Politics and Pedagogy in the “Post-Truth” Era

Insurgent Philosophy and Praxis

Derek R. Ford

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781350164864
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350059924
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Those who are in shock that truth doesn't seem to matter in politics miss the mark: politics has never corresponded with the truth. Rather, political struggle is about the formulation and materialization of new truths. The "post-truth" era thus offers an important opportunity to push forward into a different world. Embracing this opportunity, Derek R. Ford articulates a new educational philosophy and praxis that emerges from within the nexus of social theory and political struggle. Blocking together aesthetics, queer theory, urbanism, postmodern philosophy, and radical politics, Ford develops arguments and proposals on key topics ranging from debt and time, to the death drive and forms of political organization. Through forceful yet accessible prose, Ford offers contemporary left politics an imaginative and potent set of educational concepts and practices.

1

Studying in the Party

When engaging in political dialogue and action, it is not uncommon to hear educational terms thrown around. We talk about testing our ideas in practice and about learning from our history. We form study groups. We question and revise our methods of facilitating meetings and of interacting with others. Politics is deeply educational. At the same time, the educational components of political movement building are rarely investigated in any rigorous manner. One of the most important contributions that educational philosophy can offer radical politics is this investigation. We can help develop the tools, concepts, frameworks, and languages with which to better understand contemporary political educational processes, and construct and enact alternative and oppositional processes. A driving theme of this book is the exploration and articulation of such alternatives, and the purpose of this chapter is to politically theorize and push forward a specific educational praxis: studying. Research on studying emerges within the abundance of educational literature on neoliberalism, and it makes the important contribution of noting that, as a social, economic, and biopolitical regime, capitalism is legitimated and reproduced through the logic of learning. Studying is proposed as an alternative educational logic that can push past the educational limits inherent in the capitalist mode of production. Yet studying hasn’t been able to address its inherent political limitations. In particular, studying has remained merely an alternative, and hasn’t been theorized as an oppositional pedagogical logic. For this to happen, studying has to be political while remaining educational, a paradox that points to the question of organization.

I begin this chapter by drawing out the connection between learning and capitalism, showing why learning is so pivotal for the reproduction and maintenance of capitalism’s hegemonic grip and, therefore, why it is an important target for developing counter-hegemonies. Seen in this light, education does not follow from or arise in response to, but plays a key role in producing the political–economic order. I next move to an elaboration of studying, which is not positioned against learning writ large, but rather as a type of ellipses within learning, as an act that opens education up to the possibility that things might be radically otherwise. To draw out what I call the present political limits of study, I turn to Dean’s recent work on crowds, in which she argues that the crowd event produces a discharge of equality that introduces a gap in the present order. Studying, I posit, is the educational logic of the crowd. While the inauguration of the gap of possibility that the study of the crowd generates is necessary for politics, it is not sufficient. To back this up, I refer to two examples of radical study: hacking and Occupy Wall Street. Taken together, these examples reveal that, because studying lacks direction and infrastructure, it can be reabsorbed within the dynamics of capital accumulation or cut short through state repression. Dean offers a corrective that the Left must take seriously: the party. For Dean, the party is not a master, director, or prophet, but rather a type of affective infrastructure that maintains the gap of possibility and that, as I suggest, organizes and defends study, even in the direst and most hopeless of circumstances. Yet the party doesn’t emerge out of abstract crowds, but out of concrete ones gathered for particular purposes, which brings the question of explanation and learning back into the fold.

The educational limits to capitalism

If capitalism is predicated upon the dispersion of learning throughout society, then the logic of learning represents a crucial educational limit to the reproduction of capitalist social, economic, and biopolitical relationships, or what I will collectively refer to as “production relations.” Employing a Foucauldian analysis, Maarten Simons and Jan Masschelein have argued that the formation of a “learning apparatus” has been central to the rise of neoliberal governmentality. Governmentality refers to the tethering together of the state, the economy, and processes of subjectification. A transformation in sovereign rule, governmentality is a shifting and diffuse but identifiable network of power through state and non-state actors that weds together government and self-government, politics and subjectivity—and learning is the fulcrum.

Simons and Masschelein make four points to demonstrate the centrality of the learning apparatus in contemporary society. They first argue that learning has become the main engine of the economy, which is variously conceived of as the knowledge, information, or creative economy. Not only is education subjected to economics (which is what most critiques of neoliberalism focus on), but education itself is a “supplier” of the knowledge economy. Workers have knowledge, but they can always gain more knowledge. This leads to the second supporting claim, which is the emergence of “lifelong learning.” Because of the constantly changing nature of the economy and society, we have to continually subject ourselves to learning in order to fit the needs of global capital and to continually (try to) attain happiness, satisfaction, and health. The school, on this model, teaches people how to learn so that they can enter adulthood, which is where one never stops learning. Moreover, adulthood—true, autonomous being—is defined by one taking responsibility for one’s own learning, and this is the third aspect of the learning apparatus. “Learners,” in this perspective, “should become the ‘managers’ of their own learning, for example, by developing their own learning strategy, monitoring the process, and evaluating the results.”¹ The fourth point is that today the results of learning have to be employable. This is what the notion of “competencies” means today: they are the “outcome of learning and the input for the labor market and society.”² The state withdraws from the management of society and any responsibilities toward the collective because there is no more collective; there is only an agglomeration of individual entrepreneurial selves who are free to learn and relearn, and who are solely responsible for their own lot in life. One can only blame one’s poor educational choices for their circumstances, and one can only undertake a new learning project to improve them. The key lesson to take from Simons and Masschelein is that we can’t “learn” to be free, because learning is the very mechanism through which we reinforce our subjection to governmentality. Of course, it isn’t our subjection to an amorphous, omnipotent, and nebulous set of contingencies that can never be pinned down or resisted, as they claim, but rather our subjection to contemporary production relations.

