Epistomology and Education Politics

[The following is a post for a reading group I’m doing with Eli T. and Zach SW on global university politics.  It will probably only make sense if you’ve read the articles, which, this week, are from the recent issue of the Polygraph Journal called “Study, Students, Universities” :

- Alessondro Russo, “Destinies of the University”
- Colectivo Situaciones, “An Elephant at School and Other Texts”
- Universidad Trashumante, “Walking the Other Country”
- Renaud Bécot, “Universities in France: Forty Years After May ‘68”
- Gökçe Günel, “The Gated Campus, its Borderless Subjects, and the Neighborhood Nearby”

If you’re interested in reading along with us, let me know and I can get you copies.]

Reading these articles in combination, I see some interesting connections around the relations between epistemology and education.  Russo’s “Destinies of the University” draws on Foucault to critique the episteme of the modern human sciences, which is based on viewing their object as the field of ‘representations,’ and viewing ‘man’ “as a being capable of ‘representing’ life, work, and language” (63).  Operating within this episteme, the socialist bureaucracies, such as the USSR and PCI, claimed to ‘represent’ the ‘working class’ (69).  With the breakdown of the ‘representational’ modern episteme, the human sciences, the socialist bureaucracies, and, generally, the triplet of the State-party system, classist politics, and the University, are put into crisis.  Russo sees the origin of these crises in student movements coming out of the universities and connecting with workers’ struggles, spreading from the Chinese Cultural Revolution to Europe and the US.  The worker-student solidarity in this political sequence “was intensely real precisely because it rejected classist ‘mythology,’ then very common in the workers’ Parties and State propaganda, and aspired to political forms of existence beyond classism’s ideological and organizational framework” (69).  Russo goes on to say that “these events brought to a conclusion a long era of the political existence of the figure of the worker in its ‘classist’ form.  A new political course remains to be found.”

Such a ‘new political course’ seems to emerge from the practice of Colectivo Situaciones and Universidad Trashumante, and, to a lesser extent, the Sud student union.  Before addressing their contributions, I’d like to raise an ambivalence I feel about Russo’s treatment of the breakdown of the ‘working class.’  On the one hand, I’m not sure why Russo, apparently, rejects the frame of ‘class’ altogether rather than engaging with the attempts by his fellow Italians, the autonomist Marxists, particularly Negri, to rework the concept of ‘working class’ into ‘the multitude.’ The latter is a social formation beyond the representational episteme that still has an antagonistic (i.e., classist in the political sense) relationship with the forces (e.g., Empire, the capitalist form of globalization) that expropriate the common conditions and products of its labor.  On the other hand, I appreciate that Russo might be pointing to a fundamental problem with concepts like the ‘multitude,’ as it is a concept that still might be an attempt by academics (even if they are former militants) to ‘represent’ the workers, rather than a concept that workers use to describe themselves, emerging as a useful means in their own struggles.  Such distance between academics and workers is precisely what was overcome in the student-worker protests of the 60s, and is what the groups in the other articles we read also attempt to overcome.

In her introduction to the texts by Colectivo Situaciones and Universidad Trashumante, Beatriz Llenin-Figueroa argues that the “Nueva Politicidad” they practice is based on a “different sort of cognition of or approach to the world, different epistemology”: “it is an epistemology that refuses the subject-object dichotomy (Situaciones’ forceful claim is that ‘militant research’ has no object), and therefore resists the subordination of the student to a source of all knowledge (be it a teacher, a discipline, or an educative institution)” (139).  Their practices imply a sustained refusal to be hailed by the State-Party system’s and Universities’ narratives of ‘crisis,’ and instead, they strive to develop modes of living with uncertainty; they “refuse the precarious certainty of any established educational or political structure, and seek, instead, to work transversally across them” (135).   Their pedagogy, then, has a consistency with their political practice: as they follow Freire in recognizing “the unfinishedness of any knowledge or educative practice,” so their political struggles are “marked by a desire to avoid any regime of totalization (the one of class struggle included)” (138-9).  [[On a sidenote, I see a lot of overlaps between these groups mode of popular education and the practices of anarchist education, such as in its integral connection between constantly destabilizing any hierarchies both in knowledge and politics.  Coincidentally, today (10/12/09) is the 100th Anniversary of the execution (by the Spanish State) of a pioneer of anarchist education, Francisco Ferrer, who started the Modern School movement.  For more on this, you should read _Anarchism and Education_ by Judith Suissa, which I’ve uploaded here: http://www.elimeyerhoff.com/books/ ).]]

