puppets and statues, if we pay attention to them, offer a chance to think about the plurality of 

semiotic signifieds. This is qualitatively different from wielding tools and weapons: instead of 

“use” we are looking at acts of concealment, revelation, substantiation, and evocation. Puppets 

and animated statues help us understand our dreams of a moving, non-static curriculum. 

 

Enter Žižek 
Žižek offers much to this conversation, especially in his fun book, The Puppet and the Dwarf. 

Žižek is re-reading Walter Benjamin’s (1940) essay, “On the Concept of History.” Benjamin 

told of a seemingly mechanical chess player who could win every game: inside was a dwarf 

chess master who guided the moves of the puppet through strings and levers. For Benjamin, 

the Dwarf behind the chess player of contemporary thought was History, which was taken to 

be steering and manipulating all that follows. Žižek updates the story, recognizing the more 

current role of theology as the dwarf hidden inside contemporary theory. This dwarf might be 

the dwarf of a people’s theology – a set of beliefs and practices simply accepted 

hegemonically as the reality in which one exists; or a positive theology – dogmas and rituals 

imposed by an all-powerful earth-bound or divine authority; or a theology of reason, the result 

of subjecting belief to enlightenment rational critique. Žižek suggests in the style of Lacan that 

our contemporary theory has as its divine authority the fundamental act of representation, that 

is, the puppet trope! The dwarf behind the theological puppet show that we call experience is 

none other than the authority of semiotics, the premise that everything is a signifier for 

everything else. Žižek helps us see that “the real” is not external to the symbolic; the “real” is 

the symbolic itself (p.69). 

To bring this back to the quagmire of curriculum studies, that the very ideas of Bildung 

are its own contradiction, and that the very contradictions of the field are its origins or its 

center, it can be useful to read Žižek’s spin on origins and centers. In the Appendix to The 

Puppet and the Dwarf, Žižek uses the theology of representation to interrogate representation, 

and in so doing, he models a way of working, a method, that we can use ourselves. Ideas, 



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theories, concepts, plans: these are all reified in ways that are very much like a Kinder 

Surprise Egg – a thin, mediocre chocolate egg with a plastic toy surprise inside. Ostensibly 

people buy the egg for the chocolate, which they destroy quickly in order to reveal the 

surprise. In this way, the egg is a perfect example of Lacan’s motto, “I love you, but, 

inexplicably, I love in you more than yourself, and therefore I destroy you.” (p. 145) In 

general, the egg is the example par excellence of l’object petite a, the small object filling the 

central void of our desire, the hidden treasure at the center of the thing we desire. The material 

void at the center stands for the structural gap on account of which of which no product is 

“really that” – no product lives up to its expectations; in other words, the small plastic toy is 

not simply different from chocolate (the product we bought) – while it is materially different, 

it fills the gap in chocolate itself. A commodity is a mysterious entity full of theological 

caprices, Žižek writes, a particular object satisfying a particular need, but at the same time, 

promising something more. 

What do we desire? Educational experiences that are meaningful, rich, empowering, 

socially transformative? At the center of schooling is always a void, and what is filling that 

void is always promising more than itself, an unfathomable satisfaction that requires our 

destruction of schooling itself in order for us to achieve it. In this sense, educational studies is 

a traumatic experience. We act on our theology, which includes a faith in the enabling and 

emancipating potential of education, only to find social reproduction as the accompanying 

catastrophe. Schooling as enabling is at once probable and impossible. There is a kind of 

temporality to this experience reminiscent of Žižek’s discussion of Dupuy, who himself retold 

the story of  Henri Bergson, who experienced the conflict of emotions in 1914: “In spite of my 

turmoil,” he wrote, “and although a war, even a victorious one, appeared to me as a 

catastrophe, I experienced … a feeling of admiration for the facility of the passage from the 

abstract to the concrete: who would have thought that such a formidable event can emerge in 

reality with so little fuss?” (Žižek, p. 159) Žižek notes the crucial modality of the break 

between before and after. Before the outbreak, the war appeared to be simultaneously probable 

and impossible, a complex and contradictory notion that persisted to the end. Afterward, it 

suddenly became both real and possible at the same time. 

Similarly, we imagine all sorts of fine and wonderful things that we can do with 

teachers and learners. We can build a whole new world! All we need to do is honor the 

dialectic relationship between education and democracy. And then, oh dear, what we get is 

social reproduction and the constraining function of schooling. The paradox lies in the 

retroactive appearance of probability. Bergson never pretended he could insert reality into the 

past and work backwards in time. But he could insert there the possible, at every moment, so 

that the new reality finds itself having always been possible. Oddly, it is only at the precise 

moment of its actual emergence that the reality begins to always have been; yet, this 

possibility, generated by its future, now becomes a historical reality itself. 

Here is the dwarf in the machine of Benjamin, history moving the puppet who always 

wins every contest for explanations. Similarly, we always find reinserted into our explanations 

of educational experience the dwarf in the named theology, so that our faith in education 

despite its paradox reinserts itself into our stories of social reproduction no matter what. 

 

 

 



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Rancière and the Pedagogical Stance 
The faith in curriculum and pedagogy having potential specific affects on the “outcome,” and 

the ongoing layering of history and memory as well, can be interrogated through what 

Ranciére (2009) called the problematic “pedagogical stance:” One affect of a pedagogy 

designed to influence the desires and future actions of an audience is to inadvertently 

perpetuate the passivity of that audience, and the need to be taught. Curriculum Studies as an 

academic enterprise embraces this fully, as scholars strive to enlighten others so that their 

ideas might have an impact on their field. What the audience does with the products of this 

dream is typically disappointing. We love our audience in the sense that we love something 

more within our audience, that potential to create our ever-lasting careers, so we destroy our 

audience, our colleagues, in the process. Social movements expecting educational campaigns 

to change the world are similarly disappointing. They establish the audience as passive and in 

need of being taught, and hence work against their goals of creating actors who make social 

change. Educational campaigns create consumers of campaigns rather than social change 

agents. So, too, can manipulative materials and curriculum content be understood as 

inculcating passivity and the need to be taught rather than the seemingly positive goals of 

autonomy and the disposition to question received information or act on one’s critique of the 

status quo. Base-ten blocks or poetic metaphors in a classroom coexist with, and are also 

independent of, specific learning outcomes and goals for transforming individual desires and 

social relationships. They both can be traced back to making a difference, and are also both 

not necessarily identifiable as a cause of transformation. It is only the dream of the moving 

statue that evokes our fantasies of the trace while maintaining the likelihood of the non-present 

cause, that we can bring the curriculum to life through the “teacher’s kiss”.  

