Enduring Schooling (Part Three)

The Education-Knowledge Nexus in the Service of Social Cohesion: Towards the Community Based on Love and Trust

To be different in the context of Rourke’s novel is another NO to the confusion obscuring the difference between facelessness and solidarity. Bewildering cacophony is noise in the communication channel. When it occurs, the remix devises means of resistance to distorted communication flow. This entails an awareness about an incapacity to grasp the totality of it. Paradoxically, the realization of such a limit enables an insight into at least two things. One is that it might be indicative of the limits of human power. The other builds on the former. It is the avenue such an acknowledgement opens up: it inspires the remix as a form of peaceful/peaceable resistance against noise in the communication channel, against the logic of reckless self-centeredness and hostility of nihilo-cannibalist culture.

Embracing humility and rebuking self-grandeur reasserts both the limit and the greatness of the human, simultaneously engendering fruitful communication within the community based on humanness: “If this sounds unpleasantly slavish and self-denying, it is only because we forget that if others do this as well, the result is a form of reciprocal service which provides the context for each self to flourish. The traditional name for this reciprocity is love” (Eagleton 2007, 91).

Little of such reciprocity seems to be the currency the gang of fellow-chancers use in Irvine Welsh’s Skagboys (2012). A prequel to the celebrated Trainspotting (1993), the novel in retrospect casts light on the narrative about junk euphoria endemic in Edinburgh youth of the 1980s and 1990s, as captured in Welsh’s fictitious accounts. The reader is exposed to the story that requires from one a specific kind of suspension of belief.

One is supposed to reinvent the characters whose destinies are allegedly known. Nevertheless, anew they can be read. The Mark Renton of Skagboys has an air of vulnerability hardly comparable with the junk-induced immunity to the harsh edges of the world that he develops in Trainspotting. By contrast, Sick Boy is revealed in a fully fledged form of both his natural cunningness and addiction-based survival skills. For example, in order to ensure horse supply  for himself, he, having gotten Maria Anderson hooked to the drug, forces her to prostitute herself. In a psychedelic scene of succession of intercourses with local clients, she has an obfuscated vision of Wi Dickson, whom she believes to be responsible for her father’s death. The encounter is a phantasm within which Simon Williamson penetrates her, while transforming into a nightmare imagery of the man who caused her descent to the chasm of addiction and prostitution (Welsh 2012, 223-4). The sinister aspect of the character of Sick Boy seems to be maximized, but, at the same time, played off against its caricatured version. Were it viewed through an ironic filter, his darkly unscrupulous, unselective means of obtaining skag and a trainspotter’s mischievous camaraderie might seem to acquire an almost childlike aura. Well, almost.

Further, Begbie does not dominate the scene as he does in Trainspotting. A considerable portion of the novel is void of Frank’s presence, notably due to drug related charges and consequential imprisonment. This sounds not much discordant with the depiction of the character of Begbie, the trainspotter, unlike the strangely serene, almost aloof character in some scenes in the prequel. An angular lyrical streak is interwoven in his conversation on the bench with Alison. The female character in question emerges in the novel as almost diametrically opposite to the heroin-ravished desperado she is being transformed into, as the novel progresses and as accentuated in Trainspotting. Having lost her mother to cancer, her baby to a death in the haze of drugs ruins, and all her dreams to the desertlike life of a buzz seeker, in Skagboys, she is still sensitized to the vibrancy of poetry and its potentials to respond against social ills.

Contrary to these divergences, the character of Spud is suggestive of a continuity of sorts. If any, oscillations in this character are mainly reflected in the degree of addiction. His vernacular is impossible to mistake for somebody else’s. Danny’s reactions are childlike despite the overshadowing murkiness resulting from the chemically altered biochemistry.

The first part of the book focuses on Mark Renton, a youngster from Leith, who comes to Aberdeen partly in search for higher education, partly to experience a different setting, meet different people, and exercise his right to independence. Partly, Rents is just trying to escape the gloominess of the repetitive, indistinct Edinburgh days. To an extent he does, albeit only by replacing them with Aberdeen everyday equally void of excitement. Irvine Welsh, Skagboys:

But the chaos ay Edinburgh reminded me ay how much ah’d grown tae like the ritual ay ma life in Aberdeen. It made us realise that ma free-spirit pretensions were bullshit. In reality ah saturated ma days wi routine, until it pissed us off tae the point that ah wis compelled tae subvert it wi a dramatic break. A skag binge helped. Here, though, ah had Fiona, ma studies and ma walks. And the reason the trips back home had lessened: ah’d hunted doon a source ay gear. (Welsh 2012, 163-4)

Mark’s college days start with a modest academic ambition, considerable enjoyment in obtaining knowledge, and enchantment by emotional and erotic intensities of the relationship with Fiona, herself a student at the same institution of higher education. Alas, the modesty of the academic ambition is rather rapidly degrading. A reasonable hunger for cognizance is being, if not satiated, then certainly obscured. His investment in what seemed to be a romance flourishing into a more-or-less steady relationship, if not commitment, is being hard-headedly sabotaged by his own affinity to subvert a possibility to bond and to practice the gift.

