Education and Event: Thinking Radical Pedagogy in the Era of Standardization

Daniel Cho and Tyson Lewis

University of California, Los Angeles ABSTRACT

Introduction: Badiou with Freire Descartes and Rousseau stand as the two pillars of Enlightenment Reason, but they also share something else in common, namely, they are representatives for two differing concepts of philosophy: Descartes for theoretical and Rousseau for practical philosophy. Though Descartes and Rousseau share an elevated symbolic status, the method they both outline for their respective philosophical traditions are fundamentally opposed: for Descartes, the philosophers task is to isolate himself in his room and contemplate the world removed from sensual entrapments, while, for Rousseau, philosophy is primarily experiential, and as such, the philosopher must be fully immersed in the natural world. Because of this philosophical schism, Rousseau became the founding gure in educational discourse while Descartes writings remained rmly positioned within the eld of philosophical inquiry. Perhaps, today the two gures that stand for revolutionary thought in contemporary philosophy and education are Alain Badiou and Paulo Freire: Badiou for his remarkable work on the subject as a delity to a truth-event, and Freire for his theory of education as a political practice. But, here, the relationship between Badiou and Freire is an exact reversal of Descartes and Rousseau: though Badiou and Freire remain fundamentally apart in regards to their respective theories of the subject (for Badiou, subject is a subject of truth, and for Freire, subject as subject of dialogic praxis), they remain strikingly similar in their concepts of education, namely, both Badiou and Freire envision education as a revolutionary space. Whereas for Badiou (2000), educations practice is to organize knowledge to the extent that a certain truth can break through ( p. 61), for Freire (1970), education is a praxis for the transformation of oppressive relations. Where, then, do we stand today in relation to Badiou and Freires complementary theses on education, especially, during a time when standardization is the dominant mode of education in late capitalism? If we assume Badiou and Freires denition of education, it is clear that education within its current onedimensional, standardized form is not education at all but rather the foreclosure of education since it is denied its most radical and revolutionary dimension. Thus the central problematic facing both Freire and Badiou becomes clear. First, for Badiou, if education is, indeed, organizing knowledge for a breakthrough of truth, then it is already engaged in the project of truthwhat then is the passage from a technocratic, administered education (like we have today in the US) to education as a project of truth? Second, for Freire, if education is a space where students are subjectivized by a transformative praxis, then that transformative space must already be internal to education itselfwhere then is the necessary break within the prevalent objectivity of contemporary schooling practices through which such transformation could effectively take place? Is the only path left for education to be that of standardization? One possible response to this question is constructivism, or what we will call a pedagogy of play. Here educational theorists encourage students to construct their own meaning(s) from existing curricula and/ or their experiences with the world. Such theories of creative play seem to always deny the ideological mediations that structure the very frame of these playfully creative acts. Furthermore, such encouragement of playful creation of meaning deniesif not explicitly, then, at the very lest, implicitlythe existence of Truth. Is such a stance not similar to that accid form of postmodern relativism and solipsism?
Studies in Media & Information Literacy Education, Volume 5, Issue 2 (May 2005), 1 11 # University of Toronto Press. DOI: 10.3138/sim.5.2.001

Is the ludic postmodern pedagogy of play and affect the only other viable alternative to the standardization movement? Part of the difculty in investigating such questions it the very structure of late capitalism in which education is found. By this we do not only mean that education simply exists in a time of global capital, but also that education itself aims at supplying this economic structure with the kinds of skilled labor it necessitatesno matter how loosely we choose to dene those skills. On the one hand, late capitalism offers ever-increasing amounts of commodities, and likewise, its educational system offers a pedagogical logic that entertains creative displays of meaning making. On the other hand, late capitalism gives itself the appearance that no other systems are possible, and therefore, its logic deploys the standardization of the life-world itself. It also follows that its education would be underwritten by a standardized logic this is most clearly the case today. With his philosophy of the event, Badious project can be understood as working within this precise contradiction. What Badiou offers in his notion of the event is a way to shatter the deadlock of late capitalism through the short-circuiting of the very frame that structures the deadlock itself. In an unpublished lecture, Badiou (2003) framed his question this way: The question is not whether possibilities are possible but is there the possibility for new possibilities? The difference between these two options is critically important. In the rst questionAre possibilities