(Extended) Footnotes On Education

What follows is a series of loose considerations and fragmented thoughts relating to debates that have emerged over the past few years around the topic of education. On a rather abstract level, they are intended to reference discussions and struggles presently taking place in other fields; in another, more concrete sense, they might be of preliminary use in developing criteria for practical interventions in a situation widely perceived to be in crisis.

1. Learning

We learn nothing from those who say: “Do as I do.” Our only teachers are those who tell us to “do with me,” and are able to emit signs to be developed in heterogeneity rather than propose gestures for us to reproduce.¹

In the preface to his first, seminal work Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze articulates the challenges of pedagogy in a vivid, precise fashion. Deleuze claims that everything that teaches us something emits signs, and every act of learning is an interpretation of these signs or hieroglyphs. Using the example of learning how to swim, he points out that in practice we manage to deal with the challenge of keeping afloat only by grasping certain movements as signs. It is pointless to imitate the movements of the swimming instructor without understanding them as signs one has to decode and recompose in one’s own struggle with the water.

Such repetition is no longer that of the Same, “but involves difference—from one wave and one gesture to another, and carries that difference through the repetitive space thereby constituted.”² The potential of such an approach to teaching and learning is huge: as soon as a notion of learning is decoupled from the possession of knowledge, as soon as difference is liberated from identity, repetition from reproduction (or resistance from representation), we may encounter what is at stake in today’s debate about education.

Rather than simply lament the decline of public institutions, the ongoing privatization of knowledge, and the resulting precariousness of access to education, we should challenge ourselves to learn how to respond to the current situation without drowning in it.

The discovery of possible points of resistance to these oncoming waves of privatization, appropriation, and commodification of knowledge has become urgent.

The system of public education is threatened by a crisis with multiple sources, a crisis that exceeds the limits of our imagination and is essentially beyond measure since what is put into question is the very idea of measurement and commensurability as such. It is a crisis of property, which has become increasingly “imaginary” in the sense that one can no longer be sure of whether or not it is real.

In an age of cognitive capitalism, however, the crisis presents itself with the very same rhetoric of quantitative measurement that was so recently implicated in the near-collapse of the financial system. Certain risks present themselves as perfectly measurable as long as they are systematically obscured; their impact becomes noticeable only when it is too late.

The problem is not just that of the inherent difficulty of assessing how critical the situation is, it is that we have reached an impasse, a failure to generate counter-concepts that could characterize a different proposal, an alternative to the existing order. We are faced with a systemic crisis of the imagination.

How can we envision, design, develop, and enjoy environments in which one learns “with” someone else instead of “from” or “about” others, as Deleuze suggested? How can we invent, create, and compose “spaces of encounter with signs” in which distinctive points “renew themselves in each other, and repetition takes shape while disguising itself?”³ What would make these spaces different to the ones we have been forced to experience in the past?