The Pedagogics of Unlearning

Intellectual emancipation is not about learning or unlearning. It is about equality or inequality. It wages war against the explanatory system which equates the unfolding of time with the reproduction of inequality. Its proper task consists in un-explaining. This task is more urgent and more difficult than ever in a world where the explanatory logic has become the core of social domination.

The standard narrative of the “neoliberal university” contains an important blind spot: it fails to see that neoliberalism harbors within itself a distinct pedagogy. This paper unpacks and interrogates the pedagogics of one strand of neoliberalism – namely, Gary Becker’s Human Capital Theory. In Becker we witness – long before the forces of neoliberalism encounter the university (with its own pedagogical institutions) – a radical reworking of microeconomic theory, one that remains thoroughly imbricated with a theory of teaching, learning, and the school. This paper argues that efforts to resist neoliberalism require a pedagogics of unlearning in the very simple sense that any challenge to neoliberalism depends upon a prior unlearning of the neoliberal theory of education.

By way of background, the notion of “unlearning” has a strong history of critique in the field of public education, tied to Kantian Enlightenment and the overturning of self- induced forms of immaturity. I date its contemporary discussions as emerging from post war thought: for example within Adorno’s essay, “Education after Auschwitz,” within postcolonial theory of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and also to feminist pedagogy’s consciousness raising procedures. By the early nineteen seventies “unlearning racism, sexism, and homophobia” for example, was a regular feature in University classrooms. With critical pedagogy, the turn was to ideological critique and a proliferation of pedagogical orientations for liberation. Problems ensued and literary theorists such as Shoshanna Felman’s, Barbara Johnson, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick renewed discussion on the question of learning with Lacanian, Kleinian, and Freudian theories that considered the status of the unconscious and its symptoms of learning and not learning.

This paper discusses the writing block as opening a particular configuration of the difficulty of unlearning the repetition compulsion, itself a quality of writing and a means for its working through. Thus from the vantage of the emotional situation of the writing block my paper explores a psychoanalytic reconsideration of pernicious unlearning. My hunch is that people come to the university to have one. I first ask why reading for anxiety matters for understanding what happens affectively while trying to write. This will take us into more discussion on manifest and latent anxiety through examples from writers and psychoanalysts of the object relation theory, who articulate and disperse their feelings about writing as they write. From there, I trace a third path with the idea that one can write one’s way into and out of anxiety provided that we link the dynamics of writing to a constellation of libidinal conflicts that bring to the fore matters of loyalty, affiliation, ideality, separation, and finding one’s own way.

This paper explores the conference theme ‘The Pedagogics of Unlearning’ by way of a consideration of three figures: First, ‘the ignorant schoolmaster’ as constructed by Jacques Rancière in The Ignorant Schoolmaster; second, ‘the intimate schoolmaster’, as fantasized and feared by a diverse range of theories and theorists (but attention will specifically go to this figure as he features in a key moment of poststructuralism, namely Derrida’s Dissemination); and third, ‘the ignorant sifu’, as the figure which exemplifies a strong impulse in many modern movements in approaches to martial arts, self-defence and combat training. These three figures are constructed as Joseph Jacotot, Plato/Socrates and Bruce Lee. The paper does this in order to explore an undecidability at the heart of the binary ignorance/knowledge, and in order to point out that ignorance has always been a key (even if unacknowledged) premise of the dominant textual and discourse approaches of poststructuralism, as well as to offer some reasons why we might try to unlearn some of our dominant understandings of or assumptions about the political and cultural importance of pedagogy.

In the queer punk film from 1980, Times Square directed by Alan Moyle, two teenage girls meet in the psychiatric ward of a Neurological Hospital in NYC and, sensing a shared purpose and a mutual instinct for rebellion, they shed their hospital gowns, don garbage bags and run from the hospital to become part of the discarded denizens of Times Square. Refusing all psychiatric

diagnoses of their disaffection, Pammy and Nicky, resist psychologized accounts of injury and project the injury back onto the society as a whole. They have been wounded but their wounds are not the problem, the problem lies in a racist and homophobic world that regards them and the queer worlds they inhabit as obstacles to the “safe” and “clean” version of NYC to which local politicians have committed. The film, emerging as it does on the very cusp of the AIDS crisis and just before the clean up of Times Square and at the very beginning of the Reagan years, represents a lost world of queer rebellion that instructs us now on the tactics and the cultures of revolt that were swept aside by neo-liberal discourses of respectability, responsibility and social hygiene.

This talk wants to explore (without romanticizing) with Nicky and Pammy the potential of the unsafe and the unclean. In the Patti Smith song at the core of the film Smith asks: “Should I pursue a path so twisted?/Should I crawl defeated and gifted?” Taking this terminology from “Pissing in the River” as a vocabulary for punk feminism, let’s

venture into the wild world of Times Square not to find what has been lost but to unlearn the lessons of compliance that are nested within all discourses of improvement, recovery and health.

In this free-wheeling back-and-forth conversation (or, rhizomatic duo-logue), Fradenburg and Joy investigate the multiple valences and traces of the terms “learning” and “unlearning,” while also bringing those terms into contact with psychoanalytic theory, discontinuist temporalities, autopoiesis, living (biological) process, ethology, intersubjectivity, attachment and affect, ecological thought, radical doubt (and hope), the Real, “holding” environments, politics, neoliberalism, the ethics of care, institutionality, creatureliness, failure, mourning, and yearning.