The learning society catalyzes a discursive shift, which in turn constrains the definition of education, and hence what it can and can’t be. This is Gert Biesta’s argument. The “language of learning” now dominates not only education but society as a whole. In an early book, he identifies three main problems with the language of learning: (1) that it formulates education as an economic exchange between the consumer (student) and provider (teacher); (2) that in this model the teacher is there to meet the needs of the student; and (3) that education is viewed as a commodity, or a thing, that can be transferred, transmitted, and so on.³ As a result of these three problems, questions about the direction and purpose of education are reduced to whatever the flexible, global market desires and needs, eclipsing the possibility for dialogue or professional judgement.

In a more recent book, he turns away from explicit talk of the commodity and the market, and locates two related but more general problems with learning: (1) that learning designates a process and doesn’t entail any particular content; and (2) that learning individualizes education, eradicating the need for an educational relationship. Instead of an educational relationship, there arises educational accountability, which seeks to eradicate the risk inherent in education.⁴ Through a deconstructive line of thought, Biesta argues that what makes education difficult, risky, and impossible is what makes it educational. If education could be guaranteed, it would be transmission, and it wouldn’t involve human subjectivity. Education must remain unpredictable and open.

In terms of an educational response, Lewis has proposed the richest counter-logic to learning. Bringing Giorgio Agamben into the conversation, he identifies the notion of potentiality at the center of neoliberal capitalism as that which drives neoliberalism’s logic of learning. Potentiality can be broken down into two types: generic and effective. Generic potentiality is the common meaning potentiality takes on, in which potentiality is the passage from potentiality to actuality, from the state of “I can” to the act of doing or being. Neoliberal capitalism and its logic of learning are “anchored in an ontology of generic potentiality as a ‘not yet’ that ‘must be’ made manifest in measurably determinate, socially useful, and economically manageable skill sets.”⁵ Learning is defined by the achievement of a predetermined end, which is why learning is always measureable and testable. Benchmarks are then established to chart one’s progress along the way to a learning outcome, objective, or goal.

The irony of generic potentiality is that through the passage to actuality, potentiality is destroyed: one is no longer in potential, one no longer can but is. Thus, we arrive at the other form of potentiality: effective potentiality, or potentiality freed from the actualization imperative. Effective potentiality is, therefore, the potential to be and not to be, to do and not to do. Whereas generic potentiality is a potentiality in relationship to a particular thing or act, effective potentiality—as the potentiality to not be—is “a potentiality that has as its object potentiality itself.”⁶ Potential is not actualized but preserved and held within itself. Potential stays impotential.

Agamben sees these two types of potentiality as separate and, in doing so, Lewis contends, he “takes for granted the existence of in-capabilities and propensities as the necessary background for the appearance of capabilities. He assumes that one can.”⁷ Lewis, in turn, asserts a sort of dialectical relationship between them, which is why he writes of im-potentiality. To be im-potential is to be able to be and to be able to not be simultaneously, to experience potential freed from any predetermined category or identity. The learning society eliminates im-potential because it is “obsessed with the measure of what someone can do in order to fulfill a particular role within the economy,” and this obsession with “assessment and verification of actualization is . . . a form of evil that destroys the students’ freedom to not be.”⁸ True freedom, that is, is not the freedom to be this or that, but the freedom to be or to not be this or that, and thus the freedom to be or to not be something else altogether. Neoliberalism forecloses this freedom; it can’t tolerate it because it disrupts the demand for performativity and efficiency. Thus, Lewis looks to the freedom of im-potentiality to develop an alternative educational logic to learning: the logic(s) of studying.

Whereas learning is always concerned with and determined by ends (learning goals, outcomes, etc.), studying is about means: it is definitional of studying that when one engages in the act one does not have an end in mind. When one sets out to study there may be an end in sight (a dissertation or a book, or a piece of information or a theoretical development...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Also available from Bloomsbury
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Don’t Bring the Truth to a Gunfight
• 1 Studying in the Party
• 2 In and Out of the Gap
• 3 The Sinthomostudier
• 4 Stupid Urbanism
• 5 (Un)communicative Aesthetic Education
• 6 Magical Bookkeepers
• Conclusion: A Pro-Test Protest
• Appendix: History, Space, and Ideology
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page