Education after Deconstruction (Or, A Critique of Negarestani)

 OK so I'm going to kind of stream of consciousness a little about the topic of education. In particular I'm trying to think about what education in the wake of deconstruction looks like. What is a post-deconstructive pedagogy? And I'm going to cobble together an unholy alliance of Derrida, Karatani, Felman and now Negarestani to think this through.

I'll start with Karatani actually. Karatani starts from the question of solipsism, before moving to the question of teaching. The idea being that the very possibility of teaching, when taken seriously, is what explodes any possible solipsism: the one who teaches has to, as it were, cross a chasm to the other. The chasm is simply a lack of shared ground, or rules. Teaching in this regard is always two-levelled: one has to teach not just "content", but at the same time, one has to teach the other how to learn at all. If we don't share the same rules, if we don't share the some idea of what what counts as our objects of study (and what does not), we cannot even begin to get education off the ground (this is effectively the Meno problem: how can I know what I am looking for, if I haven't yet found it?).

All teaching involves this subtle alignment of "worlds", which must take place alongside or together with, the teaching of 'content'. For Karatani this means that teaching always involves what he calls - borrowing from Marx - a fatal leap. It is a fatal leap insofar as this teaching can fail. Nothing guarantees our ability to cross the chasm, and nothing guarantees that, even once having crossed that chasm, education will remain 'in place'. One can always simply forget. Karatani will go on to then thematise a distinction between 'community' and 'society', where a 'community' (nice, warm, fuzzy) are those who share rules, while a 'society' (cold, risky, uncertain) is one where one cannot take for granted the shared ground of rules. We'll come back to this (I hope). 

Anyway, why is this important? Although Karatani doesn't come right out and say it explicitly, this is more or less a model of education that follows quite nicely if you take deconstruction seriously. Simplifying a little, deconstruction is precisely a discourse that insists on the lack of any guarantee in any act of transmission - transmission here being a transmission from teacher to student. Deconstruction builds in the risk of pedagogic failure from the beginning. In fact, it will go so far as to say that it is only at the risk of failure that any pedagogy can get off the ground to begin with.

You can read this in Karatani: without the risk of crossing the chasm to the other, there is no teaching - one remains mired in solipsism. This is why I think Karatani offers a great model of post-deconstructive pedagogy. He helps to answer the question: if no transmission can be guaranteed, how should we think about education? Well, riskily. Education always involves a 'fatal leap'. And this gels with the Derridian insistence on the repetition of the sign, its lack of presence. Education does not come to end, there is always something else to learn. Some other value to what you have already learnt, which you remain ignorant of. The knowledge that you don't know you know.

This is partly how one answers the question of Meno - how to find what you're looking for if you haven't found it yet? Well, you might not find it! Or what you have found might not be what you think it is! If differance is what interrupts the smooth flow of transmission - all the better to enable it - the the problem with Meno is that is seeks much too hard to ward off any risk. It wants guarantees. But this is precisely what cannot be given in education. Education, like analysis, is interminable.

But we're not done. There's an interesting question here about the issue of dialogicism. Unsurprisingly, Karatani invokes Bakhtin - albeit briefly - and specially, with respect to his distinction between monologue and dialogue. For Karatani, properly thinking about education requires thinking dialogically - education happens 'between (at least) the two' and in so doing, it breaks the sovereignty of the monological. Plato being the paradigmatic 'monologuer', who disguised his monologues as dialogues - disguised because education for him was always a matter of recall, or remembering what was always-already there.

As an aside, is it with respect to exactly this set of issues that Deleuze called for a 'new Meno', one which would not simply 'produce knowledge as an empirical figure', and instead 'introduce time into thought'. Here is D&R:

"For as we have seen, Platonic time introduces difference, apprenticeship and heterogeneity into thought only in order to subject them again to the mythical form of resemblance and identity, and therefore to the image of thought itself. As a result, the whole Platonic theory of apprenticeship functions as a repentance, crushed by the emerging dogmatic image yet bringing forth a groundlessness that it remains incapable of exploring. A new Meno would say: it is knowledge that is nothing more than an empirical figure, a simple result which continually falls back into experience; whereas learning is the true transcendental structure which unites difference to difference, dissimilarity to dissimilarity, without mediating between them; and introduces time into thought - not in the form of a mythical past or former present, but in the pure form of an empty time in general."

Deleuze's invocation of 'groundlessness' just is - imo - the chasm that needs to be crossed by the 'fatal leap' invoked by Karatani

Anyway, back to Bakhtin and the dialogue. There's a question about who - or what - exactly 'the other' is, in the movement of dialog. And here I think you can open up a little bit of an ambiguity with Karatani and exploit a distinction that he doesn't quite make. So on the psychoanalytic model of education, the other is not some concrete other, (that bloke over there) but a structural Other. This Other is other to both student and teacher. It is not a matter of intersubejctivity, but of the unconscious. But what does this mean? What are the stakes here? At stake is the role played by ignorance.