possible?existing possibilities are found within the frame itself, while in the secondAre new possibilities possible?a restructuring of the very frame of possibilities opens up beyond the closure of the present moment. Badious answer to this second question is an emphatic yes; for him, the event demarcates just this possibility. In this sense, the event is not a spectacle; rather, the event simply demarcates the excess necessary to transform any person into a subject of the truth that the event articulates. Badiou believes that the event can take place in the areas of art, science, love, and politics. In each area, the work of the event is the same: it forces the subject to articulate a new way of being; i.e. to create new possibilities. So, regarding the deadlock education nds itself in: we must insist that an event enables a breakage from both standardization and play by revealing that new possibilities are possible. But as we also claimed, the relation of education and event has not yet been fully thought through by either Badiou or Freire. In delity to both the projects of Badiou and Freire, we must resist the notion of education as it exists within the pedagogical logic of late capitalism by pointing out this deadlock that exists within their discourses, and then theorizing the possibility of new possibilitiesthis we will call the pedagogical event. Deterritorializations and Reterritorializations in Postmodern Education The cultural logic of late capitalism is, for Fredric Jameson (1995), postmodernism. While postmodernism is in and of itself a difcult if not impossible concept to formalize, Jameson does provide the reader with a cognitive mapping of its general contours, which include an innite play of supercial features, an implosion of the real and the illusory, a waning of affect, and a particularly schizophrenic psyche. Such cultural and political mutations exist for Jameson against a backdrop of the global capitalist system, which acts as the motor for producing these subjective effects. Here we are concerned with how accurate Jamesons denition of the postmodern is for understanding the two sides of the pedagogical coin described above: play and standardization. The immediate feature that strikes Jameson is the atness, depthlessness and superciality of postmodern culture. The sign has lost history and/or human psychology as a referent, producing a glossy, impenetrable surface of innite intertextuality. As such it becomes increasingly impossible to think historically, and history is transformed into our imaginary and nostalgic fantasy of the pastthe result of which is a Disney effect where colonialism is sanitized into the Huck Fin amusement ride. Here, history is to be consumed as a product, as a prefabricated and safe consumer good that does not challenge the present so much as it legitimates the collective fantasy of the American past from the distinct vantage point of capitalist ideology.
Studies in Media & Information Literacy Education, Volume 5, Issue 2 (May 2005), 1 11 # University of Toronto Press. DOI: 10.3138/sim.5.2.001

Furthermore, there has been an implosion of the real and the illusory (Baudrillard, 1994), generating a stream of pop-cultural simulacra such as Reality TV shows. In such shows as Survivor or The Apprentice, reality is transformed into hyper-reality via the glossy, stylized sheen of a soap opera aesthetic that sells itself as more real than real. In the political realm, campaigns are increasingly scripted according to Hollywood movie plot lines (Kellner, 2003), and the politicians themselves are no more than mere simulations. The recent election of Arnold Swarzenegger as the governor of California in 2003 demonstrates the power of the media to produce profound political effects. Citizens were not so much electing Arnold as they were his super-hero, on-screen persona. In this case, politics becomes spectatorship and the role of the voter implodes with the role of the lm audience. Accompanying the slow dissolve of history and the murky blurring between the real and the simulation is the waning of affect (Jameson, 1995, p. 10). Emotion and subjectivity (such as the modernist feeling of alienation) evaporate from the postmodern sign, and in its place we are left with a dead, lifeless, reied commodity accompanied by free-oating intensities that explode within a series of perpetual and instantaneous moments. Thus we enter the disposable world of fast-food, the 15 minute work out, the thought of the day, and other time-space accelerations. Americans are constantly barraged by an unrelenting stream of intensities that fade almost as quickly as they appear thus giving us this age of extremes: extreme sport, extreme television, extreme sex, etc. Jameson (1995) describes this peculiar phenomena known as postmodernism as particularly schizophrenic ( p. 26)a logic predicated on heterogeneity, fragmentation, multiplicity, and de-centeredness. The results of this fragmentation are a profound sense of rudderless action without direction, disoriented wandering without orientation, and political action without a sense of agency or collective momentum. Thus we witness the death of the meta-narrative of liberation and the institution of postmodern identity politics that lack reference to universal struggle. In short, the dance of differences and the indulgence in consumerism and play are, for Jameson, determined in the last instance by the homogenizing reach of late capitalism. As such, rhizomatic ows of desires, political relativism via identity politics, the seductive