Žižek proposes the trick is not to employ the historic strategy. Analogously, since the 

catastrophe of education cannot be domesticated, the only option left is to posit this 

catrastrophe as real, to inscribe it into the future (p.163), to embrace it as unavoidable. The 

seduction of history is powerful: we can see the common and interwoven histories of 

curriculum as Bildung and colonialist Europe as the clear and precise “cause” of our 

frustrations. Just as metaphor in a poem might be a representation of a concept, just as every 

manipulative material in a classroom is a puppet through which the learners enact a puppet 

theater, Colonialism can make a person into a commodity to be bought and sold in slavery. 

Here we catch a glimpse of a shared hegemony among Bildung, colonialism, imperialism, and 

the crystallizing practices of reconceptualization The fundamental faith in representation 

(puppetry itself) as the dwarf behind the puppets of schooling cries out for the applause of 

closure.  



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Yet, why don’t we try out 

an alternative, in the style of 

Žižek? One should … invert the 

existential common place 

according to which, when we are 

engaged in a present historical 

process, we perceive it as full of 

possibilities, and ourselves as 

agents free to choose among 

them; while, to a retrospective 

view, the same process appears 

as fully determined and 

necessary, with no room for 

alternative: on the contrary, it is 

the engaged agents who perceive themselves as caught in a Destiny, merely reacting to it, 

while, retrospectively, from the standpoint of later observation, we can discern alternatives in 

the past, possibilities of events taking a different path.” (p. 164) 

One application of Žižek’s ideas is retrodictive curriculum theorizing (Appelbaum 

2010), in which one writes the fictional history of an imagined future. Žižek’s use of Dupuy to 

suggest that we confront the catastrophe by perceiving it as fate, totally unavoidable, and then 

projecting ourselves into it, adopting its standpoint, and retroactively inserting into its past 

counterfactual possibilities upon which we act now, adds a significant orientation to this work. 

A fine example that Žižek shares is the perpetual war on terrorism in the U.S. Instead of 

endlessly suspended terrorist threats, postponed until they might happen, we can see that we 

are not merely waiting for the catastrophe to happen; the “real” catastrophe is the life we are 

currently leading, under the constant shadow of the permanent threat of catastrophe.  Žižek 

might have made his point more simply with the example of curriculum studies. We are not 

waiting for the next catastrophic imposition of standards and quantitative assessments. We 

experience the living hell of emotional abuse and the closing off of humane lives for the 

majority of children in our schools every day (Block 1997). 

Deborah Britzman (2009) asks (p. 133), “Can one event really lead into another? 

Where would one locate transformation or meaningful change?” She might be writing of the 

surprise inside the Curriculum Studies chocolate egg. The “something more” that always 

eludes our pursuit as we destroy education is analogous to the unconscious in Britzman’s 

discussion of psychoanalysis. The techniques in that context are not instructions, and cannot 

really be taught, but are themselves instructive. For example, transference is both resistance 

and the means to its overcoming. Freud’s thoughts late in his life, in terms of fantasizing about 

cures, endings, and limitations, questioned the analyst’s translations of psychoanalytic 

education and even the nature of education. “Essentially,” writes Britzman, “the impossibility 

of the profession leads Freud to the impossibility of its education, of the profession learning 

over time.”(Britzman 2009, p. 20) 

Can we take wisdom from the psychoanalytic discussion into the puppetry of 

Curriculum Studies? To embrace the catastrophe of education as unavoidable, and to inscribe 

it into the future, retroactively inscribing alternatives into its past, would be instructive rather 

than instructions. At the same time, we must recognize with Rancière that the instructive 

Moms Demand Action (2013) 



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characteristic of these practices risks everything if they devolve into a pedagogical process. 

Does it make sense to speak about the education of curriculum studies? It makes a lot of 

sense: We love you, Curriculum Studies, we love more in you than you, yourself; therefore, 

we destroy you. 

 

Curriculum Tropology 
As much as we might feel like we have “gotten somewhere” with that last statement, I 

returning to some thoughts on the puppetry of representation, and curriculum scholarship, 

which in themselves appear to re-perform the Bildungsroman motif over and over: that is, 

curriculum studies as a field seems to be “growing up” – maybe breaking the rules of the 

previous generation with each crop of graduate students who become professors and who take 

on important work in schools and other social institutions, yet always seeming to take on its 

role in the broader world of educational studies again and again. Often positioned in a critical 

stance, challenging assumptions of schooling and educational program planning, curriculum 

studies scholars dabble here and there as itinerant theorists, hoping that new narratives and 

new concepts would offer new futures and new histories of curriculum that rarely transform 

the dominant paradigms of those social institutions they wish to critique. A puppet show, on 

the other hand, is not only an act of manipulation. It is also an aesthetic experience, often a 

narrative performance, and, in this sense, like much art, a puppet show can often be assumed 

to compel us to revolt when it shows us revolting things. That is, it supposedly mobilizes when 

it itself is taken “outside of the workshop” or “museum”, and incites people to oppose systems 

of domination by denouncing its own participation in that system. And so we have the dream 

of the public intellectual wielding her or his scholarship of representation “in the streets,” 

whether expressed as a work of art or as the scholarship of a curriculum theorist. 

Puppets and Statues: These two cultural tropes are my entry into the confusing 

paradoxes of curriculum studies as an enterprise. While the terms are rare if ever present in 

curriculum studies, they are I claim present by proxy, carrying with them essential 

assumptions, questions, expectations, fears and fantasies. A genealogy of curriculum studies 

finds stand-ins for puppets and statues in most every treatise or essay, provoking the 

constraining and enabling characteristics of curriculum as a field of study and practice. I call 

for tropological study, which I believe promises a useful analysis of the ways that curriculum 

scholarship maintains colonialist epistemologies even as it works for post-colonial practices, 

undermining its professed moral and liberating aspirations that curriculum might be “good for 

people.” Maybe we do not often stop to think about the ethics of our work, since we would all, 

I suppose, imagine that we are good at heart. Yet, unless we take the opportunity more often, 

we will, I claim, continue to perpetuate fundamentally racist and oppressive practices: there is 

no way out, I fear, if we continue to take on the curriculum studies project; however, to recoil 

in passivity would be no better. We must, if we have any fantasies of productive international 

collaboration, find ways to embrace the paradoxical quagmires of curriculum studies itself. 

