Politics and pedagogy in the "post-truth" era: Insurgent philosophy and praxis

165 Pages·2019·3.484 MB·English

by  Derek R. Ford

FINAL SPINE: 15mm HB PLC
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“An unusually moving book, strangely inspiring and motivating even as it ic Politics and Pedagogy
challenges us to excavate and overturn our understandings of how pedagogy s

and politics are interlinked. Ford’s voice is persuasive and clear, ultimately a
n in the “Post-Truth” Era
inviting readers into an engaged reassessment of our fraught contemporary d
moment, where the classroom and the street are shown to be a Möbius strip.”
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Christopher Schaberg, Dorothy Harrell Brown Distinguished Professor of e
d Insurgent Philosophy and Derek R. Ford
English, Loyola University New Orleans, USA
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“As an academic, I have been waiting for a clear map of the collusion
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between liberal democracy and the marketplace of ideas. Combining a y

careful, nuanced reading of Lyotard with an innovative deployment of work i
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by Jodi Dean and Lee Edelman, Ford shows nothing less than that the world
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can no longer afford to leave problems of pedagogy to schools of education. h
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The relationship between politics and education emerges here as the central

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problem of the times. This book not only calls for intervention, but actually
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provides one.” o
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Margret Grebowicz, Professor, School of Advanced Studies, University of
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Those who are in shock that truth doesn’t seem to matter in politics miss t
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the mark: politics has never corresponded with the truth. Political struggle is ”
about the formulation and materialization of new truths. The “post-truth” era E
thus offers an important opportunity to push forward into a different world. r
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Embracing this opportunity, Derek R. Ford articulates a new educational
philosophy and praxis that emerges from within the nexus of social theory D
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and political struggle. Blocking together aesthetics, queer theory, urbanism, r
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postmodern philosophy, and radical politics, Ford develops arguments and k
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proposals on key topics ranging from debt and time to the death drive and . F
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forms of political organization. Through forceful yet accessible prose, Ford r
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offers contemporary left politics an imaginative and potent set of educational
concepts and practices.
Derek R. Ford is Assistant Professor of Education Studies at DePauw University,
USA. He is the author of Education and the Production of Space (2017)
and Communist Study (2016).
EDUCATION
Cover design by Joshua Fanning
Cover image © Sarah Pfohl
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Politics and Pedagogy in the
“Post-Truth” Era
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Also available from Bloomsbury
Critical Pedagogy for Social Justice , John Smyth
Developing Student Criticality in Higher Education , Brenda Johnston
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Politics and Pedagogy in the
“Post-Truth” Era
Insurgent Philosophy and Praxis
Derek R. Ford
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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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First published in Great Britain 2018
Copyright © Derek R. Ford, 2018
Derek R. Ford has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988,
to be identifi ed as Author of this work.
Cover image © Sarah Pfohl
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Contents

Acknowledgments vi
Introduction: Don’t Bring the Truth to a Gunfi ght 1
1. Studying in the Party 21
2. In and Out of the Gap 41
3. Th e Sinthom ostudier 57
4. Stupid Urbanism 75
5. (Un)communicative Aesthetic Education 91
6. Magical Bookkeepers 107
Conclusion: A Pro-Test Protest 127
Appendix: History, Space, and Ideology 131
Bibliography 147
Index 155
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Acknowledgments

