Paranoid Pedagogies: Education, Culture, and Paranoia

226 Pages·2018·4.201 MB·English

by  Jennifer A. Sandlin, Jason J. Wallin (eds.)

Edited by EP
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Jennifer A. Sandlin and Jason J. Wallin UCrave
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PARANOID
PEDAGOGIES
Education, Culture, and Paranoia
Palgrave Studies in Educational Futures
Series Editor
jan jagodzinski
Secondary Education
University of Alberta
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
The series Educational Futures would be a call on all aspects of education,
not only specific subject specialist, but policy makers, religious education
leaders, curriculum theorists, and those involved in shaping the educational
imagination through its foundations and both psychoanalytical and
psychological investments with youth to address this extraordinary precarity
and anxiety that is continually rising as things do not get better but worsen.
A global de-territorialization is taking place, and new voices and visions
need to be seen and heard. The series would address the following questions
and concerns. The three key signifiers of the book series title address this
state of risk and emergency: The Anthropocene: The ‘human world,’ the
world-for-us is drifting toward a global situation where human extinction is
not out of the question due to economic industrialization and
overdevelopment, as well as the exponential growth of global population.
How to we address this ecologically and educationally to still make a
difference? Ecology: What might be ways of re- thinking our relationships
with the non-human forms of existence and in-human forms of artificial
intelligence that have emerged? Are there possibilities to rework the
ecological imagination educationally from its over-romanticized view of
Nature, as many have argued: Nature and culture are no longer tenable
separate signifiers. Can teachers and professors address the ideas that
surround differentiated subjectivity where agency is no long attributed to
the ‘human’ alone? Aesthetic Imaginaries: What are the creative responses
that can fabulate aesthetic imaginaries that are viable in specific contexts
where the emergent ideas, which are able to gather heterogeneous elements
together to present projects that address the two former descriptors: the
Anthropocene and the every changing modulating ecologies. Can educators
drawn on these aesthetic imaginaries to offer exploratory hope for what is a
changing globe that is in constant crisis? The series Educational Futures:
Anthropocene, Ecology, and Aesthetic Imaginaries attempts to secure
manuscripts that are aware of the precarity that reverberates throughout all
life, and attempts to explore and experiment to develop an educational
imagination which, at the very least, makes conscious what is a dire situation.
More information about this series at
http://www.springer.com/series/15418
Jennifer A. Sandlin • Jason J. Wallin
Editors
Paranoid Pedagogies
Education, Culture, and Paranoia
Editors
Jennifer A. Sandlin Jason J. Wallin
Arizona State University University of Alberta
Tempe, Arizona, USA Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Palgrave Studies in Educational Futures
ISBN 978-3-319-64764-7 ISBN 978-3-319-64765-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64765-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017953538
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
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S e F
erieS ditor oreword
Our present ‘global’ situation is a precarious state: the movement of asy-
lum seekers, migrants, diasporic peoples have placed an extraordinary
financial and psychological pressure on the European Union. Such pres-
sure, however, is worldwide as borders that have become walls are breeched
by those who are fleeing war-torn countries; the rise of ISIS has made the
question of ‘religion’ once more decisive as ideological divisions become
hardened when identity and belonging, as shaped by the first condition of
worldwide migratory movement, become unraveled and nomadic. This
unrest is multiplied by the precarity of the economic situation, where it is
said that the capitalist system presents the 1% against the 99% as young
people find it difficult to find work and a place in the symbolic order.
Lastly, such precarity that reverberates around the globe also includes the
‘globe’ itself in terms of the Earth’s climate change, a euphemism for the
changing conditions of the land and oceans that are shaped by industrial
growth and pollution. This sketch of a world at the brink of unprece-
dented change presents us with a compelling image that something needs
to be done. But what? And is it too late? Yet, we are living in a time where
the most marvelous technologies have come to dominate our lives, and
the promise of these technologies to put things right can always be heard.
Educational Futures address this state of risk and emergency through
three key signifiers:
1. The Anthropocene: The ‘human world,’ the world-for-us, is drifting
toward a global situation where human extinction is not out of the
question due to economic industrialization and overdevelopment, as
v
vi SERIES EDITOR FOREWORD
well as the exponential growth of global population. How do we
address this ecologically and educationally to still make a difference?
2. Ecology: What might be ways of rethinking our relationships with the
non-human forms of existence and inhuman forms of artificial intelli-
gence that have emerged? Are there possibilities to rework the ecologi-
cal imagination educationally from its over-romanticized view of
Nature, as many have argued: Nature and culture are no longer tenable
separate signifiers. Can teachers and professors address the ideas that
surround differentiated subjectivity where agency is no long attributed
to the ‘human’ alone?
3. Aesthetic Imaginaries: What are the creative responses that can fabu-
late aesthetic imaginaries that are viable in specific contexts where the
emergent ideas, which are able to gather heterogeneous elements
together to present projects that address the two former descriptors:
the Anthropocene and the every changing modulating ecologies. Can
educators drawn on these aesthetic imaginaries to offer exploratory
hope for what is a changing globe that is in constant crisis?
The series is an attempt to explore and experiment with an educational
imagination, which, at the very least, makes us conscious to what is a dire
situation.
P
reFace
This edited book explores the under-analyzed significance and function of
paranoia as both a psychological and a social force in contemporary educa-
tion. While much has been written on the role of epistemological uncer-
tainty and the death of metaphysics in education, this book claims that the
desire for epistemological truth characteristic of paranoia continues to
profoundly shape the aesthetic texture and imaginaries of educational
thought and practice. Attending to the psychoanalytic, post-p sychoanalytic,