“Trope” is a term in rhetorical studies, usually defined as the use of words to mean 

something other than what they would normally mean. Concepts other than puppets and 

statues stand in for these two human forms of production and practice, carrying with them the 

semiotic and psychoanalytic implications of puppets and statues without making this clear to 

ourselves or to others. Puppets and statues are thus hegemonic, since we do not realize that we 

are talking about puppets and statues, both literally and in more generalized, conceptual ways, 



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as we work. “Tropological” analysis of curriculum studies looks at the ways that tropes for 

puppets, statues, and other critical cultural concepts are used in the development of our 

practices. Tropological study has some roots in Christian biblical interpretation, emphasizing 

the morally edifying sense of tropes in theological scripture. One common critique of 

tropology is the ways that a study of tropes can hide the assumption that there is such a thing 

as “normal” language use, in which words are not used to mean something other than what 

they would “normally” mean. We certainly do not want to fall into such an additional 

quagmire – we have enough lacunae of our own already in curriculum studies, and I do not 

wish to add this to the mix! Instead, we will focus on the simple idea that the words we use are 

always meaning something other than what we might believe we are taking them to mean. Just 

as Žižek reclaims the theology of history, curriculum studies can employ techniques of 

tropology in the analysis of curriculum’s faith in puppets and statues. And this method can be 

extended in future work to additional tropes. 

I find puppets a natural entry into considerations of representation, transformation in 

conceptual understanding, agency and identity. A puppet can be anything – a piece of paper, a 

scissors, a ball, a box, and yet become anything – a scissors becomes a dragon about to eat a 

flower, dental floss held aloft, and anything can do anything when it is a puppet – a rabbit can 

be reborn, an evil ghost (performed by a spotlight) held at bay by a flying eggplant (made 

from a toothbrush dangling from a wire), a class of shoelace 3
rd

-grade children can enter the 

magic castle (42 stuffed animal unicorns piled high) and use it to administer first-aid to a 

swarm of injured humming birds (each crafted from tissue paper). A person can become a 

puppet, and dance with or without a mask, either making an inner sense of self more visible in 

the process, or taking on a wholly different persona. Puppets can model utopia, or defend a 

“realistic” set of social practices.  

Statues are a subset of puppets who, at least at first, do not move, and provide an 

opening for understanding things held outside of ourselves, bringing into consideration our 

conceptions of self, standpoints on things, reification, and the animation of objects. Objects 

lead to fantasies of bringing those objects to life, the translation of ideas into objects that can 

be manipulated and used. They also lead to tool use and technologies, since, once we have a 

thing, we can use that thing. Furthermore, they lead to the juxtaposition of life with inanimate 

non-life, perhaps the awareness of impermanence and the inevitability of death. 

Psychoanalytic theories, often useful in curriculum studies, take advantage of the ways that the 

conscious and unconscious can be modeled through object relations and the animation of such 

virtual objects, or statues. Moreover, puppets and statues are themselves stories about the 

history and education of desire, about our relation to what we have made or unmade, about our 

encounters with the dead, and our negotiations with what we call authority and tradition.  

I became interested in puppets while working in classrooms with teachers and students 

-- graphs or base-ten blocks in mathematics classrooms, paraphernalia in science labs, records 

and symbols of accomplishment used to indicate mastery of skills. Puppets might be present in 

educational spaces in another sense as well, as each of us performs our roles – teacher, 

student, bad student, and so on. We put on masks and then improvise the particular playing out 

of the provided scenario. Before the classroom encounter, the students and teacher are 

ossified, so to speak, awaiting animation off-stage. The educational encounter is a fantasy of 

animation, bringing the actors and the curriculum to life. Terms such as motivation are stand-

ins for the magic of animation, of the bringing to life of sleeping or not-yet-born “learners” 



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and “teachers.” Puppets and statues further help us recognize that knowledge is sometimes 

mistakenly theorized as technology.  It can become a prosthesis. Attached to a human being, 

knowledge gives him or her super powers beyond what could be done without it. More 

nuanced theories understand humans as co-emerging with their technologies. Cyborgs, 

mixtures of the biological and the machine, digital and organic, are caught in webs of 

signification and complexification. Yet in either case, prosthetic super-powers or cyborg 

mutation, we are stuck unable to understand the tensions and paradoxes among the individual 

and the group, structure and agency, signifier and signification. Whether we imagine strapping 

on prostheses or transforming with our technologies, we are always also using puppets, 

communicating through and with puppets and sculptures, interacting with our puppets and 

sculptures, creating puppets and sculptures that are “real”, imagined, still and moving, things 

in themselves and representations. Puppets and sculptures, if we pay attention to them, offer a 

chance to think about the plurality of semiotic signifieds at all times. This is qualitatively 

different from wielding tools and weapons: instead of “use” we are looking at acts of 

concealment, revelation, substantiation, and evocation. Puppets and animated statues help us 

understand our dreams of a moving, non-static curriculum. 

This, we might say, implies a specific form of relationship between cause and effect, or 

intention and consequence. Like classical theater, for example Moliére or Voltaire, curriculum 

scholarship might be taken to function like a magnifying glass, inviting spectators to view 

behaviors, virtues, and vices of their neighbors and others, in a truer-than-reality fiction. The 

logic of mimesis, Rancière (2010) has suggested, consists in conferring on artwork the power 

of the effects it is supposed to elicit on the behavior of spectators. As long ago as Rousseau, 

this assumption was challenged via reader-response ambiguities. The claim can be made that 

the puppet show should be more modest. Or that it should as art avoid representation, as 

proposed, for example, by Susan Sontag. In the end, though, we do have to accept the split 

between the puppet show and its audience; the physical distinction between the artist and the 

art; and the distance across the chasm between the people and their statues. To use these 

distinctions and distances as representations of time, though, we learn from Žižek, tossing 

them into a theater of history, masks in a kind of meta-puppet-show the theater of our 

theology. In this sense, theology of curriculum (representation, metaphor, metonomy, 

modeling – the dwarf in the inner void of our field of scholarship) is like a hegemony on 

steroids: unless we are willing to sacrifice our addiction to representation, I fear we will 

merely be cracking open one more chocolate egg after another, for the worthless plastic 

surprise inside.  