In the vein of how Russo notes that Deleuze called Foucault a “new cartographer,” I think that the Collectivo Situaciones are drawing new kinds maps of the relations between the conditions and processes of education, work, and life.  Their analysis of the film, Elephant, reveals their concern to map the “direct relationships” that already exist in students lives, as a basis for thinking of ways to remake those relationships for alternative possible worlds: “An attempt to elaborate this ‘elephantine’ presence in the school could perhaps begin by interrogating what happens when the kids, the adolescents, are not merely ‘future adults’ – projects of citizens, possible workers – but subjects who already possess a direct relationship with the world, with consumerism, with images, with (non-)work, with failures, and with social and political realities” (146).  In contrast with the apologists for the school (who argue that ‘the school did what it could’ or ‘it could have happened anywhere’), who seek to take it out of relation, who “confuse responsibility with guilt,” the Colectivo Situaciones take on the task of grappling with the school’s differential responsibility.  Rather than assuming a unified whole of a school, they trace the fragmented assemblages that determine how “it does everything it can in its current state, that is, according to its current mode of coordinating bodies, environments, and subjectivities.”  And they see responsibility as not merely a critical task but also a constructive, affirmative one: “that of thinking, of re-making itself, of investigating its internal articulations and those of its surroundings, of thinking what is adolescence today, in what conditions and contexts certain strategies are developed, certain indifferences, certain desires.”

I found very interesting their alternative vision of a school as a “live laboratory,” because it addresses the scale of the self and the scale of the school simultaneously, as interconnected.  On the one hand, “making of every situation of learning a live laboratory (according to the parents in one of the schools: ‘the school as a site to register symptoms’) that accompanies these subjectivities, that composes itself along with them beyond the rhetoric of criminalization and psychologization that are rampantly deployed to resolve practically and ‘anomaly’” (147).  And on the other hand, “the laboratory implies a reformulation of the space of learning that does without the distinction of inside/outside, school/non-school.”  This dual attention to the formations of subjectivities and space is something that I’ve been thinking about in trying to theorize the practices of the Experimental College of the Twin Cities (the free school I help organize – http://www.excotc.org).  Particularly, I’m thinking about practices for creating alternatives to the School’s intertwined formation of, on the one hand, the subjectivities of students with the dichotomy of ‘dropout’ vs. ‘graduate’ and, on the other hand, the School’s control over authority relationships within the spaces of the School (through the teachers who control the expertise that students must learn in order to ‘graduate’ and through the administrators who control the rules that the students must abide by in order not to be expelled as ‘dropouts’).  While I’m interested in learning more about how Collectivo Situaciones are “reformulating the space of learning,” I’d take a more nuanced view of these distinctions of inside/outside and school/non-school; instead of saying ‘get rid of them,’ I think we should theorize the conditions for participants in processes of learning to gain control over making those distinctions as well as over the definitions of relationships of authority, values, goals, and needs within those spaces of learning.  The Collectivo Situaciones are probably already very concerned with creating practices toward this end, such as with their development of “counter-power,” which they define as “the construction from below of a new human relationships based on resistance and creation: a relationship that does not deny organization, but assumes it without constructing a ‘center’” (148).

I completely agree with them that “the possible conditions of knowledge are much vaster, so much so that they transcend, by far, the institution of the University” (155).  At the same time, it’s important for us to recognize that many of the resources for creating knowledge (money, the bodies and relationships of students and experts, libraries, technology, classroom spaces) are currently concentrated in universities.  But I wonder, however, if I’m being Americentric here, i.e., if the dominance of universities over the resources for knowledge production is a phenomenon specific more to America.  Perhaps it is in countries where universities have never have had much resources, such as Argentina, or are being defunded and commercialized through neoliberal reforms, such as France, where the possibilities for creating knowledge outside of universities seem much more appealing and do-able without having to worry about taking resources from universities or competing with them for those resources.