 Instead of conspiring against the onset of increasingly heavy heroin intoxication, Rents is decidedly commitment-resistant. The sweeping indulgence experienced with Fiona scares him. He would rather spend his time with Don, the dealer, and Donna, a prostitute. She enables him access to bodily sensations divested of intercourse. Rather, she insists on allowing him to give her oral sex, or, expertly dubbed, cunnilingus, as Si enlightens benighted Rent Boy (Welsh 2012, 185). The detail is evocative of the scene in which Mark has an affair with Charlene while previously working on a ship, having accepted state supported immersion in the luxury of welfare and the job provided for him and the acquaintances. Unlike Donna, the prostitute, Charlene wouldn’t permit him to cunnilingus her. She insists on intercourse, emphasizing the character of their relationship being not that of lovers: “It’s just a shag” (Welsh 2012, 335).

On the other hand, Don provides him with a pleasure of a different nature, before he disappears causing Renton’s decision to quit college, leave his girlfriend, and go back to his native Edinburgh to start a life of a full time junkie. Instead of bonding, he will be able to immerse himself in the destructiveness of drug misuse, thus concealing the obstructiveness of the commitment-phobic side of himself. He will indulge in the fakeness of the communal spirit available to him in a distorted form of union with his mates in petty crimes to support the ever accruing habit. Only, he will later, in Trainspotting, call them acquaintances. He won’t be happy and he might even know it. But, he won’t be deluded by the deceitful glamour of success, prosperity, prospects for a matrimonial farce, and the complicity in advancing the monstrosity of commodity driven social relations in the company of so called friends. Or, so heroin speaks.

As is the withdrawal from university, so is Mark’s return to his home town suggestive of the tone of the novel’s tracking the Trainspotting themes. At the same time, these diverse aspects of  the retro-unfolding narrative reveal the UK social realities amidst the erosion of the mythologized imperial grandeur underpinning the microcosms full of elusive orbits, deceptive glow, uncanny class divisions, weird sense of ethnicity, economic recession in disguise, power relations along cultural divides of the indefinable character, the notion of wealth whose semblance with any abstract concept is worthy of philosophizing as much as it calls for economic strategizing, the advent and the spread of the AIDS pandemic, subcultures whose vivacious urbanity creates defiantly nonconformist responses against the calamities of valueless economically minded cultural realities.

The impasse of the hypocrisy of the officialdom, its complicity in the proliferation of illicit use of drugs, criminalization of both drugs and certain demographics, and the impact of such policies on the semi-atrophied social strata, slumberous and nearly immobilized by the insufficiency of choices, might be implied in the following critical account:

-- On the one hand the government are encouraging the authorities to come down hard on drug use, on the other they’re acknowledging the growing problem of heroin addiction in the community. So there is the  strong chance of a custodial sentence if you don’t cooperate with this rehab programme. Your parents are outside, and have been informed of the situation. What do you want to do?

Decisions, decisions.

-- Ah’ll sign up. (Welsh 2012, 395 original emphasis)

By collectively signing up, for the lack of an alternative to the detoxification offered, they demonstrate willingness to cooperate with socially designed assistance. The three week  program is followed by a several hour aftermath preceding a relapse. About the counselor at St Monans, whom the gang mockingly call Skinny-Specky, Mark notes in his diary kept during the rehab program. He presents a view that reinstates the core of culturally constructed collisions:

Skinny-Specky made some comment about salt in porridge (she took sugar in hers) and we playfully derided her English habits. She insisted that she was Scottish, but Ted and Skreel told her that posh Scots were, to all intents and purposes, the same as the English. I mentioned that there were actually working-class people in England, and social class supplanted nationality as the parameters of our discussion. (Welsh 2012, 413 original emphasis)