For Karatani, the leap that has to be taken by the teacher puts the teacher at a kind of disadvantage. The act of teaching does not happen between two 'equals': the teacher is subordinated to the student's ignorance, which it is their role to overcome, in a way. And Karatani compares this to the relation of the buyer and seller in the market, where the seller is put at a disadvantage, insofar as they have to rely on the whims of a buyer who may, or may not, make a purchase.

But psychoanalytic pedagogy is, in a way, much worse than this. As Lacan put it, in psychoanalysis, knowledge cannot be exchanged at all!: Felman (quoting Lacan): "The analysts are those who share this knowledge only at the price, on the condition of their not being able to exchange it". Analytic (textual) knowledge cannot be exchanged. it has to be used - and used in each case differently, according to the singularity of the case, according to the specificity of the text. Textual or analytic knowledge is, in other words, that peculiarly specific knowledge which, unlike any commodity, is subsumed by its use value, having no exchange value whatsoever."

But what kind of knowledge is this, that is "shared without exchange?" It is - can only be - a knowledge of ignorance, in both senses of the genitive. In other words, one both learns (active?-resisting?) ignorance - learns to not accept ready-made interpretations of thing and opens oneself to the singularity of what must be learnt - and learns from ignorance. This 'learning from ignorance' is what is learnt by the analyst, who, in Felman's words again, 'is doubly ignorant':

"Each case is thus, for the analyst as well as for the patient, a new apprenticeship. "If it is true that our knowledge comes to the rescue of the patient's ignorance, it is not less true that, for our part, we, too, are plunged in ignorance" (S 1.78). While the analysand is obviously ignorant of his own unconscious, the analyst is doubly ignorant: pedagogically ignorant of his suspended (given) knowledge; actually ignorant of the very knowledge the analysand presumes him to possess of his own (the analysand's) unconscious: knowledge of the very knowledge he-the patient-lacks. In what way does knowledge, then, emerge in and from the analytic situation?

Through the analytic dialogue the analyst, indeed, has first to learn where to situate the ignorance: where his own textual knowledge is resisted. It is, however, out of this resistance, out of the patient's active ignorance, out of the patient's speech which says much more than it itself knows, that the analyst will come to learn the patient's own unconscious knowledge. that knowledge which is inaccessible to itself because it cannot tolerate knowing that it knows; and it is the signifiers of this constitutively a-reflexive knowledge coming from the patient that the analyst returns to the patient from his different vantage point, from his non-reflexive, asymmetrical position as an Other. Contrary to the traditional pedagogical dynamic, in which the teacher's question is addressed to an answer from the other-from the student-which is totally reflexive, and expected, "the true Other," says Lacan, "is the Other who gives the answer one does not expect" (5 II.288). Coming from the Other, knowledge is, by definition, that which comes as a surprise, that which is constitutively the return of a difference. (Felman, "Psychoanalysis and Education")

Key passage: "Out of [the patient's resistance], the [ignorant] analyst will come to learn the patient's own unconscious knowledge, that knowledge which is inaccessible to itself because it cannot tolerate knowing what it knows ... knowledge coming from the patient that the analyst returns to the patient from his different vantage point, from his non-reflexive, asymmetrical position as an Other". Importantly, it's not that the analyst IS the other. The analyst occupies the position of the other.

Which brings us back to Bakhtin and how one can deepen Karatani - and by extension, post-deconstructive pedagogy - by way of psychoanalysis. Where for Karatani, the other is kind of social (concretely existing) other (the other of Society as distinct from Community), the psychoanalytic Other is irreducible to society - or community for that matter. So the point here is to make a small but significant distinction between Karatani's - let's call it - transcendental anthropology and Derrida's "ultratranscendental logic". A "sharing without exchange" is something that, symptomatically, escapes Karatani's "Modes of Exchange" logics that he'll later go on to develop. In a sense, the above complicates - deconstructs, if you will - any easy distinction between Community and Society that Karatani draws. Community must be understood to be always-already "contaminated" (Derrida's term) by Society. There is nowhere that the fatal leap is not required, not even among those who purportedly share the same rules as 'we' do. 

So, if we deconstruct the Community/Society distinction, then it is also the case that the Other as a structure must be, can only be, originary. Or more accurately, a perhaps nice way to put it is that the distance that has to be 'fatally lept' over is - 'scale invariant'. Individual, society, community, the necessity of the leap runs through it all. It's true that reading it this way does flatten all social relations (and even 'relations' would not be the right word exactly, insofar as what's as stake is something like a paradoxical pre-relational dialogic structure). But it's value is in functioning as a prophylactic against certain ways of treating pedagogy. And here's where I wanna say something about Negarestani's reading of pedagogy and pit what's been said so far against it. This'll be the payoff, I hope!

