This paper explores the continuing relevance to education of ideas about art and resistance that Jean-François Lyotard signalled in his curated exhibition in 1985 at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris entitled Les Immatériaux. The exhibition was for Lyotard the ‘staging’ of a resistance at the dawning of an information age that challenged the prioritisation of computerised ‘data’ through the very deconstruction of data as presented in artistic form. While the implications of this event for art exhibitions are still being (...) theorised and debated, it is the insight Les Immat​ériaux provides as pedagogical encounter that is the focus of this article. The paper explores the exhibition in the context of the immateriality of art and develops this argument towards a notion of artistic testimony that then culminates in an analysis for the pedagogical significance of the exhibition in the information drenched, highly networked context of contemporary education. (shrink)

Educational resistance is, here, examined in two of its possible inflections. First, as resistance to educational imposition. Second, as a form of resistance which might itself be educational. Jean-François Lyotard's reflections on 'anamnesic resistance' are developed in the context of educational thought, and then read up against proposals for philosophically informed educational reform by Bernard Stiegler. Stiegler's approach, based in part on a critique of Lyotard, is called in to question, both in terms of its reading of Lyotard and the (...) impositional educational logic it follows. Additionally, this article incorporates a novel application of a practice-as research methodology, in aid of illuminating and exemplifying the central dimensions of its argument, utilising sound as a means of philosophical research and 'anamnesic resistance'. (shrink)

Paulo Freire consistently upheld humanization and mutuality as educational ideals. This article argues that conceptualizations of knowledge and how knowledge is sought and produced play a role in fostering humanization and mutuality in educational contexts. Drawing on Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, this article focuses on the two central characters who ‘ardently’ pursue knowledge at all costs. It will be argued that the text suggests two possible outcomes from the pursuit of knowledge. One is mutuality; the other is social disconnectedness.

What is the place of philosophy in the study of education? What is its significance for policy and practice? This paper begins by considering the policy and institutional context of the philosophy of education in the UK and by tracing its recent history. It examines both the place of philosophy in Education (as a field of study) and the status and character of the philosophy of education in relation to the 'parent' discipline of philosophy. Rival accounts of the nature of (...) the philosophy of education are outlined, in such a way as to acknowledge the importance of conceptual analytical approaches, but also to stress the value of a wider, more inclusive characterization. In the light of these, examples are offered to illustrate the role the subject must have in the understanding and improvement of educational policy and practice. Reference is primarily to the UK context, but the manner in which fundamental questions are addressed makes clear their much wider relevance and importance. (shrink)

Education lies at the heart of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR): ‘Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms’. However, when education is mentioned in the philosophical literature on human rights, or even within the literature on educational policy, it is usually within the context of its being treated as a specific right—as education as a human right rather than human rights education. (...) Taking rights and obligations to be intimately tied within a full human rights educational regime, I argue for the role of education in establishing and realizing freedom from poverty as a human right. The arguments for why this freedom should be considered a human right are compelling. I offer five educational moments in the human rights movement in general, and the arguments for freedom from poverty as a human right, more specifically, in my discussion of human rights education. (shrink)

The theme of childhood and education in Lyotard’s philosophy provides an interesting field of reflection combining education studies and continental philosophy. Childhood in Lyotard’s thought is mostly understood as infantia, a concept that appears towards the end of his work. The claim of this article is that childhood in Lyotard’s philosophy cannot be reduced to the late concept of infantia; looking at the recurring nature of this theme in his writings that is present from the beginning, as well as various (...) figures under which it appears, pushes Lyotard’s readers to reconsider his work from a pluralist and interdisciplinary perspective. (shrink)

This paper explores the theme of education and the posthuman from the perspective of French philosophy. It addresses a crisis in eduction today identified by Michel Serres: now that knowledge is widely and freely accessible through information technologies, what is the purpose of education? A response is developed through three conceptual terms prefixed with ‘post’: the postmodern, the posthuman, and through the proposed idea of ‘postinformation.’ The background to the problem is sketched in terms of the ‘postmodern,’ with reference to (...) Lyotard’s influential The Postmodern Condition. A theory of the posthuman, which synthesises Stiegler’s ‘exorganism’ and Floridi’s ‘inforg’, is then sketched in response to Serres’ question of who the subject of education is today. The response to the crisis the paper proposes is that the purpose of education today is not to transmit information, but to help shape posthuman subjects able to process it effectively. This means helping them to learn how to navigate the complex informational networks we now inhabit so that they are able to flourish. The concept of postinformation is designed to help facilitate this educational shift in perspective. Postinformation concerns not just informational content, but the constitutive function of information and information technologies. (shrink)

This article explores how Jean François Lyotard reflects on affect as unrepresentable in relation to contemporary affect theory and specifically post-Deleuzian perspectives and non-representational theories suggesting that we need to invent new theoretical ways of addressing our more-than-textual, multisensual worlds. The essay leans on this conversation to make a political and pedagogical intervention into the terrain of addressing affect in the classroom. It is discussed how Lyotard adds his own contribution to the work of other affect theorists, who are not (...) saying that if we find the right vehicle—literature, art, etc.—we can translate or represent affect, but rather that pedagogy is itself always already an affective event that exceeds representation. Pedagogies of ineffability, as it argued, are those pedagogical practices that do not fall pray into the rhetorics of standardization and homogenization in the name of ‘emotional intelligence’ or ‘effectiveness’, but rather invent affective spaces of learning in which educators and students are opened precariously to the unknown. (shrink)

The origins of philosophy of education as a discipline are relatively late, and can be traced in the Anglo-American academic world from the 1960s and a specific emphasis on conceptual problems deriving from the analytical tradition of philosophy. In more recent years, however, there has been a notable ‘Continentalist’ turn in the discipline, leading to a re-evaluation of key texts and philosophers from the French and German traditions and their relation to the discourse of education. One paradigmatic example here is (...) the work of the French postmodernist thinker Jean-Francois Lyotard. In this essay, I explore how Lyotard’s powerful critique of education in his early work, especially with regard to his influence on the May ‘68 events at Nanterre University, can be seen as crucially important, now again, to a current crisis in educational philosophy in the Western world. Moreover, Lyotard’s post-’68 work, with his paradigmatic The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge as especially important, can be seen as providing a very challenging riposte to both ‘managerialist’ and instrumentalist philosophies on the one side but also to overly simplistic ‘liberatory’ educational critiques on the other side. (shrink)