nature of the simulacrum, and the death of history are all unleashed through capitalist production and cannot function as resources in a socialist struggle for radical social, political, or economic change. In the world of media conglomeration, the logic of late capitalism is certainly at work. While there has been a massive expansion of new cable channels and cable networkscatering to every possible subculture while simultaneously inventing new subculturesthis seemingly innite expansion is predicated on an equally fast paced media consolidation. Thus the very system giving us access to a world of freedom through the consumption of signs and media codes also standardizes, centralizes, and polices the very production of these freedoms in accordance with stock market values and corporate interests. Thus the construction of new desires and new subcultures expands the scope of the media market, producing new consumers and new loyal viewers whose cultural identities are sustained through consumption. Most often, the analysis of the postmodern condition in educational discourse has focused on a shift away from Marxist pedagogy towards a postmodern pedagogy of affect or of ludic play (McLaren, 2000; Zavarzadeh, 2003). According to Masud Zavarzadeh and Donald Morton (1994), capitalism functions through this postmodern classroom in order to produce subjects who think of themselves as being in control of their own actions, as masters of their own destinies, as the source of their own social valuesin short, as sovereign subjects ( p. 10). The pedagogy of affect values the perpetual and indeterminate play of difference and champions the autonomous, creative, and entrepreneurial subject who produces his/her own meaning through novel readings of texts. This particular subject, as Zavarzadeh and Morton argue, is not so much antithetical to capital as it is capitals necessary agent: the transnational corporate manager capable of adapting to a variety of situations through innovation and creative solutions. Thus liberalized forms of ludic postmodern education manufacture the subjectivity through which capitalism operates within the global sphere. Paula Allman (2001) agrees that the relativism, the (uncritical) celebration of diversity, and the pedagogy of play found within such

Studies in Media & Information Literacy Education, Volume 5, Issue 2 (May 2005), 1 11 # University of Toronto Press. DOI: 10.3138/sim.5.2.001

classrooms are particularly detrimental to a socialist struggle in moments when capitalism is in crisis mode. In terms of school reform, Michael Apple and Geoff Whitty (2002) demonstrate that school policy changes in England under the New Right have resulted in a supercially postmodern paradigm that does not so much as produce educational equity as it reproduces structural inequalities between classes. In short, these critics follow Jamesons lead, and argue that the institutionalization of postmodern themes, such as the exible self, relativity, and ludic play are the necessary pedagogical supplements to the transnational behemoth of late capitalism. Yet this critique of postmodernism is rarely, if ever, applied to a critique of the recent standardization movement in United States educational policy. While on the one hand, standardization appears to be a modernist trope, we would argue that current standardization in the U.S. is articulated through a decisively postmodern cultural logic. The point that must be emphasized is how this conservative movement of standardization is the spectral supplement for late capitalisms liberal postmodern logic of difference, and as such, it is not in the ludic classroom where we see the true cultural logic of late capitalism but rather in the No Child Left Behind (2000) national policy of George W. Bush. Returning to Jamesons original diagnostic analysis of the postmodern condition, we begin to see startling similarities between the cultural logic of late capitalism and the move towards nationally implemented accountability standards. Standardization abstracts knowledge from its concrete position within the totality of social relations. Knowledge becomes a series of discrete skill sets and fractional units loosely held together by nothing more than the supercial formalization of the test itself. Through standardization knowledge is sand blasted from the strata of historical overdetermination, becoming a commodity, a pure reied object whose only function is to pass the test. As such, facts become free oating signiers detached from the material relations of history. Like Warhols dead, lifeless, and inert Diamond Dust Shoes, (Jameson, 1995) so too knowledge under standardization looses historical depth. Thus, the only function of knowledge (as data) is to be memorized and regurgitated like mental excrement. Teaching itself has also undergone standardization. In the pure logic of standardization, affect is an obstacle to be overcome. Pedagogy is divorced of its libidinal component and in turn is reduced to an emotionless ritual performance. In this sense, pedagogy as a psychological, intersubjective relationship mutates into a postmodern simulacra, a one-dimensional set of procedures that simulate teaching through a series of prefabricated curricula and pedagogical codes, which are determined through centralized authorities. The relationship between student and teacher is xed into a prescripted binary pair where the teacher is the one-who-knows and the student is the one-who-learns. Affect in the classroom is the enemy of efciency, and thus there is a decisive