Noah De Lissovoy

Educational 'accountability' and the violence of capital: a Marxian reading

This article investigates the accountability movement in education in order to discover its meaning within contemporary capitalism. It demonstrates how trends in educational accountability reify the consciousness and creativity of students into simple scores and indices according to a logic of commodification, as well as reinforcing white supremacist ideology by portraying neocolonial representations of student accomplishment and potential as neutral and objective. This movements participation in bourgeois traditions of juridical reason is also explored, according to which students are constructed as always in debt to the state and as such subject to an increasing intensification of discipline and punishment. It argues that an attentiveness to the violence of these trends can help to understand what is distinctive in the current moment in global capitalism, as well as indicating the importance of conceptualizing this system as organizing processes of exploitation in the subjective as well as the economic registers.

Decolonial pedagogy and the ethics of the global

An ethical and democratic globality, and the kind of education that would contribute to it, are only possible in the context of a recognition of the relations of power that have shaped history, and in particular the political, cultural, economic, and epistemological processes of domination that have characterized colonialism and Eurocentrism. Imagining an ethics of the global in this context means articulating a decolonial perspective. Starting from recent work in philosophy and cultural studies, this paper describes key principles of such an orientation to globality, and develops a reconceptualization of education in the context of this framework. The article proposes in particular a curriculum against domination, oriented against the epistemic and cultural violence of Eurocentrism that underlies the politics of content and knowledge in education, and a pedagogy of lovingness, committed to building global solidarity based on non-dominative principles of coexistence and kindredness.An ethical and democratic globality, and the kind of education that would contribute to it, are only possible in the context of a recognition of the relations of power that have shaped history, and in particular the political, cultural, economic, and epistemological processes of domination that have characterized colonialism and Eurocentrism. Imagining an ethics of the global in this context means articulating a decolonial perspective. Starting from recent work in philosophy and cultural studies, this paper describes key principles of such an orientation to globality, and develops a reconceptualization of education in the context of this framework. The article proposes in particular a curriculum against domination, oriented against the epistemic and cultural violence of Eurocentrism that underlies the politics of content and knowledge in education, and a pedagogy of lovingness, committed to building global solidarity based on non-dominative principles of coexistence and kindredness.

Pedagogy in Common: Democratic education in the global era

In the context of the increasingly transnational organization of society, culture, and communication, this article develops a conceptualization of the global common as a basic condition of interrelation and shared experience, and describes contemporary political efforts to fully democratize this condition. The article demonstrates the implications for curriculum and teaching of this project, describing in particular the importance of fundamentally challenging the interpellation of students as subjects of the nation, and the necessity for new and radically collaborative forms of political and pedagogical authority that can more powerfully realize the imaginative potential of educators and students alike as global democratic actors. In this effort, familiar progressive educational ideas (e.g. the importance of the continuity of the curriculum, and the meaning and purpose of experimentalism) are interrogated and rearticulated. The article concludes with a discussion of the unique ways in which education can contribute to constructing a democratic society in the global era, and how the central aspects of such a pedagogy in common can also suggest essential principles for the organization of social movements in this context.

Education and violation: conceptualizing power, domination, and agency in the hidden curriculum

