InC @ICA (2010)
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Transcript of InC @ICA (2010)
THE FUTURE OF PEDAGOGY THE CONCEPT AND THE DISASTER
Sam McAuliffe, Daniele Rugo, Roberto Cavallini, David Smith for InC, Continental Philosophy Research Group
On the eve of yet another educational reform our interest will
focus on the future of pedagogy and in particular on the
possibilities of resistance that this offers when actively
configured as “a pedagogy of the concept”. The series
investigates the occasion for an explicit affirmation of singular
interruptions in the face of “absolute disaster”.
In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari speak of “the
three ages of the concept”, ages that express three varying
determinations of the activity of thinking itself. “The post-Kantians concentrated on a universal encyclopaedia of the concept that attributed concept creation to a pure subjectivity rather than taking on the more modest task of a pedagogy of the concept, which would have to analyze the conditions of creation as factors of always
singular moments. If the three ages of the concept are the encyclopaedia, pedagogy, and commercial professional training, only the second can safeguard us from falling from the heights of the first into the disaster of the third – an absolute disaster for thought whatever its benefits might be, of course, from the viewpoint of universal capitalism.” There is, then, “a pedagogy of the concept.” The concept
necessitates, calls for, is implicated in a certain form of
pedagogy. As though in the absence of this pedagogical
supplement, the concept would cease to be determinable as
such. And insofar as it accompanies a concept’s creation,
insofar as it works to ensure the latter’s efficacy, pedagogy
concerns the very possibility of thinking itself, its “condition.”
For philosophical thought the question of pedagogy is
therefore formative. And it is in this sense that the
pedagogical “age” of the concept cannot simply be
understood as one age among others. On this point Deleuze
and Guattari are explicit: pedagogy would be the single
configuration of the concept through which the passage from
subjective idealism to universal capitalism is not facilitated but
potentially interrupted, called into question: “only the second
[age] can safeguard us from falling from the heights of the first
into the disaster of the third.” The disaster – specifically seen
in the move away from research towards forms of continuous
assessment – reduces this interruption to the transformable
parcel of a “single business”. What Deleuze and Guattari call
pedagogy here is therefore a form of resistance whose force
is directed against the historical course that would see the
concept delivered over to “universal capitalism.” By contesting
the inevitability of this transition and the “absolute disaster”
that it would, for thinking, imply, pedagogy may therefore be
considered that which maintains a relation to philosophy’s
future, a future from which it is otherwise closed off. As a form
of resistance a “pedagogy of the concept” keeps open a
resource for thinking: the imminent possibility of error as the
renewal of complexity against the transformation of thinking
into an “high-handed method”.
Our question then: how would a “pedagogy of the
concept” take place today? On the basis of what apparatus,
what set of relations, what series of functions? Can we
continue to say that the pedagogical act retains this capacity
for critique that Deleuze and Guattari unconditionally invest it
with? Can a distinction between pedagogy and “commercial
professional training”, “the viewpoint of universal capitalism”
continue to be drawn? If so, then by what means? And if not,
does this impinge upon the very possibility of critical thinking
itself?
If in the situation of “absolute disaster”, in which “the only
people left are administrators”, moments of singular creation
are outclassed by the constant improvement of logical
apparatuses, what can we expect from the institutions once
devoted to the “pedagogy of the concept”? While a certain
lexicon seems already to prefigure a change in paradigm,
what position will institutions take in the shift from a
“pedagogy of the concept” to “commercial professional
training”? Will the institution still formulate questions as to the
possibility of thinking?
This seminar series will pursue these questions through the
following forms:
I. Pedagogy and the Proper Name
With a view to interrogating the hierarchy inherent to the
pedagogical relation, participants will be invited to respond to
the following proposition: “No teaching without the proper
name; no teaching of the proper name.”
II. Pedagogy and Technics
The pedagogical act to be considered as a form of technics,
an instrument, tool, or supplement that cannot, however, be
categorically opposed to a supposedly natural form of being.
The risk of pedagogy becoming a completely autonomous
machine calls for a constant questioning of the relationship
between technocracy and pedagogy.
IV. Pedagogy and Institution: Method and Anti-Method
The pedagogical act is subject to an “immanent untruth”
Adorno writes in an essay on teaching. In what does this
untruth consist, and what are its consequences? In this
session, the ethico-political specificity of pedagogy encounters
the delimitations of the institution: questions for/from the
institution.
SUGGESTED READING LIST - Adorno, Theodor W. 'Philosophy and Teachers', 'Taboos on the Teaching Vocation' and ‘Notes on Philosophical Thinking’ in Critical Models (Columbia, 1998) - Bourdieu, Pierre. Homo Academicus (Stanford, 1990) - Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition (Athlone, 1994) - Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. What is Philosophy? (Verso, 1994) - Deleuze, Gilles. ‘Postscript on Control Societies’ in Negotiations (Columbia, 1995) - Freire, Paulo. Education for Critical Consciousness (Continuum, 2005) - Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Future of Our Educational Institutions (St. Augustine's Press, 2004) - Rancière, Jacques. The Ignorant Schoolmaster (Stanford, 1991)