waning effect at work within the oppressive testing regime of standardization. In short the true dialectical negation of the logic of postmodern pedagogies are not found internal to it, but rather, in the gure of standardization, a background of sameness against which differences emerge. As Slavoj Zizek (2002) forcefully writes, . . .philosophers as different as Alain Badiou and Fredric Jameson have pointed out, apropos of todays multiculturalist celebration of the diversity of lifestyles, how this thriving of differences relies on an underlying One: on the radical obliteration of Difference, of the antagonistic gap. ( p. 238) So, the pedagogical logic of late capitalism has two faces: on the one hand, late capitals rhizomatic ows are institutionalized through the liberal pedagogy of play, and on the other hand there is the conservative standardization movement, which attempts to contain this ow through No Child Left Behind. As Deleuze and Guattari (1983) would say, late capitalism is a schizophrenic economic system that simultaneously deterritorializes capitalist expansion and at the same time reterritorializes this rhizomatic extension through state, family, or educational intervention. By recognizing innite plays opposite in standardization we now see why the Deleuzian strategy of schizophrenization does not elude the logic of capital: the bedrock of a One (i.e. standardization) is what enables the innitization of capitals

Studies in Media & Information Literacy Education, Volume 5, Issue 2 (May 2005), 1 11 # University of Toronto Press. DOI: 10.3138/sim.5.2.001

deterritorializing/reterritorializing logic, and as such, unless the underlying logic of the One is transformed, schizophernization alone is ineffective. This dialectical pair of standardization/innitization is not only visible in education. Take our example of media conglomeration: is it not clear that the innity of differences and choices exists in relation to rigid sameness of the Big-Four media conglomerates, which the takeover of Disney by Comcast only accentuates? And returning to Reality TV: underlying all the different versions of Reality programming is the commodity fetish witnessed in how each show revolves around the grand prize of one-million dollars. In this paradoxical cultural logic, the ludic classroom does not explode the logic of standardization, but rather, depends upon it. Applying Jamesons theory of postmodernism (2004) to the classroom, we argue that this double bind within educational discourse demonstrates our collective inability to imagine radical difference outside of the schizophrenic social relations of late capitalism. Any utopian component found within the pedagogy of play (creative, spontaneous labor) or the pedagogy of standardization (educational equity) is bounded by the ideology of late capitalism, and in order to actualize itself, must be de-coupled from both terms. To break out of this deadlock what we should focus on is exactly that which is excluded from both sides of late capitalisms pedagogical logic, namely, the very possibility of a break with this logic altogether. What is denied, then, by both is the possibility of new possibilities in education or, to use Badious language, the horizon of the event. The Event Before subjects are composed, for Badiou, only some-ones exist in any given situation. These someones are humans in their animality, which, for Badiou, means that people exist in their species-being (i.e. animality) and are not yet subjects to any event. For this some-one to become subjectivized, he/she needs the help of a supplement: the event. Or put in the opposite way: returning to Badious question of possibility for new possibilities, in any given situation the possibility that exists is simply what is, and the operator of the permutations of what exists is simply a some-one, or an any-one. For this situation of what is to become a new open space (i.e. the existence of the possibility for new possibilities), this new possibility cannot be an articulation of the given choices. As such, the some-one, who knows only what is, cannot be the operator of this new possibility. But neither can this operator be totally removed from the situation (Badiou has many names for this outside position, two of which are mystics position, (Badiou, 2003) and the angels position (Badiou, 1996). Instead, the operator for this new is precisely the some-one with the supplement of the event. In his important book, Ethics (Badiou, 2002), (an event in its own right), Badiou writes, Let us say that a subject, which goes beyond the animal (although the animal remains its sole foundation [support]) needs something to have happened, something that cannot be reduced to its ordinary inscription in what there is. Let us call this supplement an event, ( p. 41, original emphasis) Most concisely put: an event is what structures the truth that at the center of every situation is a void. Here, the inuence of Lacanian psychoanalysis can be seen: the Badiouian void at the center of every situation is akin to Lacans notion of the Realthe impossible internal limit to the Symbolic order. To illustrate this concept of void, observe how void differentiates Knowledge from Truth: in todays order of late capitalism, the symptomatic expressions of capitals internal contradictions, i.e. destruction of global ecology, the displacement of the worker to the, so-called, Third World, the crisis of sustainability, etc., are not glitches in the Matrix (to use a pop-cultural example), but rather, the necessary results of the late capitals structure. On the side of Knowledge: the expressions of contradictions are mere correctable glitches, and all that is deemed necessary is to nd the further knowledge that might correct them. But on the side of Truth: these contradictions are the articulation of the void of the situation, i.e. the disavowed Real at the very heart of capitalism itself; these contradictions are the Truth of capital. Simply put, the operative ideology of capitalism sustains itself through the exclusion of the Truth of the situation: continued exploitation of the working class. This exclusion forms a