Th e ideas in this book spring not only from my engagement with certain
texts, but more fundamentally—and fi rst—from my engagement with certain
struggles, and certain groups, forces, and people in those struggles. Th is might
seem odd for a work like this that’s deeply theoretical, but it’s true nonetheless. It
is the struggle that structures my encounter with philosophical and educational
concepts, and that in many ways determines how I develop my own, to the extent
that they can even be called “my own” (and I don’t think they can). So thanks to
all of you—or, better, us .
It was Michael Peters who got me thinking about the “post-truth” era, aft er
I had instinctively written it off as so much mainstream liberal rubbish. With his
prompting through an editorial in Educational Philosophy and Th eory , I began
to wonder what the temporal and political designation might off er the current
political struggle. He invited me to contribute a chapter to an edited volume
on the topic, Post-Truth, Fake News: Viral Modernity & Higher Education , and
that chapter was the springboard for this book. Th anks to Mike for this, for his
own scholarship that has opened many doors, for taking me (and other young
educational scholars) seriously, and for amplifying our ideas. Another scholar,
whom I also call a friend (in all the indeterminacy of that word) that I owe a public
thanks to is Tyson Lewis. Tyson coauthored with me what appears as the fi ft h
chapter in this book. He also cleared a path of legitimation for my generation of
educational theorists to think (and publish) politically and pedagogically out of
bounds. He and Amy Kraehe carefully read C hapter 4 and gave helpful feedback.
My students in Radical Philosophy and Education taught me a lot about
what studying can really look like. Th e education studies department at
DePauw University provides me the support and fl exibility to teach and study
a range of disparate but pedagogically related topics, which enables me to
do this kind of research. Mark Richardson and Maria Giovanna Brauzzi, my
editors at Bloomsbury, have been unusually responsive and helpful throughout
the inception, writing, and production of the book. Th anks also to the four
anonymous reviewers, who helped sharpen and shape the text in signifi cant ways.
Finally, thanks to Sarah Pfohl for her insights, laughter, and gestures, and for
making a life with me and with Felix and Otis (and Moose, Roscoe, Dotty, Daisy,
and Ava).
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Introduction: Don’t Bring
the Truth to a Gunfi ght
Many are in shock that today the truth doesn’t seem to matter in politics. Every
time US president Donald Trump tweets that a news article unfavorable to him
is “FAKE NEWS!” they are aghast and disoriented. Every time he says something
blatantly false, it adds a new bullet point to a list of lies and sets off a new circuit
of outrage. Th e response is clear: we need to call out the lies and tell the truth!
Educators have a crucial role to play here, for we are the ones who teach the
truth to others, or who facilitate the collective realization of the truth. Th is
analysis and proposal completely miss the mark: politics has never been about
a correspondence with an existing truth. Indeed, when I hear people denounce
our political scene as “post-truth,” I wonder when exactly they think it was that
truth determined politics. Th e same goes for those who decry today’s “fake
news.” Hasn’t the media always been an arena of political struggle? To claim
that with Trump’s election we’ve entered a post-truth era of fake news is to claim
that the domestic and international wars against First Nations, Black people, and
people of color that were and are central to US democracy have been based on
truthful politics and media. 1 Political struggle rather concerns the formulation
of new truths and, more importantly, the m aterialization of those truths. Our
contemporary moment thus off ers an important opportunity for the Left to
embrace political struggle, to stake out positions, and to fi ght for those positions.
On the one hand, it seems reasonable to propose that we reject the “post-
truth” designation altogether. Aft er all, doesn’t the repetition of that language
serve to further entrench the liberal narrative of a democracy corrupted? I would
answer this question affi rmatively. But, on the other hand, I would also caution
that we should not—and in fact cannot—exhaustively determine the uses to
which this language will be put and the eff ects that such usage will have. Th us,
I’d like to hang on to the “post-truth” for now, but I’d like to propose a particular
conceptualization of it, one that I believe holds political and pedagogical promise
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2 Politics and Pedagogy in the “Post-Truth” Era
as a frame for engaging in transformative praxis. To be post-truth, so I wish
to suggest, is not to be “anti-truth” or even “without truth.” Instead, we should
understand the relationship between the “post-truth” and “the truth” in the same
way that Jean-François Lyotard formulated the relationship between the modern
and the postmodern.
For Lyotard, the postmodern is not a negation, annihilation, or supersession