This article offers a theory of a process of violation that connects macropolitical effects to the intimate terrain of subject production. I describe power, as violation, in terms of a simultaneous process of construction and destruction, which seeks its satisfaction in an injury to the very identities it is complicit in producing. Starting from analyses of power and racism in the historical Black radical tradition, and in particular the work of W.E.B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon, and in contrast to prevailing conceptualizations in critical and poststructuralist theory, I describe violation as active and motivated rather than the mere by-product of a more fundamental imperative of reproduction or normalization. This analysis foregrounds the continuous process of assault that characterizes the hidden curriculum of schooling for students of color and other marginalized students, particularly with regard to the contemporary clinical and academic discourses that work to name, know, and organize identities. I argue that the pathologization of student selves by these discourses is a more complex process than the simple circulation of norms, and that this process is always characterized by a simultaneous struggle for resistance and survival. The article describes the ways in which critical theory in education will need to become more sensitive not only to the logic of violation and to the modes of domination that it sets in motion, but also to the persistent integrity and agency of those whom it seeks to subjugate.This article offers a theory of a process of violation that connects macropolitical effects to the intimate terrain of subject production. I describe power, as violation, in terms of a simultaneous process of construction and destruction, which seeks its satisfaction in an injury to the very identities it is complicit in producing. Starting from analyses of power and racism in the historical Black radical tradition, and in particular the work of W.E.B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon, and in contrast to prevailing conceptualizations in critical and poststructuralist theory, I describe violation as active and motivated rather than the mere by-product of a more fundamental imperative of reproduction or normalization. This analysis foregrounds the continuous process of assault that characterizes the hidden curriculum of schooling for students of color and other marginalized students, particularly with regard to the contemporary clinical and academic discourses that work to name, know, and organize identities. I arg...

Economies of Racism: Grounding Education Policy Research in the Complex Dialectic of Race, Class, and Capital.

The intent of this paper is to interrogate the current theoretical discourse in education concerning issues of race and class. The authors maintain that in recent years educational theory and critical policy discourse have unintentionally become splintered in such a way that race and class theories are employed separately, without much analysis of the concomitant ways race and racism are both embedded in and productive of the material processes of production and exploitation that characterize capitalism. The authors propose the framework of economies of racism to make sense of the complex unity that brings white supremacy and capitalist accumulation together in a single dialectic. Drawing from recent work on race and class in critical social theory, the authors first make their case for the theory and formulation of economies of racism in society and education, and follow this with an analysis of current educational policy research via the theoretical lenses posited through this dialectical framework.

Staging the Crisis: Teaching, Capital, and the Politics of the Subject

Abstract This article proposes a philosophical reconstruction of the subject of the educator as the agent of curriculum. Starting from recent work in critical theory and philosophy, it describes the process of the existential crisis of the educator as the first step toward a truly critical education. The article argues that philosophy of curriculum must be concerned not just with forms of thought but also with forms of being—with the very ground of the subject and its real. This political ontology of the subject suggests a process of reconstruction consisting of several stages: the disclosure of ideology and complicity, the investigation of the process of interpellation, and the creation of a fundamentally collective educational practice. It is only on the basis of the effective staging of this crisis at the heart of the teaching subject that a meaningful critical pedagogy and curriculum can be articulated. The article concludes with a description of the outlines of such a critical education, as they emerge through the process of reconstruction described above.

Conceptualizing the Carceral Turn: Neoliberalism, Racism, and Violation

This article considers the turn to punishment in neoliberalism, and the hardening it marks in the criminal justice system, education, and public life. Examining tensions between neoliberalism’s doctrine of equality before the market and its actual reproduction of racial disparities, I specify a concept of violation, as a principle of both material and symbolic domination, that can respond to these tensions. Considering influential analyses of the turn toward punishment, I argue that the historic legacy of racism is a crucial determinant of the excesses of current regimes of penality, and that racialized repression figures in a contemporary recomposition of political economy. Furthermore, in the neoliberal moment the disciplinary repertoire of racism is extrapolated to new populations and terrains. I recontextualize the current carceral turn within a broader logic of violation that links moments of social production and decomposition, and fuses processes of material exploitation with racialized injury and ...This article considers the turn to punishment in neoliberalism, and the hardening it marks in the criminal justice system, education, and public life. Examining tensions between neoliberalism’s doctrine of equality before the market and its actual reproduction of racial disparities, I specify a concept of violation, as a principle of both material and symbolic domination, that can respond to these tensions. Considering influential analyses of the turn toward punishment, I argue that the historic legacy of racism is a crucial determinant of the excesses of current regimes of penality, and that racialized repression figures in a contemporary recomposition of political economy. Furthermore, in the neoliberal moment the disciplinary repertoire of racism is extrapolated to new populations and terrains. I recontextualize the current carceral turn within a broader logic of violation that links moments of social production and decomposition, and fuses processes of material exploitation with racialized injury and subjection.