Having outlined the intricacies of the class-nation myth, Rent Boy continues with writing his journal further disambiguating kierkegaardian vertiginous anxiety loaded with free-spirited bullshiteering. In one of the entries, he will write in response to the notice on the plaque outside the Scottish Parliament evoking barely decipherable oscillations along the center-periphery divide, all the while readdressing the thoughts about the question of supremacy: “ENGLAND EXPECTS EVERY MAN TO DO THEIR DUTY” (Welsh 2012, 473 original emphasis). About this, the character ruminates: ”We stopped to look at it, both of us flabbergasted as to how blatantly and effortlessly fucked up Scotland could be” (Welsh 2012, 473 original emphasis).  Like in Trainspotting, where Scottish national idiom is defined by Tommy via Iggy Pop in the vocabulary of polytoxicomania as the vernacular of the oppressed, Skagboys goes on to specify the profoundly transnational stand:

If being Scottish is about one thing, it’s aboot gitting fucked up, Renton explains, working the needle slowly into his flesh. – Tae us intoxication isnae just a huge laugh, or even a basic human right. It’s a way ay life, a political philosophy. Rabbie Burns said it: whisky and freedom gang thegither. Whatever happens in the future tae the economy, whatever fucking government’s in power, rest assured we’ll still be pissin it up and shootin shit intae ourselves, he announces, pulsing with glorious anticipation as he sucks his dark blood back into the barrel, then lets his ravenous veins drink the concoction. (Welsh 2012, 355 original emphasis)

Needless to say, this is undoubtedly a commentary on the complexity of the merciless socio-economic circumstances, detrimental for sound countercultural responses, causing social apathy, dissolving communal cohesion, detrimental for the sense of individuality, and impairing social relations and human relationships by and large. Irvine Welsh, Skagboys:”The rat race n that. Stressed if yuv goat a joab, stressed if ye huvnae. Everybody oot fir themselves, at each other’s throat n daein each other doon. Nae solidarity nae mair, ken? The work is ower, it’s aw gaun, n thaire’s nae particular place tae go” (Welsh 2012, 340-1).

But, go they do. Into the adventure through the cityscape known, however revealed in a phantasmagoric haze of sickness-exhausted bodies and minds. Completely unaware that a contingent of brown is being transported towards the city from another part of the country, Mark is awoken to the reality of the morning following the night spent with Hazel. Still sound asleep, her presence is a reminder of safety. No, they did not have sex—is what Mark realizes with a relief reconfirming Hazel’s unthreatening symbiotic friendship. They could not have sex—it is the contract between the victim of incest and of the heroin-crushed libido. Having realized there is nothing worrying about the previous night, Mark focuses on the quandary caused by the increasingly aggressive withdrawal. Sick Boy wakes up to the same reality. Only, in contrast to the routine calls to Swanney, Seeker, or whoever could procure heroin, the morning to which they awake brings no ritual visits to the places where withdrawal-induced miseries can end. Of all the places on the planet, Edinburgh finds itself with no readily available much needed substance.

As the gang is assembling, they embark on a journey that starts as an aimless stroll through the well known neighborhoods whose facial features appear not as familiar as they do when smack supplies abound. Pilrig, Leith, Gorgie…way too unwelcoming without safe havens such as Swanney’s or Seeker’s. The walk starts acquiring distinct characteristics as Mark, Si, Spud, Matty are heading towards the source: Blandfield Works, pharmaceutical manufacturer. They realize that the plant can only be reached via the ceiling and in order to accomplish it, they find themselves at the point from which they overlook the old Gorgie Station. Trainspotters. They need tools that will enable access to opioids. They decide planks they find as they go can do the job. 

The characters of Keezbo, Second Prize, and the memories of Billy, Mark’s elder brother, enter the scene as the plot is unwrapping and the gang is tirelessly cutting across the concrete desert. Tirelessly until it becomes apparent that the source denies them access. Until Spud vocalizes the wrongness of it all and announces that it has to stop. The aggregating component is seeping out through the crevices of the survival urge. They are not sure where each of the mates is. They seem to have lost Spud. They need to find the way back.

Back through the awareness of the experience of nothingness, having realized “that you couldn’t simply turn your back on nihilism; you had to live through it and hopefully emerge out the other side, leaving it behind” (Welsh 2012, 530). As if it were an echo of Seeker’s remark from the beginning of the chapter:

Although he’d become a valued customer, Seeker made Renton feel as if he was somehow disappointed in him for being on junk, that he was better than that. – Mark Renton, he smiled, -- you’re a strange yin. Can never quite figure you oot.