 

“Other” Puppets and Statues 
It is the particular historical context of the puppet show that concerns me. Taking a step back 

from puppets and Bildung, this period of history in which they emerged together, the late 18
th

 

and early 19
th

 centuries, was the height of colonization, imperialism, the raping of non-

European lands for physical resources, and the establishment of the slave trade as a massive, 

commercial enterprise. By association, there is potentially greater, shared evil in the 

assumptions of Bildung and the practices of imperialism than we might think. After all, if we 

can manipulate the environment that our children experience so that they might take risks and 

in the process integrate their critiques of society into a conservative outlook on autonomy and 

independence, treating people in the world as our puppets, then we can just as easily turn 



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humans into commodities and buy and sell them in another theater, on another continent. In a 

puppet theater, a scissors can become a flying dragon; in Africa, a person can become a 

“slave”. 
3
 

In contrast, as a detached, touchable object, a statue points to the manner in which 

human knowledge is predicated on acts of separation, distancing and expulsion; on our making 

alien some part of the chaotic, formless continuum of physical and perceptual life; converting 

it into something readable and accusable; it is a process that makes a thing into a cause.  Here 

we see the intrinsic link between knowledge and the act of othering: the act of separation 

essential to consciousness, it seems, is at once also the prehistory of our presumption of 

strangers, gods and monsters; and this expectation that those things separate from us, strange 

as they are in the creation of them as separate, seem co-requisite with knowledge itself, which 

comes to be comprehended as knowledge of “things.” Kenneth Gross (2006, 2011) ties 

together the dream of the moving statue with its centrality in the co-creation of knowledge: 

 

If the statue is a corpse, it is also a corpus of knowledge; the idol gives birth to our 

ideas, our words, our very breath, even as it reminds us of their catastrophic origin. 

The statue indeed represents a paradoxical gift, a form of knowledge and mastery 

stolen from the dead. (Gross 2006, p. 22 ) 

 

“It is the abstraction of sculpture from the muddled world of bodily and historical life,” 

writes Michael North (1985, p.27), that “remains, as it were, part of that life; it is something 

the sculptor can both struggle against and use. Nevertheless, the fact that a statue can be said 

to draw back from time, to stand or defend against time – this is part of what makes statues 

such perfect homes for those ideals, virtues, aspirations, and accomplishments that we might 

wish to transcend time, survive history and physical contingency.” 

North is writing about how the very distance is part of what makes statues appeal to us 

as resonant images of serious ideas, as things with the look of something meaningful – 

literally, as worthy of a pedestal; he is also describing the ways that statues are comforting in 

their generality as well as non-referential. They are at once things and images. The very lack 

of obvious meaning might be what draws us to them. Curriculum as statue carries with it all of 

these cultural and psychoanalytic elements: The exteriority of statues is what lets them serve 

as persuasive figures of an idea, and at the same time as powerful images of literal things, 

images of calcified thought and fantasy. Yet, their exteriority attracts us to them as the foci of 

troubled bearers of an interior life that is at once their own and not their own. We see this in 

our fantasies of the statue coming to life: If a statue is now moving, alive as it were, perhaps it 

was beforehand merely asleep, waiting to wake? The trope of release from death, as if the 

statue were a person turned to stone by an angry god, evokes connections with a fall from the 

grace of sleep itself. A redemptive gift or resurrection can just as easily reveal a kind of theft 

of peace, as if something already autonomous was forced to yield to the demands of a life not 

proper to it (Gross 2006, p. 9). The separations that statues establish just as simply manifest a 

lack of identification, and so a recovery of lost objects experienced in the fantasy of bringing a 

curriculum to life is also an awakening of the self to its lost, murdered or abandoned objects, 

and a return of those objects from their alienation. The basic point is that the animation of a 

statue is not a purely liberating metamorphosis; it is both a transcendence and a descent into 

the murky world of “life.” This recovery fantasy can take political form as well, overturning 



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the fixity of statuesque forms and mystifications of tyrannical authority (“a kind of 

substitution for iconoclasm,” Gross, 2006, p. 10); yet, even in these apparently revolutionary 

circumstances, the awakening of a statue can become a trial, at times even an occasion for 

paranoia. Statues come to life can be elusive or threatening, calling into question our naively 

benign assumptions about animation, or about what the nature of life itself entails. A recovery 

can be reframed as a violation. It can perpetuate rather than salvage the lack or loss; the dream 

can become a nightmare; rebirth can be into something other than life, a death-in-life, a 

zombie. The voice-over in Cocteau’s Le Say d’un Poéte (1930) murmurs, “It is already 

dangerous to brush up against the furniture; is it not then mad to awaken statues so suddenly 

after their age-long sleep?” … Might we ask the same of our students whom we seek to 

“educate?” 

The legacy of bildung might be characterized because of its puppetry as “just not a 

good idea:” it separates us from “things” we “play with” … it establishes the primacy of 

puppetry and it is not immediately clear that the pros outweigh the cons of this separation of 

things and puppetry. Playing with things and representations of things is revered in a 

fundamental sense for almost every common philosophy of education, reducing those things to 

mere objects of manipulation. The reverse, turning people into objects that can be 

manipulated, as commodities or ideas, is a simple extension of puppetry. Nel Noddings (2003) 

and others have worked through a solid critique of this fundamental reverence, offering 

“caring” as a significantly different “order of things”.  Yet the dominant discourse perpetuates 

long-standing epistemologies of ignorance.  

 

The Red Blush of Embarrassment and Violation 
The statue in its paradoxical fixity, anonymity and substitutability resembles those entities that 

fill and constitute the hypothetical unconscious mind. Internal statues, as the products or relics 

of an archaic process of internalization, an “introjection of images, persons, gestures, and 

relations derived from our early experiences of the external world” (Gross, 2006, p.33), mirror 

those external statues we find so compelling, those sites of “projection.” We could say that the 

actual statues allow us to restore to things inside us something of their original exteriority, 

even as they keep the coloring of the interior, and it is in this way that curriculum as statue 

makes its affect apparent. “If statues can be mirrors of our internal objects, they can also 

become the places where such objects are captured, deformed, and reassembled, as it were, by 

the very “gravitational pull” of such statues.” (Gross, p. 33) William Blake once argued 

differently. Instead of creating idols that need to be smashed, statues that are projections of our 

internal unconscious, which are inevitably accompanied by limitations and constraints -- that 

is, forever sharing that world with our constructed terrors, self-defeat, and self-abasing 

imagination -- we should instead acknowledge these fears themselves as false idols, 

foreshadowing much of psychoanalysis. Such a critique depends on the risk of a counter 

invention, a fiction that bears the burden of our resistance, even if doing so brings forth yet 

another idol. 