Studies in Media & Information Literacy Education, Volume 5, Issue 2 (May 2005), 1 11 # University of Toronto Press. DOI: 10.3138/sim.5.2.001

conspicuous void at the heart of hegemonic, bourgeois ideology, the articulation of which would be a truth-event enunciating the Real of the system and inaugurating revolutionary action against structures of exploitation. The subject then emerges from the truth-event as both its support and its product. It is this subject who, as a bearer of the truth, breaks from the current situation to articulate a new way of being. Or put another way, the subject is the one who maintains delity to the opening towards new possibilities a process of delity to the event. Here, the inuence of Lacan is most clearly seen, as Zizek (2000) writes in his commentary on Badiou, In Lacanese, an Event is objet petit a, while naming is the new signier that establishes what Rimbaud calls the New Order ( p. 141). Such events abound in the elds of politics, science, art, and love. In politics, the radical event of the October Revolution is perhaps the most dramatic (Zizek, 2000); in science, the shift from Newtonian cause-and-effect to Einsteins dynamic theory of relativism; in art, the radical interruption of Malevichs White Square on White Background (Zupancic, 2003); and in love, the effervescent feeling of all embracing transformation that accompanies the moment of loves arrival (Badiou, 2002; Cho, 2005). Yet events can also be less cataclysmic. Alenka Zupancic argues that an event can in fact be a subtle subjective shift resulting in a minimal, yet nevertheless profound, difference in our relation to our unconscious fantasy, thus opening up a new eld of possibilities (2003). All these examples share in common a signicant restructuring of a situation following a decisive rupture (an event), producing a new subject of truth. What must be guarded against is the premature closing of these events through what Lacan would refer to as the discourse of the university. The university discourse attempts to deny that such events ever happened in the rst place by reabsorbing them into a prefabricated (standardized) narrative through which the potency of the New Order is effectively gentried (Zizek, 2000, p. 163). In a time when postmodern thought and the sustaining of difference no longer stand against the order of late capitalism, but rather, have become its cultural logic, Badious theory of the truth-event presents a new way: The subject, as a subject of a truth, is no longer marked by differences, but rather, the so-many differences that constitute the some-ones are traversed by a universal truth (Badiou, 2003). Thus Badious solution does not coincide with Deleuze and Guattari who would advocate an intensication of the schizo-potential within the postmodern pedagogy of play. For Badiou, such a solution would never truly rupture the logic of capitalist expansion, and would all too easily be reabsorbed into its totalizing force. Yet how do we differentiate the universality of the truth-event from that of standardization? Before we answer this question we should clarify truth from its oppositeevil. For Badiou (2002), evil takes three forms, all of which depart from truth, or to conceptualize evil another way, all forms of evil are a betrayal of the possibility of new possibilitiesa closure of the open: simulacrum, betrayal, and disaster. First, simulacrum is the simulacrum of a truth-event by, precisely, establishing itself not upon the void of the situation but upon some other part, thereby declaring itself an event. The example there is Nazism: rather than structuring the void of the situation, the Nazi-event/simulacrum established the existence of the German destiny by giving body to the void in the form of the Jews. Second, betrayal is a givingup on a truth-event. In betrayal, the existence of a truth-event is effectively denied, thereby allowing the existing order of Knowledge to continue. And third, disaster is forcing the truth to totalize all parts of the situation. For Badiou, there always remains one part that truth remains blind to, namely, the collective itself. To be a truly open space, the collective must remain totally open, and to place a name on it would mean the exclusion of others. Here, Nazis serve as the example of evil: the naming of the collective, i.e. the Nazis, or the Aryans, is paid for by the eradication of the Jews as the excluded other of the collective. Now we see the difference between the universality of a truth-event and the logic of standardization, which through totalization of the situation of knowledge produces a distinctly educational form of evil. Rather than recognizing the void of the situation, standardization represents its effective denial. This is to say, standardization is the fantasy screen covering the event. The truth-event is a truly open space, a true universality that traverses the differences of those that are subjectivized by its appearing.
