Abstract
This paper attempts to portray the composition of education and responsibility in the “bullying problem.”
According to Durkheim and Foucault, the “responsible subject” is produced through modern school education as the apparatus of discipline. That is,“responsible subjects” cannot exist in the “community” of pre-modern society. In the “bullying problem,” the mechanism explained is that a pre-modern “community of the pupils” is reproduced in the school, and this explanation has been accepted by society. That is, from the viewpoint of the Constructionist approach, thesocial system talking in terms of the discourse of “bullying problems” has replaced the social system that talks in terms of the discourse of “school violence problems.” The figure of the “responsible subject” has been made to disappear and the figure of the “community” has reappeared in its place.
From such a viewpoint, the “bulling problem” can be portrayed in two ways. First, it is portrayed as the terminal point of the “schools as a enclosed environment.” The schools, as mere “enclosed environments” that no longer function as apparatuses of discipline, once again reproduce the “pre-modern community.” Second, the limitations of the “school” can be seen as a phenomenon which occurs in Deleuzeʼs “society ofcontrol.” In the societies of control, various “enclosed environments” would be disorganized and a seamless system of control would need to be organized. Thus the concept of “accountability” would be emphasized instead. The modernist concept of “responsibility” and the figure of the “individual” would be disorganized to “dividuals” that would form a new kind of “community” in information networks. Forecasting such a transformation of the social system through the “bullying problem” would be an important role for sociology to play.