In coming to life, a statue always bears a trace of its existence. Instead of a radical 

change of state, some residue or un-gluable tie to its origins as a statue remains. The fiction of 

its life troubles the categories by which we attempt to mask differences between the living and 

the dead. This is the essential failure of school curriculum, which always fails us because it is 

always both the living experience and the trace of a dead, rigid plan. Worse than this, bringing 



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a statue to life is often a wound to the statue itself. Pygmalion’s kiss turns to a red blush of 

embarrassment and violation. Life for an animated object is often torture, as in many versions 

of the Golem story. Coming to life triggers, finally, those buried fears and fears of things 

buried; the inhuman, the irrational, the solid unmoving statue; coming to life brings forth a 

ghost, a zombie, a monster. Often, in our stories about statues, bringing a statue to life leads to 

another life turning to stone, as if there is a careful economy of life in the universe. The 

literary pattern suggests that statues are a response to the crisis of fantasy and knowledge that 

has produced the fantasy of animation itself. Curriculum as animated statue keeps alive a 

tension between life and death, which are tropes for wish and frustration, which in turn signify 

object and human. Roman Jakobsen (1937) wrote that transferring the life of the signified onto 

the dead signifier achieves a figurative cancellation of the gap between the human world of the 

sign and the world of inanimate objects. If closing the gap brings the inanimate object to life, 

it also shows us a living creature that has lost its independence of the artistic sign. That is, the 

semiotic opposition that constitutes the lure of the statue is resilient enough to survive the 

fiction that projects its disappearance or collapse. The opposition in this way not only survives 

but is reborn and projected into a story in which a living statue kills a human being, or at least 

drives him or her out of his or her humanity. Here is yet one more fundamental quagmire: Our 

critique of curriculum as statue is nothing other than a furthering of the fantasy itself. If we 

bring curriculum to life, it perpetuates the tension between signifier and signified in ways that 

make the experience of curriculum deadly. As long as we say that attempting to bring 

curriculum to life is destroying something human we are just as much stuck in the muck of 

curriculum as statue. 

 

Lines of Flight in the Marionette Theater 
Puppets may be our alternative as much as the originating nightmare of curriculum theory. 

Our quagmire may be that it is only a European, colonialist puppetry that we have so far 

performed. Puppetry as a global phenomenon may help us rethink statues as much as 

puppetry, curriculum as much as colonialism, knowledge and authority as much as the 

objectification of people. In Two Regimes of Madness, Gilles Deleuze (2007) reminds us of 

Heinrich von Kleist’s essay, “On the Marionette Theater,” describing how puppets manifest at 

least three lines of movement. In doing so, Deleuze offers a conception of dynamic agency 

that is coexistent with our ages-old quagmire of structure and agency, yet opens up potentially 

different “lines of flight.” A puppeteer doesn’t actually move the puppets as they appear to 

move. Instead, he or she works with a different line (a trope for agency?), and that one, 

combined with gravity (a trope for structure?), leads to the actual movement of the puppet as 

part of the story of the puppet play and its interaction with other puppets in the context of the 

play (a trope for action?). Kleist had similarly described dancers who use their bodies in 

comparable ways; in that context, one can see the “soul” of the dancer in the curving line that 

would be the puppeteer, while the rest of his or her limbs are mere pendula, like the arms and 

legs of a marionette. What might once have been of interest as the puppeteer’s agency, 

somehow manifested in the complex interaction of these lines of movement, is replaced in this 

way of thinking by his or her affect on the puppet and on the play of the play. At the same 

time, we have shifted from the quagmire of the representation aspect of the puppet, the ways 

we might describe the puppet or the ways the puppet might describe other things, to the things 

that the puppet can do and the ways that the puppet acts. When we work with statues, a similar 



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transition can occur, from the ways that the statue is a particular kind of puppet to the things 

the statue can and does do. 

And so I offer a new field of curriculum studies scholarship; a global, post-colonial 

immersion in puppetry and its metaphorical instantiations. Here the undercurrent for the dream 

of the moving statue is the story of the puppet who dreams itself of coming to life, as in 

Collodi’s (1883) Pinocchio or the more recent The Collector Collector by Tibor Fischer 

(1998). In the first, the puppet Pinocchio is a projection of the complexity of ethical and moral 

behavior; in the second, our narrator, an ancient bowl, is a sage with perfect memory. In both 

we also see the fascinating potential of the puppet and statue as audience: like pets, our 

puppets and statues know more about our secrets and desires than anyone else. Yet we might 

further appreciate what puppets and statues have to teach us, what they demand of us, and 

what they desire as things in themselves. What affects do different puppets have in different 

cultural contexts, and how might curriculum as puppetry and curriculum as a dream of the 

moving statue be re-conceptualized in these contexts? 

Albrecht-Crane and Slacker (2003) write of the three lines of movement in the context 

of pedagogy as molar, molecular and flight lines; each type has comparative, potential affects. 

Molar lines express binary affects, and cut up bodies into categories, identifying bodies and 

making them identifiable within rigidly molar structures. Molecular lines distribute territorial 

and lineal segmentations, securing segmentarity at the capillary, micropolitical level. Lines of 

flight mutate encodings, unmaking and modifying the molarities and categories. This theory 

does not define individuals or position them within social structures. It instead describes 

potential affects that they can have. (Instead of asking, “what is a body?” it asks, “what can 

this body do?”, or “of what affects is a body capable?” Albrecht-Crane & Slacker, p. 192) The 

term “affect” articulates what happens during the educational events with larger cultural and 

social struggles, yet at the same time, seems to avoid the reduction of those struggles to 

questions of identity. Bodies are instead individuated by particular affective thresholds and in 

this way enact variable investments in social spaces (Albrecht-Crane & Slacker, pp.200-201). 

The “line of flight” manifested by a pedagogy of affect coexists with the molar binary lines, 

but is no longer hostage to them. 

Molar lines fix a self as much as ideas by establishing the exhibit of statues in the 

unconscious as the core “self.” Molecular lines describe the curation of that exhibit, the details 

of social reproduction. “Learning” in this shifted conception is a line of flight, an opening of 

desire, desire’s machines, and the organization of a social field of desire; as Deleuze writes in 

Negotiations (1995, p.19), “… it is not a matter of escaping ‘personally’ from oneself, but of 

allowing something to escape, like  bursting a pipe or a boil.” While bildung in its colonial 

sense reinforces the binaries that allow a flip from one representation to another, from a 

scissors to a dragon, a pile of ping-pong balls to an ocean above which the dragon flies, from a 

human being to a commodity, lines of flight that do not flip a person into a slave to be bought 

and sold, or that do not only flip from one representation to another, break up the reductive, 

molar ways of working that social organizations reproduce. Lines of mutation and decoding 

break up points of fixity, and realize as an affect those desires that are associated with 

movement instead of static categories. 

