Text(ure)s of Violence

Education as the Forgery of Subjects

Found on the Cybermind list:

A paper I recently read at a conference on the culture of peace and
non-violence. Pl. forward it to interested persons/lists.

Rajesh

Thank you Rajesh, and hereby I take it into the Hugen site, on the 25th of December 2002. - Enok

Notwithstanding all our song and dance about the sublime aims of our
education, the fact remains that we live under capitalism and our
education is the principal apparatus for the production of
subjectivities under capitalism. This implies our deep implication and
investment in relations of power in which the dominant theme is
oppression.

This is not, however, to discount education as a project of freedom but
to face the truth that it is also the site of the most crucial but
normally invisible struggle between forces of subjection and those of
freedom.

When we mention "subjection" we do imply human beings who get subjected,
but it does not follow that there are always human subjects who are
intentionally bent on pushing others into subjection. Indeed, a good
deal of subjection is non-subjective and - for precisely this reason -
more insidious, widespread and hard to resist. The oppressors are often
subject to incomprehensible forces.

When the virus of subjection has infiltrated the very nervous system of
freedom, you need a splintered mirror to catch the spots. You need the
splintered mirror of the cracking, fragmented, repetitive, overlaying
language that does not shy away from performing surgery on itself.
Education can heal itself only by doing violence to its informing
language. The volcano of violence that erupts in New York today and
Godhra tomorrow cannot be frozen into an instructive monument without
dismantling the myth of education as an innocent adventure.

*

On violence, the entry in my dictionary (NODE, 1998) reads:
behaviour involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill
someone or something.

The additional definition goes like this:
strength of emotion or an unpleasant or destructive natural force.

Whose interests does this grossly inadequate, elegantly crude definition
of violence serve? What about that violence which happens when a child
is forced to eat and vomit alien(ating) nursery rhymes? When a teenager
is served a starvation diet of careers? When soap operas and commercials
harass you like mosquitoes in the privacy of your bedroom? When, on a
footpath in old Delhi, a chance look at Deepak Chopra's recipe for
finding God raises you to the seventh heaven of bliss? When Cadbury's
range of Temptations overwrites the epic magnitude of Eve's temptation
in your random access memory? When you feel like Kafka's tragic
cockroach in your dehumanizing ambience? Or when you don't even get to
know that you are that cockroach -grubbing, on a junky footpath, among
stock market news, pornography and commercial divinity for some elusive
redemption?

There is violence and there is myth of violence. The myth is slighter
but it overwhelms the reality with its exclusory, defining force in
discourse. What we eventually get to see of violence is a sanitized,
censored version. With its mediated intensity, which is on a relentless
auto reinvent mode, it manages to keep the eye glued to itself. What
happens beyond the margins of the myth would not be recognized as
violence. The victim would not be empowered to name the thing, to call
it violence.

Hence this: education against violence begins after we have violently
torn apart the myth of violence, have learned to grapple with the
distinction between violence and the myth of violence.

In a way then, the initiatory act of education is an act of violence.

Let us, therefore, set the oppressive violence apart from the enabling
violence.

The Gita, inscribed in the peculiar event of its transmission, is a
paradigmatic text of education in that it both performs and confronts
violence - the former as a creative, saving act; the latter as a
necessary, ambient fact. Without these two that go together, peace is
impotency and flight. And the peace of a living, advancing people cannot
afford to be that.

Krishna undoes the old Arjuna in order to bring him to re-create
himself. He makes him see; and the seeing is violent, cataclysmic. It is
impossible that without this Arjuna should confront the violence that
blows around him threatening to tear up the banyan tree of dharma. His
subsequent intervention is, hence, predicated on a twin experience of
violence: he suffers violent rebirth in order to be able to experience
the ambient violence as violence, as violation. He would be denuded of
illusions in order to stand before the bare reality of violence.

Education must divest us of illusions and make us see. The seeing cannot
happen unless we become self-reflexive. The silent infection of memory
has to be overcome for us to be able to create ourselves anew. A violent
rupture with ourselves marks the moment of our initiation into reflexive
subjectivity.