Studies in Media & Information Literacy Education, Volume 5, Issue 2 (May 2005), 1 11 # University of Toronto Press. DOI: 10.3138/sim.5.2.001

Education, or Life in a New Open What does Lacans denition for the signier as that which represents the subject for another signier, mean for education today? Take Lacans own illustration from Seminar III: The Psychoses (Lacan, 1993), that of, the day/night signifying dyad. The position of the second signier (night) is dened not on its own but by its differential position to the rst signier (day), so that in effect we only know night as the difference between night and day. So is the case with every signifying chain: in every chain of signiers, every signier in the second position (S2) derives its meaning through its difference with the Master signier (S1), which can be written with the matheme: S1 ! S2. What, then, of the rst signier? Does day derive its meaning by its difference to itself ? On the contrary, the only signier that cannot derive its meaning through its difference with day is, of course, day itself: if the Master signier ever comes into self-identity, we do not get the meaning as such, but rather, its collapse. Here, we see that what must be repressed for the signifying chain to become operative is the contingency of S1. This contingency is what the second signier (without ever being the contingency as such) represents to the Master: in the day/night chain, what night represents to day is days absence, or as Zizek (2002) puts it, night holds the place of days absence. It is this structure that Freire recognized in the dehumanizing teacher/student relationship of the banking concept of education: without ever being knowledge, the teacher holds the place of knowledge to the student, that is, the teacher occupies the position of S1, whereas, the student, without ever being the absence of knowledge, holds that position for the teacher. This is also the oversight of the pedagogues of play: play is not a radical redening of the S1 ! S2 structure of the teacher/student relationship, but merely its innitization or dialecticization. The student can occupy an innite number of positions in relation to the teacher, which amounts to the difference in knowledge dened by the students difference with the teacher (or the standards), but the student can never be self-identical with the teacher by occupying the place of the teacher. Stated differently, the moves that are permitted within the pedagogy of play are always structured by a fundamental fantasy, a primal choice, through which all subsequent choices are knitted. To put this logic in Badiouian terms: the postmodern play of difference is a realization that within the given S1 ! S2 structure of the teacher/student relationship a number of possibilities exist, but what is needed to break with this deadlock of education in late capitalismwhose two faces are standardization and the interminable play of differencesis the possibility of new possibilities. In fact, education caught within the Master/slave dialectic that informs both sides of the pedagogical coin results in the evisceration of education as suchleaving its emaciated husk, or what Alenka Zupancic would describe as postmodern nihilism (2003). For Zupancic, nihilism is dened as the will not to will rather than will nothingness (2003, p. 64). In educational terms, such nihilism amounts to schooling as a performance devoid of its educational supplement. The result is a situation frozen into a calcied ritual of repetition whose sole function is reproduction within a closed loop rather than a radical traversal into the open possibilities of the new, which, according to Badiou, is the precise function of education in the rst place. The mantra of the postmodern pedagoguetrapped by the logic of late capitalismseems to be even if the activity I engage in is not education, it is better to do this rather than to do nothing. Or stated differently, Badious notion of the possibility of new possibilities is replaced by the possibility of new nihilisms operating not in the open but in the closed circuit of the present. Does the Freirean dialogic pedagogy present to us a reconguration of this nihilistic relationship? After all, for Freire it is dialogue that transforms the object of student into the subject of student, which is the fundamental gesture of a transformative education. First we must recognize how the history of educational philosophy is based upon a signicant oversightwhat Lacan (1981) called the Piagetic Error ( p. 208): namely, what Rousseau, Dewey, and even Freire ( just to name a few) misrecognized as the natural impulse of the child towards curiosity was identied by Lacan to be a hysterical impulse to unravel the mystery of the Others desire. So, when a child asks, Why? it is not simply because he is curious as to how things in the world operate, but rather, it is the hysterical Che Vuoi? the, He is saying this to me, but what does he want? (Lacan, p. 214, 1977). Thus educators
Studies in Media & Information Literacy Education, Volume 5, Issue 2 (May 2005), 1 11 # University of Toronto Press. DOI: 10.3138/sim.5.2.001