The dream of the statue coming to life might in this way be a warm touch that works 

with the statue, as if with molten wax, becoming usable through the use itself. The test to see 

if one can bring a statue to life, kissing it or touching it in a certain way, for example, would 



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itself be in this sense the bringing forth of the desire to bring that statue to life.  The test is an 

enunciation of the idea of turning an idea into a molar line that constructs the demarcation 

between life and death. To restate this in terms of puppets, a line-of-flight epistemology makes 

puppets into something other than a bifurcation. We think about what a puppet can do. First, in 

the colonialist sense, that is, in the molar line, it defines representations as distinct categories, 

and it places things into one of these categories at a time. Second, it unites the two categories, 

defining a relationship. This second affect is more like a zipper than a wall or boundary – it 

unites at the same time as dividing. Now this unification, the bifurcation as a reified idea, 

follows its own line. Where does it go? 

 

Reconceptualization as Conceptual Art 
The South African artist William Kentridge has written, 

 

I have never tried to make illustrations of apartheid, but the drawings and films are 

certainly spawned by and feed off the brutalized society left in its wake. I am 

interested in a political art, that is to say an art of ambiguity, contradiction, 

uncompleted gestures, and certain endings; an art (and a politics) in which optimism 

is kept in check and nihilism at bay. - William Kentridge (Goldby 1993, pp. 20-23) 

 

Here we see the artwork as a zipper, binding the optimism and nihilism of apartheid, its 

legacies, antiapartheid efforts, and post-apartheid fantasies in the coexistence and avoidance of 

apartheid, molar categories. Similarly, the lines of movement in curriculum theory and 

classroom practice might share topological structures with this sort of artistic endeavor. In the 

case of teachers and students working with blocks to represent place value or with metaphors 

for justice in a poem, the teachers and students trace particular lines of affects, things they can 

do and make happen with blocks or metaphors – they focus attention, ignore, interpret, 

conceal information, make the use of the blocks or metaphors into the primary tool of a 

mindless task, suggest links to other representations as relevant to thinking, and so on. The 

blocks and metaphors move in ways that are affected by the teachers and students, but they 

move also in the gravitational context of their social, cultural, political and semiotic histories, 

so that the line that is traced is a combination of affects. In the play of the classroom, school, 

families, and broader cultural communities that create the social milieu, yet another line is 

traced, one that might only be describable after it has already been traced. We can compare 

this with much of Kentridge’s work in animated film, where he works on a single sheet of 

paper, drawing and erasing, instead of adding a series of images one after the other in 

sequence; an effect of ahistorical “reality” is replaced in Kentridge’s animations with a line of 

density, history and sedimenting memories. 

If we consider in turn the affects of this “third” line of movement, and the idea that 

curriculum and pedagogy can have specific affects on the “outcome,” as well as the ongoing 

layering of history and memory, we can see the concern of artists and educators regarding 

what Ranciére (2009) called the problematic “pedagogical stance:” One affect of a pedagogy 

designed to influence the desires and future actions of an audience is to inadvertently 

perpetuate the passivity of that audience, and the need to be taught. Social movements 

expecting educational campaigns to change the world are usually disappointing in this way. 

Similarly, manipulative materials and curriculum content can be understood as inculcating 



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passivity and the need to be taught rather than seemingly positive goals of autonomy and the 

disposition to question received information or act on one’s critique of the status quo. Base-ten 

blocks or poetic metaphors in a classroom coexist with, and are also independent of, specific 

learning outcomes and goals for transforming individual desires and social relationships. They 

both can be traced back to making a difference and not necessarily identifiable as a cause of 

transformation. It is only the dream of the moving statue that evokes our fantasies of the trace 

while maintaining the likelihood of the non-present cause.  

The Brazilian artist Vik Muniz (1996) writes, “Knowledge is the painful longing for 

transparency and representation is its analgesic.” In the documentary Wasteland (Walker, 

Harley & Jardim 2010) we learn of Muniz’s collaboration with catadores -- self-designated 

pickers of recyclable materials in the world's largest garbage dump, Jardim Gramacho, located 

on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. Muniz’s initial objective was to “paint” the catadores with 

collected garbage. However, his collaboration as they together recreated photographic images 

of themselves out of garbage revealed both the dignity and despair of the catadores as they 

began to re-imagine their lives. Muniz’s art commanded large sums at auction, brought back 

into the lives of the subjects. In this work, the garbage, the collectors, the paintings with 

garbage, the photographs, and the documentary, did not function as colonial puppets or 

statues, but as post-colonial zippers that weave together while dividing more than two 

categories at any given time. As an educational encounter for the artist, garbage collectors and 

film-makers, and now for us as viewers of the documentary, the story of his work addresses 

Muniz’s idea that “Varnish is to philosophy what formica is to politics: the isolating of surface 

into a manageable representational meta-structure of belief” (Muniz 1996).  

What I take from Muniz here to the tropological study of curriculum is how puppets 

and statues as rhetoric tend to simplify dichotomies in form, content and substance into 

dichotomies of representation. We might say, with Muniz, that puppets and statues simplify 

such dichotomies by reducing them to an even simpler binary of surface and form, “flattening 

complexity into a diagrammatic dimension.” He writes further, 

 

The fabrication of complex representational surfaces acts as a believable trompe 

l'oeil for depth and substance. If we consider the rhetoric of power as a quest for 

surface control, we will find in art - especially in painting - the ultimate simulacrum 

of this quest. Art as a twisted branch of politics is simply better equipped to generate 

such models because time for the artist is invariably in sync with the models she or 

he produces. The artist is the link between the surface and the promise of the 

surface's own depth.
4
 

 

An earlier project, “Sugar Children” (Magill 2000) demonstrates how Muniz can 

become a “link between the surface and the promise of the surface's own depth:” Visiting the 

Caribbean he observed sugarcane workers’ children. 

 

They were wonderful. But their parents were so sad, really hard people. I realized 

they take the sweetness out of the children by making them work in the fields. It’s 

very hard work. All the sweetness from them ends up in our coffee. So I made 

drawings of them from sugar. I’m interested in that kind of transformation. (Magill 

2000) 



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By making the images of the children out of the sugar that sucks the happiness out of 

their lives, Muniz evokes a new gradient of representation, in which the children and 

sweetness are not reduced to the sugar itself, despite the literal, surface reduction to a flat 

drawing made out of sugar. 

A comparable contribution to curriculum re-conceptualization as conceptual art takes 

the work of Sara Felder, a solo theater artist, playwright and juggler, and applies it 

analogously to the performance of curriculum theorizing.  While the themes of her plays and 

performances are serious, her form is comic, engaging, and vaudevillian. In this respect, she 

might be emblematic of Sontag’s parody and satire.  Her own description of her work claims a 

striving to integrate personal experiences with the urgency of a given moment in history.  Out 

of that mix she creates funny and provocative theater.  Drawing on her sharp wit and insightful 

eye, Felder performs virtuosic juggling, vivid monologues, sacred clowning and evocative 

poems (sometimes written collectively with the audience). Her performances include the 

tossing of balls, knives, scarves, cigar boxes, Barbie dolls, rubber chickens, feathers, a crystal 

ball, a bowling ball and a cassette player, puppet versions of a woman’s womb, and so on. 