The present crisis of education can be located in a conflict of
objectives in respect of subjectivity. There is education for
reproduction and there is education for re-creation. The first, which is
akin to the process of industrial mass duplication and which answers to
the imperatives of the economies of scale, aims at reproducing
efficiently programmed replicas. The second aims at the subject's
rebirth, the earth-shattering process that opens his eyes into reflexive
awareness and makes him dvija, the twice born. The continuance of
capitalism, however, is best ensured by the reproduction of
subjectivities. In place of human beings you have human resources that
must be employed and exploited optimally to extract the highest
profitability. Education gets increasingly identified with training and
the upgrading of economically productive skills. The remaining spaces in
the structure of subjectivity are filled up with mass-produced
standardized entertainment, "interpersonal skills" and safe political
attitudes - and the newspaper wisdom stuffs the head with a dash of "the
intellectual". Whether through affluence or through privation, the
serpent of subjectivity just fails to put its mouth and tail together.
To the reproduced subject, the reflexive threshold remains elusive.

Yet even a subject forged in the reproductive machinery of capitalism
must inevitably exceed the objectives of his forging. The subject's
ineludible humanity must overtake his alienation as a reproduction and
haunt and sting him with the dream of authenticity. The dream poisons
the media-induced fantasy of this human resource, engendering suffering
that persists as long as his humanity suffers violation. The subject's
problem is he can neither shrink to a resource nor buy humanity off the
shelf.

The task before education, then, is to either resolve or transcend the
contradiction between reproduction and re-creation. However, with
resolution ruled out by the very nature of the contradiction,
transcendence as an effect of history remains the sole possibility.
Capitalism may not have suspected it but in the age of postmodernism
when reproduction is trash and creativity (including creative rehashing)
wealth, the re-created subjectivity might prove to be more productive
than the mere reproduced subjectivity. Authentically reflexive
subjectivities may not be in tune with the demands of an oppressive and
totalitive global economic order, but these should be harmonious with a
dispersive and free world economy. With the world currently poised on
the edge of chaos between these two impending orders, the shape of the
future may not emerge any soon. But that shape, if it is to house the
human being, will critically depend on ideas and actions that are
clearly intended to intervene in the course of events to give them
orientation.

The decentring of power will not translate into the deconcentration of
power so long as people are mere points, not engines, in the field of
power. Their transformation into the engines of power, the true vocation
of human education, cannot be achieved unless they step off the assembly
line of reproduction and begin to self-reflect.

This, however, requires de-oppressing the apparatus of education to
allow power to circulate freely.

If the gravity of the matter will allow some levity, I would concede
that a great deal is happening in our universities to set the education
free. During a recent exercise in academic auditing (!) a team of dons
and managers visited the college where I work. I suggested a system of
regular interaction between the faculty of the affiliating university
and that of its colleges. "We appreciate your point of view. You mean
the colleges should function as franchisees of the university. Happily,
we are already working in that direction," the team leader informed me.
His earnestness was transparent.

The problem is how to get rid of this bazaar vision of education that
has been seeping into the vocabulary of our thought and imagination to
fundamentally impair our ability to reflect as educators. At this
critical and dangerous hour, can we keep our eyes on what Foucault calls
"the microphysics of power" in education? Can we read the fine but
gloomy print? Critical intelligence and the power to critique depend on
reflexivity. On reading. On reflexive reading. Unfortunately, the text
of education itself today suffers from the malaise of diminishing
readership, including that inside the academy. As a consequence, we are
becoming dead to the anguish of violence.

Violence does not always come as infliction. Sometimes, indeed, it comes
creeping as insinuation to inhabit and ensoul people. This happens when
the apparatus of education suppresses reflection and incentivizes
reproduction. Education has then become a forgery: inhuman, mechanical,
duplicitous.