should not conate raising critical consciousness with a students hysterical attempt to discover why the teacher is asking what he/she is asking, that is, to unlock the mystery of the teachers desire, You are asking me this question, but what do you want? What the teacher does not recognize is that the students answer is already mediated by the teachers desire, that is, the teachers voice vis-a ` -vis the teachers question is the objet athe object cause of the students desire. In a sense, this hysterical questioning which sustains the opening in the teacher is in effect the articulation of an unconscious desire for a Master! The hysterical subject pokes holes in the Master precisely because the Master is not living up to the students expectations. It is Freire, in his critique of the banking concept, who tells us that the fundamental relationship between a teacher and a student is one of disjunction insofar as knowledge, the center around which the relationship is constructed, is never whole. Knowledge, as an incomplete object is the absent center that the student represents to the teacher. Every relationship from the standardized Master/slave structure to the pedagogies of play is an attempt to postpone confronting the trauma that the teacher/student relationship is one of disjunction. To accomplish this masking, the teacher or the student regards the other to be the bearer of the missing part: with the Master/slave structure, the student represents the ignorance necessary to set knowledge transfer into motion, and with the pedagogy of play, the student represents the multitude of ways one can approach knowledge. Dialogue, then, always risks becoming the hysterical dialogue in which the teacher holds a secret relationship to the answer, the missing part of knowledge, which the student tries to uncover. Or in Lacans terms, the teachers precious object that incurs the students desire is the agalma. What lls the gap separating the teacher and student in relation to knowledge so that their dialogue appears to be the exchange of critical knowledge is the same thing that sutures the disjunctive relationship of the Master/slave and the pedagogy of play so that they appear to be processes of learning, namely, the fundamental pedagogical fantasy. Rather than interpreting the fantasy in an effort to discern what is true and what is exaggerated, the fantasy must (not so) simply be traversed. The fantasy that the other has the relationship to the missing part of knowledge must be traversed uncovering the traumatic Real of knowledge (i.e. that it is always lacking). Here, we see where the act, the traversal of the fantasy, articulates with the event: rather than seeking wholeness in the other, the event structures the truth that at the center of the teacher/student relationship is a void, that is to say, the event is the traversal of the fantasy. Stated differently, the event is what breaks the passionate attachments (Butler, 1997) to old subjectivities by rupturing its phantasmatic support. Or as Zizek puts it, this passionate disattachment of the event articulates with Lacans notion of the being in the two deaths, Zizek (2000) writes, To put it in Badious Christian terms, in order to be able to open oneself up to the life of true Eternity, one has to suspend ones attachment to this life and enter the domain of ate, the domain between the two deaths, the domain of the undead. ( p. 146) The Freirean dialogue, then, cannot structure the teacher/student relationship so that the teacher supplies the answers missing in the student nor so that the student supplies the answers missing in the teacher; but rather, it must be a pedagogical act that punctuates the truth that their relationship is disjunctive. The pedagogical act is the event that structures the truth that knowledge is not whole. Knowledge does not exist in the classroom, in the lecture, nor in a text, but as Freire reminds, knowledge arises from the inquiries we restlessly pursue in the world. To maintain that a teacher must learn something about the student or that a student must learn something about the teacher, as if knowledge is constructed from two incomplete sets of knowledge, would amount to nothing more than a resealing of the possibly open relationship of the teacher/student. Take for example the movie Antwone Fisher (Washington, 2002). Here the title character embarks on a journey of self-realization which ultimately leads him to nd his family. Fisher begins this journey as a result of a pedagogical encounter with a psychologist ( played by Denzel Washington). In this pedagogical relationship, Fisher is not interested in relating with or understanding
Studies in Media & Information Literacy Education, Volume 5, Issue 2 (May 2005), 1 11 # University of Toronto Press. DOI: 10.3138/sim.5.2.001