Often, a poem is recited in combination with an impressive feat of juggling, in a particular 

context of stories that set up the audience to be thinking about connections and juxtapositions 

at the same time, so that the combination cannot be simply teased apart in any way. In Some 

Antics/Semantics, props such as balls or a cassette player become puppets while puppets 

become props for comic routines or serious poetic statements. In Out of Sight, a nearly blind 

mother and her lesbian daughter see each other and the world differently, using circus tricks, 

shadow puppets and a Jewish queer sensibility to question the silences created by new 

frameworks for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Other work explores the social complexities of 

melancholia, and the relationships among personal life history, art, and social change. 

What does it mean to say one is a “queer juggler”? To suggest that one can be defined 

in such a way? As a juggler, she keeps things in motion, moving in space, and moving in the 

development of her performance. As a queer juggler, we might say there is nothing 

specifically queer about her technique with the props: they fly through the air, doing things 

that should not be possible to do, just as the props of any juggler, queer or not. Perhaps her 

uniqueness in making the juggling part of a solo performance piece that incorporates juggling 

unusual objects, for symbolic purposes, in the larger context of her stories and humor, is 

queer, in the sense of non-normative, defying norms, that is, as lines of flight that co-exist with 

molar categories and molecular systems of ascription and constraint. A curriculum theorist 

pondering the character of her or his work – noting how the a-historical and a-theoretical 

character of traditional curriculum studies disabled teachers from understanding the history of 

their present contexts (Kliebard1986; Pinar 2004); understanding the classed, gendered, raced, 

theologically influenced, nationed, and colonialist failures of this work; worrying about the 

fetishization of newness in scholarship – might take solace in the queer aspects of scholarship 

that do not meet the expectations of tradition, and which muddle the categories of scholarship 

itself (Appelbaum 2002). 

Muniz speaks proudly of his work in Salvador, Brazil, with children who know that 

people visiting museums are those who produce and show these children what they cannot 

have. Their images, holding invisible items, inspired by a Giacometti sculpture, combined 

with the placement of those items in a black bag, deprive these people of the knowledge of 



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what each child is holding. “They turned the tables for once and learned to be the ones 

producing desire” (Magill 2000).  That is a lot accomplished with invisible puppets, held by 

children turned to statues and frozen in photographs. 

 

Zippers: Metonymy can Trump Metaphor 
Felder’s satire and parody, and Muniz’s “turning the tables” might be said to avoid the ossified 

statues of curriculum and the anything-goes, colonialist patriarchy of puppets. Unlike the 

statue that demands suspension by the viewer of free thoughts or reason in order to interact 

with the unapproachable
5
, for the promise of a new world that cannot be possessed, carrying 

the spectator into a new world of utopist or dystopist imagination, these collaborations that 

confuse audience and performer, purpose and method, strategy and meaning, are less about the 

melancholic failure of the conceptual art and more about the experiences themselves.  

Kentridge and Muniz incorporate materials and tools in such a way that the material is also the 

carrier of symbolic meaning – the signifier and signified are the same thing. Puppets and 

Statues, tropes that define the rhetorical landscape of curriculum studies even as they 

themselves emerge symbiotically with curriculum studies, exist as molar entities that have 

(colonialist) affects and consequences; at the same time, they are lines of flight that coexist 

with, undermine, or ignore such affects. What would it take for us to adopt this language of 

curriculum? Well, in a sense, we already have. Some theorize that a Renaissance fixation on 

rhetoric and the teaching of rhetoric led to a cultural dominance of metaphor over other 

rhetorical forms. In this way, we might see curriculum as puppetry and curriculum as statues 

in metaphorical terms. Flipping from one representation to another carries qualities of one 

domain to another. The zipper notion attempts to turn a categorical border into a liminal 

terrain. There may be alternatives to metaphor, of course. One is metonymy, where a direct 

connection between two terms leads to the use of one to stand for the other (Hollywood for US 

Cinema, Crown for the Prince). We can imagine that a puppet would only be used to create a 

character metonymically if there was something about the material from which it was made 

that suggested a direct connection. It would be hard to imagine a sweet potato being used as a 

scissors in a puppet show.  

Curriculum theorizing carries with it the legacy of Renaissance teaching of rhetoric, 

which emphasized tactics of metaphor over metonymy and other rhetorical moves; this led to 

both a narrowed epistemology mutually generative of racist and colonialist practices and the 

accompanying presumption that language itself is a neutral technology, separable from 

oppressive forms of social practice. Even contemporary discourse of difference and 

multiculturalism perpetuate this epistemological crisis. Knowledge in this conception is 

reduced to translation from one category to another, via the metaphor, and the isometric 

mapping of such colonialist practices as slavery and curriculum.  

It is a challenge for us to work in ways that do not perpetuate harmful assumptions of 

Bildung and the enactment of the Bildungsroman. Puppets and statues play key functions in 

this work, as tropes for representation, the fantasy of bringing people and curriculum to life, 

and the psychoanalytic perseveration with social reproduction. Delleuzian lines of flight 

further extend the fantasy of the puppet, enacting movements that solidify categories, place 

things into the categories so as to substantiate them, and in maintaining the dream of the 

moving statue, the lines of flight that maintain hope. Curriculum might be the puppet masters 

behind the scenes, or the statue come to life, or tracing the ghosts of death in the fantasy come 



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true. In any case, flipping base-ten blocks into place value, or poetic metaphors onto justice, is 

epistemologically equivalent to flipping a person into a slave to be bought and sold. Teaching 

practices that promote study of the child and surveillance of the learner make people into 

objects of study rather than members of communities. The ethics are seriously in crisis! Yet, if 

puppets and statues can be understood as zippers, bringing together two sides of borderlands 

even as they separate them, rather than as walls of distinction, we can imagine gradients with 

no boundaries in borderland pedagogies, something that can be further developed through a 

study of metonymy (Appelbaum 2011).  