Like everything Seeker said, Renton was aware it carried a barely suppressed element of threat. But this, he supposed, was as close to friendship and respect as it was possible for Seeker to get. (Welsh 2012, 503)

As if it were concentrated circles emanated from the epicenter of sickness before they reached Blandfield Works whose name is flashing out from the sign of a three-storey victorian building. As if they were from the books of the eras bygone: “[T]he Punks were the Postmodern children of Dickens” (Savage 2001, 374). As if they were  renegade children of Dickens asking themselves:”Who are these people, these aliens, that we move among in such sadness?” (Welsh 2012, 506 original emphasis).

As if the walk through the citydesert were a journey through the history of Scotland, as presented in the novel:

The Scottish Enlightenment. You could trace the line from that period of the city’s global greatness, to the Aids capital of Europe, going straight through that mix of processing plants and warehouses within those security fences. It was a peculiarly Edinburgh brainchild of medicine, invention and economics; from the analytical minds of the Blacks and Cullens, filtered through the speculations of the Humes and the Smiths. From the deliberations and actions of Edinburgh’s finest sons in the eighteenth century, to its poorest ones poisoning themselves with heroin at the close of this one. (Welsh 2012, 516-7)

As if the lurking wake up call “What are we daein here?” (Welsh 2012, 506) were evocative of the statement such as: ”History is made by those who say ‘No’ and Punk’s utopian heresies remain its gift to the world” (Savage 2001, 541). 

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“Enduring Schooling : Against Noise, and in the Service of the Remix.” Genero: Journal of Feminist Theory and Cultural Studies. Eds. Katarina Lončarević, Marina Simić, and Daša Duhaček. Issue 18. Belgrade: Women’s Studies Center, 2014. 65-88. Print.

Enduring Schooling (Part II)

Erratic Pathways of Power-Narratives

This can further be contemplated upon through Lee Rourke’s novel The Canal (2010), delineating redemptive educational capacities of the preservation of the childlike. Having quit his job, the main character / narrator, spends his long days on a bench opposite an office building decorated by numberless computer screens and workers sitting in front of them, at their desks. It can easily be the building in which he used to work prior to deciding to explore the realms of boredom of a different kind. While narrating about an adventureless adventure by the canal, somewhere between London boroughs of Hackney and Islington, he might as well, somehow, still be in the office, in front of the computer, imagining a different world to be his everyday: the palpably intangible space between or within the spaces that attempt to subjugate everything to the dictum of economic power and upward mobility:

From where I was sitting, if I stared straight ahead, I could clearly see that the building was split into two halves: the ground floor, by the esplanade, above the murky moss by the water’s edge, was packed with rows of snazzy flat-screen monitors, each accompanied by an office worker—some on phones, some not. The five floors above this bustling office consisted of the goldfish-bowl-like abodes of the upwardly mobile. (Rourke 2010, 5)

As the novel is unfolding along the estuary storyline, recollections of childhood bring a relief. Back then, one was not happy because pollution was incomparably lower. One was neither happy nor unhappy because of that for a simple reason: the child does not care about such things, as maintained: “I thought nothing of the pollution back then” (Rourke 2010, 4). Further, the episode in which the narrator is being taught by his brother how to climb the tree and descend from it is suggestive of the modified perception of power he acquires later on. He urges the brother not to leave him. The brother encourages him to open his eyes, leads him step by step, confidently catches him once he comes down, and carries him back home on his shoulders. The trust of the scared, distrustful one now acquires fully fledged meaning in the hard-won safety (Rourke 2010, 161).

How different the communication between them is from the world in which one would be glad to see a lower level of pollution because one knows what it is. How their shielded conversation is immeasurably remote from the office space that not only deprives one from the private sphere, but transforms the public realm into a zone void of communication, despite the verbal content being the apparent currency. How very incommensurable the brothers’ understanding of control and power is from the corporate culture’s corruption, either as a means or as a consequence of ensuring the dominant position in the arena of unscrupulous progress rush.