and critical significance of paranoia as a mode of engaging with the world,
this book inquires into the ways in which paranoia functions to shape the
social order and the material desire of subjects operating within it. This
book largely argues that paranoia is not an individual pathology, but
rather, a mode of social organization and imaginary configuration of real-
ity. Attending to a little-studied area of educational philosophy and schol-
arship, this book attempts to analyze the reasons and functions of paranoia
in social and educational settings, and in turn connects these reasons to a
broader calculus of social conformity and potential for social resistance.
Aiming to understand how the paranoiac imaginary endemic to social life
is made manifest in education and educational research, the book exam-
ines the issues paranoia makes manifest for teachers, teacher educators,
and academics working toward change.
The book is divided into three sections. In SECTION ONE:
PARANOID AESTHETICS, the authors address such questions as: How
does paranoia function as a form of aesthetic representation tethering
social potentials to prior social codes and images?; In what ways might
paranoiac pedagogies be detected in the contemporary aesthetics of
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viii PREFACE
popular culture and, further, the exertion of power at varying scales of
aesthetic and affective experience?; and, How might paranoia be rethought
as an aesthetic counterpart to the affective politics of neoliberal capitalism?
These questions are focused around the aesthetics of paranoia, and how
paranoia is related both to imaginaries produced and circulated, for exam-
ple, via Hollywood film, and self-image—as seen in the neoliberal obses-
sion with self-representation and self-surveillance that manifests through
selfie culture and the kinds of self-marketing and promotion that happen
via social media applications such as Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat.
In their contribution to the book, Andrew Hammerand and Bucky
Miller provide a photo-essay that simultaneously plays with and critiques
both physical mechanisms and sites of surveillance as well as aesthetic
expressions of surveillance or paranoid chic. These images both capture
and critique the present cultural condition of paranoia and surveillance.
We are extremely fortunate for the contribution of jan jagodzinski,
whose genius work on paranoia and education predate this book by over a
decade. In his essay for this book, jagodzinski draws upon psychoanalytic
and post-psychoanalytic theorizations of paranoia as they inform upon the
use of ‘dangerous images’ (i.e. controversial, extreme, or challenging
imaginaries) in the classroom. Focusing on the paranoiac refusal of such
images as they might destabilize, contort, or ‘penetrate’ the accepted
worldview of the student, jagodzinski articulates how paranoia functions
as a means to keep one’s eyes closed to the unthought, or rather, to those
imaginaries that exceed those accepted images of the world that shore up
student subjectivity and buttress it against the excess of the real that par-
ticular images, in their extremity and violence, return to us. However, this
kind of paranoia can also have the more positive effect of revealing how
vision and knowledge are in fact framed in particular ways to begin with.
Finally, jagodzinski evokes the challenges of teaching that avoid the trap-
pings of both the paranoiac refusal to look and the neoliberal impetus that
we, as consumers, are impelled to look.
In the last chapter of section one, Doug Aoki takes up a related line of
questioning that is connected to self-image, particularly the presentation of
one’s ‘professional’ educator self via social media and in (and out of) the
classroom. Addressing two ways this kind of professorial paranoia emerges—
the refusal of ‘friending’ students on Facebook as well as the insistence of
being called ‘Dr.’ by one’s students—Aoki problematizes these enactments
of paranoia, discussing how this paranoia reveals an expression of ego
entwined with a culturally located form of academic self- perception anti-
thetical to the pedagogy and wisdom tradition of karate-dō 空手道.
PREFAC E ix
In SECTION TWO: PARANOID SOCIETY, authors address such
questions as: How does neoliberal economics require paranoia to sustain
itself and, following, what kinds of social potentials might be liberated
from under paranoiac social organization?; How does/might paranoia
support and promote public fantasy?; Where today might educational
research and practice express paranoiac tendencies?; and, How might con-
temporary calls for educational fundamentalism be analyzed as a symptom
of paranoia? In a general sense, these questions aim to investigate how
meaning becomes fixed within the dogmatism of paranoiac thinking. Such
investigation is crucial today insofar as paranoiac modes of social produc-
tion tend to fix meaning and knowledge in ways that prevent flows of new
meaning, which works to concretize meaning and thus restrict meaning
from changing. In this second section of the book, the authors seek to
understand how current paranoiac libidinal investments in contemporary
social issues encode meaning and help to shape and fix social structures,
including educational systems and practices.
In our contribution to the collection, we (Jenny Sandlin and Jason
Wallin) use a case study of the religious cartoon tracts of Jack T. Chick to
examine how paranoia functions to both regulate and constrain desire.
Here, we take up paranoia as constituting one way of coding or socially
organizing desire within capitalist societies, and thus view it as not merely
a purely psychological, but also a social process. In particular, we explore
the paranoiac investments of Christian Fundamentalism, which is on the
rise in the United States and increasingly influences social, cultural, eco-
nomic, educational, and political decision-making. We examine the para-
noiac worldviews of the Christian Fundamentalist cartoons of Jack T. Chick,
which we argue construct and transmit social and political beliefs along
with their theological messages. These messages include the paranoiac anx-
iety that Satan is working through a host of peoples and practices, includ-
ing communism, Masonry, the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus, Harry
Potter, Islam, Dungeons and Dragons, and many more. Moving beyond
examining this particular paranoid fundamentalist Christian worldview, we
use Chick’s cartoon tracts to illuminate the functions of paranoia in broader
capitalist society, including explicating how this paranoiac mode of social
organization permeates more formal educational realms, particularly edu-
cational policy and practice as well as the academic fields of curriculum
studies and curriculum theorizing.
While the kinds of libidinal paranoiac investments Mark Helmsing
explores in his contribution to the collection are perhaps less dramatic than