Pedagogy of the Impossible: Neoliberalism and the Ideology of Accountability:

This article analyzes the ideology of accountability in contemporary education within the context of neoliberalism and its reconstruction of social relationships on the basis of the market, competition and efficiency. Drawing on contemporary critical philosophical accounts, it argues that the scholarship on education and accountability has not fully registered the way that ideology in neoliberalism works through modes of fantasy and enclosure, inhering not only in perspectives and understandings, but also in procedures, rituals and structures of subjectivity. Analyzing the political logic of test-based accountability, and taking up several specific examples of its reorganization of curriculum and assessment, the article challenges the tendency within educational theory to understand ideology in education according to the Gramscian model of hegemony and proposes a reconceptualization of accountabilitys ideological effects. In particular, it shows that the tradition of understanding ideology in schooling in terms of the production of ‘common sense’ overlooks the ideological force in contemporary education of the procedures themselves of standardized assessment and scripted curriculum. The article concludes with a consideration of the implications of this analysis for critical teaching in the context of the constraints created by test-based accountability systems.

Rethinking Education and Emancipation

In an inhuman world, the problem of education is the problem of articulating a human voice against the machineries of violence visited persistently upon persons— a voice against the truth of power, the dead and finished truth of what is decided, the truth of the inert and incontrovertible. The problem of education is the problem of unwinding the human body and soul from this intricate clockwork of not merely the correct and commendable but also the apparently self-evident and inevitable. It is the problem of rescuing being from what is, a what is that has conquered every other possibility to give itself the status of fact and truth. This what is is not just an apparatus of painful training; it is a machine of assimilation and destruction. The prior chapters have described the outlines of this system. The experiences that theorists have identified variously as exploitation, marginalization, and normalization should not be fought over as to their priority, since they all participate in the same process. They represent the various modes of an assault on the human by power and the reality that power has assembled for itself.1 The exposure of and challenge to this violence is the real problem of education.

Race, Reason and Reasonableness: Toward an “Unreasonable” Pedagogy

Starting from the contemporary critical-theoretical notion of an objective violence that organizes social reality in capitalism, including processes of systemic racism, as well as from phenomenological inquiries into processes of race and identity, this article explores the relationship between racism and reasonableness in education and society. The category of the reasonable connects the content of particular propositions with the inner truth of the form of thought. At the same time, the reasonable refers to what can be legitimated not only intellectually but practically and morally. I describe how the force of this category, working through neoliberal modalities of appropriation and penality, is an anchor for persistent processes of racial oppression in educational policy and curriculum. Furthermore, if the reasonable is a central figure for ideology, then a kind of thinking that would break with it will show up in the first instance as unreasonable. Thus, I argue that critical pedagogy in the present needs to start from a different and “unreasonable” reason. In addition, taking its cue from interventions by radical educators and students, critical teaching needs to challenge the dominative decorum that forces dialogue on race and racism into the narrow spaces—both material and discursive—of the given.Starting from the contemporary critical-theoretical notion of an objective violence that organizes social reality in capitalism, including processes of systemic racism, as well as from phenomenological inquiries into processes of race and identity, this article explores the relationship between racism and reasonableness in education and society. The category of the reasonable connects the content of particular propositions with the inner truth of the form of thought. At the same time, the reasonable refers to what can be legitimated not only intellectually but practically and morally. I describe how the force of this category, working through neoliberal modalities of appropriation and penality, is an anchor for persistent processes of racial oppression in educational policy and curriculum. Furthermore, if the reasonable is a central figure for ideology, then a kind of thinking that would break with it will show up in the first instance as unreasonable. Thus, I argue that critical pedagogy in the present n...