So Negarestani has a frankly reverential - and Kantian - view of education. Listen to I&S: "education and general pedagogy, in its diverse spectrum from child rearing to the higher systems of education extending to adulthood, is one of the most—if not the most—fundamental and necessary infrastructures for any meaningful or sustained sociopolitical change. Without it the fruits of even the most consequential emancipatory actions will be undone—if not tomorrow, then inexorably for the next generation." (p44)

 In this you can hear Negarestani's - 'augmentive' model of education. It bears 'fruits', which in turn must be defended. He's pretty explicit about this: "the primary goal of education and generalized pedagogy is the functional re-realization and augmentation of what mind already is: a unifying structuring point or configuring factor in which the coextensive complexity of the theoretical-practical subject and the world in its radical otherness are expressed.... This generalized pedagogy, however, is more like a primary education through which the child AGI comes to recognize the necessary correlations between mind and world, structure and being, intelligence and the intelligible, theory and object". (280-281)

At a surface level, anyone acquainted with say, Paolo Freire's critique of 'the banking model' of education (in which knowledge is desposited in the student as though a bank) might get their heckles raised at this point. But Negarestani is not an 'empiricist' about education here. Education for Negarestani has a properly transcendental standing: it is about the cultivation of capacities which allows for a wider and wider ambit of engagement by an agent with their world. It is not about accumulating more and more bits of empirical knowledge. This is the vaunted autonomy that Negarestani seeks: autonomy through education, and with it, the raising of the human itself to something even better. 

Perhaps interestingly - given what I said above about the social and the scale-invariance of the leap - Negarestani himself has a critique of 'sociality'. Or rather, he critiques a certain way of conceiving sociality which we might call a 'folk' sociality involving real people in conversation, hashing it out over shared modes of life etc. For Negarestani, the sociality he's keen to emphasize is as 'a formal condition'(!). His use of sociality is a matter of "sociality as an interaction that can be elaborated logically and computationally." The artificiality of this sociality for N has the advantage of 'unbinding' it from calcified forms of life, rending it all the more supple and adaptable for the cultivation of the (transcendentally) educated agent (this is his critique of Brandom, who, in N's view, substantializes rather than formalizes sociality).

Having elaborated all this, it's possible to finally ask: where in all this might the psychoanalytic instance of coming to have a knowledge of ignorance find its place? The short answer is that it simply cannot. It's not that Negarestani does not 'leave room' for the role of ignorance in the acquisition of knowledge. But it is always a matter of reincorporation, of a ignorance-for-knowledge:
 

"The systematic dissolution of Meno’s paradox exemplifies the model by which Plato transforms ill-posited thoughts into well-posited methodical thoughts, the eristic into the dialectical, the game-theoretic into interactionist games in which both ignorance and knowledge, doubt and trust are incorporated. Plato simulates an interactive situation by pitting the sophist against his favourite player Socrates, who also always comes off as a sophist. In an interactive programmatic scenario mirroring the logico-computational account of programs given above, once the sophist and its dual Socrates. begin the game of philosophy—the interaction par excellence—the solution naturally assembles itself from the exchanges between the opponent and the proponent." (441)

But this 'interactionist game' is just the 'monological' dialogue that Karatani critiques, lacking an encounter with a true other for whom - or with which - rules must be elaborated. Ultimately - and this brings us back to the very beginning of all this - Negarestani's subject of pedagogy is properly solipsitic. At no point is any true leap required. In terms of ignorance, what the irreducibility of the leap - and the structural Other - entails is nothing other than the preservation of ignorance as a kind of counter-knowledge that refuses the 'fall' into knowledge. If Negarestani's agent can learn from ignorance, it cannot attain a knowledge of ignorance. I'm thinking here of Lacan's advice to analysts:

"One of the things we should be watching out for most, is not to understand too much, not to understand more than what there is in the discourse of the subject. Interpreting is an altogether different thing than having the fancy of understanding. One is the opposite of the other. I will even say that it is on the basis of a certain refusal of understanding that we open the door onto psychoanalytic understanding."

But it's exactly this kind of - why not? - gelassenheit of knowledge (a 'leaving ignorance be') that can't be countenanced by the educational model that Negarestatni proposes. These eddies of ignorance which must be left in place and in which all pedagogy finds its risk (in the irreducible leap) are precisely what Negarestani wants to expunge. Listen again to his anxiety: "Without [education] the fruits of even the most consequential emancipatory actions will be undone—if not tomorrow, then inexorably for the next generation." But this fear of 'undoing' only follows if one buys into Negarestani's 'accumulative' model of pedagogy. But what if one values education for its powers of undoing? For it's breaking the lines of transmission such that something properly new can be learnt? What is 'the next generation' if not the one that shatters what is known?

So I'll end on this - one of the things which is similarly 'blocked' by the accumulative model of education is the movement of becoming. If all of I&S involves the 'education of the child-machine' (named Kanzi by N) growing to maturation, what of the counter-movement of what D&G call the becoming-child? This involves a childhood which is "not the child 'before' the adult, or the mother 'before' the child: it is the strict contemporaneousness of the adult, of the adult and the child, their map of comparative densities and intensities, and all of the variations on that map... It is no more projective than it is regressive. It is an involution, but always a contemporary, creative involution" (ATP165). This line of becoming has no place in the 'education of Kanzi' who can only 'progress' without any possibility of involution in this way.