Washington. Rather, this relationship forces Fisher to discover himself, which turns out to be simultaneously traumatic and cathartic. But what must not be missed is how Washington, though he spends the whole movie listening to Fisher tell his story, never really learns anything about Fischer himself, but ratherand this is what is most remarkable about the lmhe learns about himself and his own weaknesses and shortcomings. As a result of this encounter both student (Fisher) and teacher (Washington) turn their existence outward towards their own social situations in order to educate themselvesabout what? Of course, about themselves (Fisher by nding his family, and Washington by becoming a better husband). Education, then, is the struggle to keep open the open teacher/student relationshipwhich is rst constructed by the event. It is the student who is subjectivized by the truth of this open, and it is this student who must articulate a new mode of being, namely, by the restless pursuit of truth in the world, to be sure, a project that transforms the world. So, when, Freire maintains that education is what transforms the object of the student into the subject of the student, he is correct, but only if we take Badious account of the subject as the subject of truth. Returning to Badious denition of education as a practice of organizing knowledge for a truth to break through, is it not the Freirean subject of the student who must be the operator of this truth-event? What is this new mode of being that is the subject of the student? Of course, it is to pursue truth in the world, that is to say, to create the conditions for events to occur in the world. Knowledge, far from being databases of facts that we acquire, is the name for this path of truth that students create in the world. In this way, education is not an event, but rather, an event of events, and education is not a truth, but a truth of truths. So, when Zizek (2003) writes, The true Openness is not that of undecidability, but that of living in the aftermath of the Event, of drawing out the consequencesof what? Precisely of the new space opened up by the Event ( p. 137). Is this not because every open existence post-event is educational in character? We must resist the temptation to claim that education only refers to those some-ones who are teachers by trade and students by occupation. Would not such a position be the result of education as a closed space? We must not miss how this closed denition of education is determined by the logic of capitalism, namely, if and only if one receives a wage, or is recognized by the State as being such, can one, then, claim to be a teacher or a student. Rather, this call to take up the subject position of student is open to all insofar as the truth of the event is a universally open truth. So, we must rehabilitate the revolutionary kernel found within the old cliche I am a student of life: insofar as being a student is to pursue truths in the world, and so the openness of being a student is living out the possibility of new possibilities. COLUMBIA ONLINE CITATION: HUMANITIES STYLE Cho, Daniel, & Lewis, Tyson. Education and Event: Thinking Radical Pedagogy in the Era of Standardization. Studies in Media & Information Literacy Education 5.2 (2005). http://www.utpress.utoronto.ca/journal/ejournals/simile (insert access date here). COLUMBIA ONLINE CITATION: SCIENTIFIC STYLE Cho, D., & Lewis, T. (2005). Education and Event: Thinking Radical Pedagogy in the Era of Standardization. Studies in Media & Information Literacy Education, 5(2). http://www.utpress.utoronto.ca/journal/ejournals/simile (insert access date here). BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE Daniel Cho is a Doctoral Candidate in the school of Education at the University of California, Los Angeles. His areas of specialization are Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory Mr. Chos research interests include deploying Lacanian psychoanalysis for studying the pedagogical implications of culture. His most recent publications are Lessons of Love: Psychoanalysis and Teacher-Student Love, Educational Theory, 55(1), 79-95, and Teaching Abjection: A Response to the War on Terror, Teaching Education, 16(2) (in press). Tyson Lewis is a Doctoral Candidate in the school of Education at the University of California, Los Angeles. His areas of specialization are Cultural Studies and Critical Theory.
Studies in Media & Information Literacy Education, Volume 5, Issue 2 (May 2005), 1 11 # University of Toronto Press. DOI: 10.3138/sim.5.2.001

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His current research interests include the application of historical materialism, psychoanalysis, and postmodernist theory to the understanding of a variety of educational issues including the ideology of normalcy and the relationship between school surveillance, prisons, and the medical clinic. AUTHOR CONTACT INFORMATION Daniel Cho University of California, Los Angeles 361 W. California Ave., #8 Glendale, CA 91203 Telephone: 818-507-9610 E-mail: dcho@1177@yahoo.com Tyson Lewis University of California, Los Angeles 1030 Tiverton Ave., #208 Los Angeles, CA 90024 Phone: 310-443-1906 Email: aspendowning@hotmail.com References
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Zavarzadeh, M. U. (2003). The pedagogy of totality. jac, 23(1), 153. Zavarzadeh, M. U., & Morton, D. (1994). Theory as resistance. New York: Guilford. Zizek, S. (2000). The ticklish subject: The absent centre of political ontology. New York: Verso. Zizek, S. (2002). Did somebody say totalitarianism? Five interventions in the (mis)use of a notion. New York: Verso. Zizek, S. (2002). For they know not what they do: Enjoyment as a political factor. New York: Verso. Zizek, S. (2003). The puppet and the dwarf: The perverse core of christianity. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. Zupancic, A. (2003). The shortest shadow: Nietzsches philosophy of the two. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Studies in Media & Information Literacy Education, Volume 5, Issue 2 (May 2005), 1 11 # University of Toronto Press. DOI: 10.3138/sim.5.2.001