Despite the stultifying aggressiveness of the torpor of those dominance-ridden, demigods’ empires, their energies are not entirely different from those of the overtly violent street gang Pack Crew, astonishingly precisely depicted as “a cacophony of teenagers and testosterone—a heady combination” (Rourke 2010, 20). Indeed, the description of empty days of empting glasses reflects the meaninglessness of those worlds and longing for the safety of the imaginary shelter until the knots of the absence of communication start being disentangled:

I spent the whole weekend with them, drinking in the same pub, with the same people, the same faces; drinking the same drinks, saying the same things. After I had exhausted myself saying the same things I simply said nothing. I let those around me say the very same things for me. I drank. I can’t even remember stopping to eat, although I figure I must have done at some point. All I really wanted was to be back at the canal. My weekend was a waste. I wanted to be back on that bench, waiting for her. (Rourke 2010, 13)

He realizes the exacerbating effect corporate surrounding has on him, so he opts for not partaking it. The boredom of the office environment he finds stupefying. He decides to indulge in daily observations of passers-by walking or cycling along the towpath. Instead of sitting in the office, he distanced himself differently. The boredom of the days spent seated on the bench brought to him different insights, different stories. One would be prone to assume that it also brought to him an inalienable right to thoroughly explore the meanings of words and the subtlety of the distinctions between and among them:

I liked my spot across from the flat-screen monitors and superfluous balconies. I liked being bored—I liked what it was doing to me. The word “boring” is usually used to denote a lack of meaning—an acute emptiness. But the weight of boredom at that precise moment was almost overwhelming, it sure as hell wasn’t empty of anything; it was tangible—it had meaning. (Rourke 2010, 8 original emphasis)

Immersing himself in daily conversations with the girl whom he met during his hours spent on the bench stands in contrast to coercive socio-political mechanisms pertinent to corporate pantheons that strive to dissolve individuality into a soluble mass amalgamation. Once he himself was introduced to the enchantment of the sense of omnipotence. He was sitting in his room from which he could observe airplanes taking off from and landing at Heathrow Airport. It was  a rainy day. He was in the room from which it was possible to see the verisimilitude of the roofs of Hackney. As if one were sitting on the bench by the canal. Or, some other spaces.

The narrator draws the reader’s attention to the imaginative realm of the fantasies of childhood. The protagonist is in a Dan Air Boeing 727. He likes his food during the night flight and he likes the turbulences during the descent. Strangely, he is in the aircraft’s cockpit, where he is at one point accompanied by his father. The world in front of his eyes is being magically transformed: “When the pilot allowed me to sit in his chair, seeing the entire world below me, I remember something seeping into me that I had never felt before: importance. I felt powerful. I felt like I could control the world” (Rourke 2010, 35).

How incredibly it helps one demystify seductive travesty of kinship, discern and preclude uncritical identification between adulthood and maturity, and reveal incommensurability between the childish and the childlike. How confusing is the notion of virtuality of office computer screens sometimes mistaken for the original meaning of the word virtual. How bewildering is the character of the girl with whom the protagonist spends long jobless hours by the canal: between a chimera and a metaphor of the narrator’s search for the boredom to bore him to surrender.

How tightly knitted are both the relationship between those symbolic realms and the character’s being deadened by militant sedentariness of corporate culture and dulled by its implacable, unquenchable thirst for obfuscation. How inexplicable is the affinity for adopting a godlike character. Or not.

In the novel, indicted are certain kinds of distinctions:

I’ve never been able to fathom why it has taken us so long to develop a system of existence that makes no sense to me. I really don’t know if this is my failing or theirs, or whether I am somehow unhinged, or different—but the feeling is that I now know something, something blindingly obvious, something they can’t see. (Rourke 2010, 195)

The blindingly obvious might easily be yet another linguistic subtlety providing a key for reading in the light of the distinction between the words bondage and bond. Being free from the forces that confine --“gravity was nothing to me” (Rourke 2010, 199) – is revealed as a diametrical opposite to the previously recognized appeal of deceptive godlike powers now disentangled.

By the canal, facing his reflection on the water’s surface, one is no more tempted to worship a delusion of omnipotence. His struggle over the feeling of dislocation is immortalized in the symbolism of the dead swan murdered by the gang, entailing the death of the girl who was trying to save the dying bird. With the disappearance of noise epitomized by the characters of the girl, the gang, the swan, the setting such as the canal, the office building, aircrafts, and by other elements of the novel metaphorizing obstacles to a clear vision, gone is the swan and all somnambulist logic. The situation illuminates how invaluable cherishing certain experiences from childhood is. With particular emphasis on the nuances between different kinds of awareness and unawareness, the view, too, elucidates the delicacy of versatile sorts of significance. The context invites reiterating the notion of the gift, as presented in Wark’s parlance. How it is perceived from the perspective of the child has nothing to do with the utilitarian version of reciprocity and everything to do with the joy of not owing anything to the world. (Wark 2012, par. 1). What may be inferred from Wark’s rhetoric is that growing up in consumer society, one develops a sense of obligation and, along with it, quite often a fabricated sense of indebtedness. Needless to say, it causes countless conundrums. Nonetheless, it is reasonable to believe that selectively preserving memories from childhood can disambiguate the confusion aimed to be imposed on one, along with an infantile fantasy of carelessness and valuelessness as liberatory and pure. It may also reveal a blissful abundance of the potential for learning. 