of the modern. Th ere is no dialectic of or between either. Th e postmodern
doesn’t come a ft er the modern, for such a progression would itself be decidedly
modern. No, the postmodern “is undoubtedly part of the modern,” Lyotard
tells us. 2 Even Christianity has its own postmodern infl ection (for who can
really prove that Christ isn’t a phony?). 3 Th e postmodern inhabits the modern,
interrupting it: “Th e postmodern would be that which in the modern invokes
the unpresentable in presentation itself, that which refuses the consolation of
correct forms, refuses the consensus of taste permitting a common experience
of nostalgia for the impossible, and inquires into new presentations— not to
take pleasure in them, but to better produce the feeling that there is something
unpresentable .” 4 Th e modern is that which off ers a narrative of understanding,
cohesion, and unity; the postmodern is that which interrupts it.
Th e modern itself isn’t a narrative. Th e modern can be read as a narrative,
but it can also be understood in relation to institutions, philosophy, science, art,
and so on. Th e postmodern is that for which these can’t account, an excess of
thought, feeling, and being. At one point he off ers that “postmodernity is also,
or fi rst of all, a question of expressions of thought: in art, literature, philosophy,
politics.” 5 As a surplus of the modern that cannot be tamed, the postmodern
is that which certain modes of politics and forms of governance attempt to
suppress, regulate, or annihilate. What Lyotard is aft er is a form of life that
doesn’t accede to this repression, but not so that the diff erent and the new can be
uncritically celebrated (an important injunction that his critics always overlook).
Th e postmodern project is an investigation into the rules governing reality to
open up the possible.
Th e post-truth designation, on this reading, is an occasion to refuse the liberal
nostalgia for the democratic and civil public sphere based on truthful exchange
at the marketplace of ideas. Like the postmodern shows how the modern covers
over diff erence and the rules and methods by which diff erence is accommodated
or obliterated, the post-truth can agitate the political nature of truth and, more
importantly, the pedagogy of truth. Th e post-truth, in other words, opens up a
political project as well as a pedagogical one. Th e political project involves the
power relations that compose truths, and the pedagogical project involves how
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Introduction 3
we engage ourselves, each other, and the world in transformative processes as we
formulate and realize these truths.
Th ese related but irreducible tasks are rarely thought together in academic
literature. Radical political theory is littered with educational terms like
learning, teaching, and even testing. Th e logics, trajectories, and politics
inherent in these educational processes, however, are neither excavated nor
explicated. Th e pedagogical dynamics of political struggles remain unconscious
and unexamined, latent and assumed. One would think that this is where critical
educational researchers would step in, but here, too, pedagogy is variously
reduced to politics, sidelined by political analysis, or subjected to the service of
politics. In the fi rst case, pedagogy is collapsed into political revolution, in the
second case it is benched so that analyses of neoliberalism can take center stage,
and in the third case it is theorized and deployed with the aim of producing
particular kinds of subjects who are capable of being part of a (democratic)
order. In each instance, pedagogy itself is left untheorized.
Zombie intellectualism
Not only is pedagogy untheorized, but the political domain into which it
is subsumed or to the side of which it steps is at best impotent, and at worst
destructive. 6 One cause of this I label zombie intellectualism, and this ailment
oft en takes the form of blog posts, articles, book chapters, and even entire books
that do little else than denounce the present moment, condemn our political
reality and subjectivity in near apocalyptic terms, whitewash history, and issue
decrees to social movements. Th e reason I term this zombie intellectualism
is because it feeds off of political struggles but serves only to demobilize and
demotivate them. It’s the same old ideology critique whose faith rests on the
critical educator awakening the stupid masses to the reality of our oppression.
Th ey tell us we are living in end times and at the end of democracy, reinforcing
a triumphalist narrative of US democracy and romanticizing a past that’s never
existed in this country. Usually these pieces end with nods to existing social
movements, although tellingly the pronoun of social movements in this literature
is always a “they” and never a “we,” because the authors are disconnected from any
existing struggles. When the problem is posed as ignorance and complacency,
it means that all theorists need to do is theorize, and that we need not leave
the computer or the classroom. Zombie intellectualism is the latest trend in the
academic left ’s long history of armchair analysis.
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