In that event, reflexive reading, the kind that can stand back and
contemplate itself, can restore creativity and the transformative power
to education. It can neutralize the manipulation of power that moulds
the people into pliant subjects. Thus it can create the conditions
necessary for power to circulate freely. The employment of this strategy
of de-oppression, however, requires that we range in the margins and
interstices of the text with the patience and ruthlessness of maniacal
archeologists. Not really a great price to pay to preserve our humanity.

The Indian education - if we may use this term with a cool conscience -
is in the process of change. But how much of the change is really geared
to excellence? Isn't the greater part of it a mere tossing about for
survival? We are losing even the sense of proportion that is essential
to know the higher from the not so high. Universities and colleges are
succumbing to the mean temptations of the bazaar, mindlessly picking up
and then throwing into the trash bin courses as well as students. The
humanities with their ideals and ideas, for long the cherished space for
education to do its bit of self-reflection, get a guilty and apologetic
mention. While the institutions of higher education that should act as
bastions of judgement in a period of indirection have either fallen
silent or begun to dance and sing to the techno music of faddish
idiotologies, the society is back to sheer survival - albeit as a mass
of cyborg cavemen. Hence we bask vicariously in the American fantasy of
the Spiderman - the creepy insect-god as a nauseating and infantile
plastic messiah for the post-9/11 world, metaphorising an impossible
double escape into the past and the future. We have our own homespun
fantasies too - like Amir Khan's pseudo-revenge on British imperialism
through a moronic reappropriation of cricket and the competitively
packaged and remixed versions of Bhagat Singh's life and thought.
Resistance and revolution rehashed for a bored and drugged market.

And yet these are the texts the academy is the least inclined to touch
even with a long pole.

Perhaps the time has come to de-institutionalize education at our own
end and let it slink into the slums and service lanes of the academy.
The emerging dominant paradigm of education is displaying all the signs
of being ruthlessly incorporative. For the sake of a peace that is not
of the graveyard, we must embrace the tactics of the guerilla. We must
rummage every text - literal or visual, cultural or economic, bodily or
spiritual - and rip open each sign. For in the manufactory of these
signs and texts is our subjection being forged. These signs and texts
hide their bottoms under cover of a fabricated economic and
cultural-military consensus with global pretensions. The time has come
to expose these bottoms. The night has gotten the inkiest ever.

I am not making out a case for academic anarchy. On the contrary, I hold
that education in any significant form may not survive the ruin of its
institutions. What I am skeptical of is the icy institutionalism that
might extinguish the last sparks of that individual and eccentric fire
which is so necessary to keep education a/live. Institutional education
is a contradiction in terms and education must overflow the institution.
The institutions exist to nurture free subjectivities, not to forge
subjects. When these begin to compete as the ancillary units of
multinational industry and trade, it is time the educators should dig
their souls for possible complicity.  The last thing we can afford to
forget is the human being who should be at the heart of any project of
education. To institute profits in that place is the ultimate betrayal,
the last profanation of education. It amounts to the abandonment of
humanity and constitutes spiritual dereliction.

On their part, our institutions of education could go down the history
lane to pick up a few lessons. Hopefully, they would be better equipped
to fight the spreading dehumanization if they could adequately
internalize the critique that is implied in the concept of the gurukul
for our times.

The gurukul is not impersonal. It is not institutional. Its scale of
values is not derived from the market. It is not a forgery for the
production of subjects cheated of their humanity. It is the foundation
of the social order yet suitably distanced from that order to be able to
deal critically with it. It grows around personal relationships and
functions as a community (it does not need a manager nor can it be put
online). It does teach the practical skills but it never forgets its
principal aim. Which is to teach the people the art of rebirth, the art
of transforming oneself through reflection.

When the way of Nachiketa is available to us, there is no reason we
should take to the ways of Faustus.
...................
Rajesh Kumar Sharma
# 74, Lane 13
Krishna Nagar, Hoshiarpur (Punjab)
PIN - 146001
Phone: 91-01882-242545
Email: rksharma1@vsnl.com
rajeshkr@sancharnet.in

Heimskringla            Hugen