Rancière writes, “I think we can distance ourselves from the current mood if we 

understand that the ‘end of art’ is not ‘modernity’s mischievous destiny but the reverse side of 

the life of art.” (Rancière 2010, p. 132) What I take from this statement, translated into 

curriculum studies, is that we can understand the extent that the aesthetic ties our curriculum 

scholarship to non-scholarship in particular ways from the start. Rather than imposing upon us 

a polarity of scholarship becoming “mere recipes for practice” – whether the practice of 

pedagogy in educational contexts of the practice of theorizing in post-colonial times – or 

scholarship becoming some notion of “only theory,” each end of such a polarity would carry 

with it its own turmoil and withering soul of curriculum theorizing. Life in curriculum is, to 

use Rancière’s words, a “shuttling back and forth between a different polarity of autonomy 

versus heteronomy and heteronomy versus autonomy, which, fundamentally, requires playing 

one linkage between art and non-art against another linkage – that is, one representation of 

representation against another representation of representation. But to do so merely locks us in 

the box of puppets once more, repeating again and again the same perseveration. Each 

possibility is a tale in a meta-political puppet show. Which is why Rancière believes artists 

cannot successfully isolate art from politics, and why those who want art to fulfill its political 

promise are condemned to melancholy. The implication would be that we cannot distinguish 

our work from practices in schools nor from colonialist epistemicides (Paraskeva 2011); and 

that most of us are condemned to melancholic nostalgia for those moments in our early 

professional development when theories promised ways out of hell into nirvana. 

Even seemingly more sophisticated or generative theoretical orientations reproduce 

insidious Eurocentric and colonialist assumptions that educators would want to avoid. The 

more critical question has to do with what fantasies and fears we maintain with our 

perseveration on social and cultural reproduction through our work in multiculturalism, inter-

culturalism, cosmopolitanism, and other “orientations” which, in themselves, fetishize the 

notion of perspective itself. Perspective is a trope for puppeteer. The puppeteer brings two 

arbitrary things into unity via the puppet. The dream of pedagogy as the design of the design, 

the storyboard for the puppet theater, is both the possibility and the paradox. To place oneself 

in a position to resolve paradoxes of Bildung in post-colonial times, or to create a new 

discourse that writes a new world, is to compose the script for new puppets, that is, to merely 

reproduce the crisis of reproduction itself. Whether this new puppet show sells a project, plans 

and predicts, or dreams of a new fantasy, it is nothing more than a puppet show. Puppet shows 

can incite revolution, but, we should note, “the more things change, the more things stay the 

same.” A puppeteer is condemned to these dualities. To be human, seems, too, to be subject to 

the same melancholic and joyous dualities – as long as one continues to play with puppets. 

What happens when we change the puppet show, so that the boundary between the 

audience and the puppeteers does not exist? What happens when the audience creates the 



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puppet show for yet another audience, whose participation disrupts conceptions of boundaries 

and differences between audience and performer? These situations seem to offer new 

understandings not only of the puppet show but of the puppet show as metaphor and model for 

representation and theorizing. They might be a dose of Žižek, who, in typical Lacanian 

fashion, characterizes perverts, not as we would expect, as dangerous rebels, but as covert, 

closeted conservatives, secretly wedded to the prohibitive authority they loudly claim to 

heedlessly defy. For curriculum studies, our pleasures have taken on a captivating, beguiling 

spirit only for as long as the transgressions of the critiques are grounded in a belief in the 

existence of big, social systems, and symbolic “others” against which one is acting out. Can 

we speak back to these systems, these “others”? Or do they exist on some plane of eternally 

unapproachable power and authority? In The Puppet and the Dwarf, Žižek (2003) writes of 

God as the name, not for the divinity so much as for the gap between the human and the 

divine. The Christian notion would be that Christ offered a bridge across the chasm between 

God and humanity; the Žižek-ian turn is to name the gap itself, so that there can be a 

discussion of the divine in humanity and the human within divinity. Analogously, in 

curriculum studies, we have held onto our beliefs in puppet and statue tropes in a misty haze 

of Bildung. Curriculum as the interdisciplinary study of experience, and as complicated 

conversations, might more aptly name the chasm between us and our puppets and statues. 

Rather than manipulate our models, metaphors, and designs for educational encounters, we 

might find more rewarding the notion that our models, metaphors, and designs are names for 

the chasm they themselves construct, between our imagination and those externalized fetishes 

we call systems of reproduction and regimes of truth. Life – in curriculum, in schools, and so 

on – has come to feel worthwhile only as long as we hold onto our desires to play with our 

puppets and statues; that is, only as long as our so-called desire to transgress those systems 

and regimes is never fulfilled, since to satisfy our desire is to end the fantasy. Puppets and 

statues are both the things that make our work real to us and at the same time the very things 

that distort our relationship with that work, bringing us further from our goals even as we 

come closer to them.  Puppets and statues are both the resistance to innovation and the 

resources for relating to this resistance. 

 

 

 

Notes 

                                                
1
 A version of this article was presented at the The Fourth World Curriculum Studies 

Conference - IV IAACS in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2012). 
 
2
 appelbap@arcadia.edu 

3
 The link is more than coincidence. Many have written on the joint and mutually buttressing 

histories of the Bildung culture and the fascist objectification of “others.” Cultural theorist 

Klaus Theweleit (1987) notes how the fascist ego forms itself around the image of a 

statuesque, purified self-hood that is further formed through threat from both inside and 

outside; it is a hardened, collective ego always in danger of contamination or self-corruption 

by its own ambivalence. 

mailto:appelbap@arcadia.edu


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5
 See Friedrich Schiller’s (1909-14) fifteenth letter, placing his readers in front of a Greek 

statue. The statue is self-contained, and dwells in itself. She is free of care, duty, purpose…and 

also carries with her the properties of the goddess she depicts, paradoxically figuring what has 

not been made, what was never an object of will. Meanwhile, the spectator experiences the 

statue must suspend random free thoughts or reason to interact with the unapproachable, non-

interacting statue, and is promised in return a new world that he or she cannot possess. The 

goddess and the spectator are caught in a joint free play and free appearance, cancelling the 

oppositions of activity and passivity, will and resistance. The conclusion is that the autonomy 

that is present is the autonomy of the experience, not of the work of art. On the one hand, the 

artwork participates in the experience of autonomy only so far as it is not a work of art. And 

the implication is that the autonomy of art and the promise of politics are not counter posed in 

this relation. Instead, the statue calls forth an imaginary “new world” of art as not art, that is, 

the appearance of a form of life in which art is not art. Or, in our case, curriculum theorizing, 

in which theorizing is not theorizing. Or, cosmopolitanism that is not cosmopolitanism. Or 

intercultural imperialism that is not the opposition of epistemicide versus hypostasizing of 

cultural traditions. 

 

 

 

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Submitted: May, 15th, 2013. 

 

Approved: June, 15th, 2013. 
 

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