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“Enduring Schooling : Against Noise, and in the Service of the Remix.” Genero: Journal of Feminist Theory and Cultural Studies. Eds. Katarina Lončarević, Marina Simić, and Daša Duhaček. Issue 18. Belgrade: Women’s Studies Center, 2014. 65-88. Print.

Enduring Schooling (Part 1)

How Significant and / or How to Say it 

At one point, I realized that my ideas about education needed to be considered in the way different from how I used to think about it. That in the past education mattered, while nowadays it has no such significance, I did and did not approve, but I could not specify how and what aspects of the observation either were or were not in accord with my views. I opposed the suggestion that education did not matter anymore. And yet, there was a strong sense that its role somehow has slightly been modified.

Further contemplating upon the issue led me to understand that it was not quite accurate to assume that it had no relevance. The sheer fact that considerably more people now than in the past pursue a university degree in undergraduate and graduate programs alike is indicative of a greater demand towards obtaining higher education. Presumably, it suggests that there is some kind of need for higher education. It may as well signal that education by and large is sought because there is a correlation between social relations and what individuals know, need to know, and/or want to know. Or not. By extension, this could be indicative of education being of importance of some kind.

In an age increasingly oblivious of the role of education as a means of genuine exchange, the threat of pervasive corporatization seems to overshadow the distinctions between individualism and individuality, uniformity and unity, to name just a few instances of noise in the communication channel. Thus, there is an indisputable need for sustaining the awareness about at least two vital aspects of education. One concerns its authentic characteristic being conveying information, while the other contextualizes the polemic within societal institutions. Both are related to the notions of communality and individuality. Both imply education heavily relying on the currency of exchange between and among humans: language. As such, it is integral to the mutually conditioning relationship between discourse and cultural realities.

In the dominance-based, ruthlessly accelerated world in the pursuit of sweeping commoditization, a hostile climate of mindless competitiveness and unscrupulous utilitarianism, strangely coupled with the myth of progress and accumulation of knowledge for its own sake, more often than not appears to be infinitely more a recognizable vocabulary than that of the gift. However, the mutually conditioning relationship between corporate culture and education by no means obscures the wholesome awareness / practice of exchange. Nor does it entail an equation between individualism and individuality. Likewise, it does not imply that uniformity should be identified with unity. It certainly does not afflict the possibility for communal cohesion and the right to individuality.

It seems that ever since humanity started rushing along the progress path, there has been a decrease in recognition of education as a means of communication. Instead, it was becoming a form of accruement of knowledge with little consideration for the possibility of its providing a basis for communal cohesion and enhancing the right to individuality. It seems that such an approach excluded from the conversation the very idea that initiated it. In other words, the very reason why education matters has been neglected. Precise articulation of the kernel of education might exceed both linguistic and epistemological apparatuses as we know them. One may be inclined to equate the elusiveness in question with absence. Few things are more inaccurate than such an assumption.

A precise definition of exchange, communication, and exploration of the realms of knowledge might not be accessible through either linguistic or epistemological apparatuses. This seems to be a component of cultural flows that enables manipulative interventions aiming to divert education towards goals and ideas strikingly different from the playfulness inherent to questlike endeavors.

if not getting paid for housework is regarded as a betrayal of monetizing labor, it might be a good response against the misconception about the logic of somnambulism

To say that fruitful communication—spreading information and conveying the message--is constitutive of education is to indicate its antiutilitarian character. Now, there are at least two ramifications of such a statement. Firstly, it can erroneously be characterized as  potentially illogical, provided the supposed incommensurability between antiutilitarianism and reciprocity. The misleading reasoning can be repaired via McKenzie Wark’s observations (2012). He considers the idea of the gift within the context of the world under a threat of reckless commoditization. In such a world, financial economy has allegedly usurped the realm of art to the point that clearly calls for reconfiguring:“With finance capital in particular, it is not just that financial ‘products’ are like contemporary art. They are contemporary art” (Wark 2012, par. 20).

Partly hyperbolizing the role of corporate culture, partly provoking art that has been reduced to the parameters of “boughtness and soldness” (Wark 2012, par. 15) the claim demands a response:“A task of our time might be to free the aesthetic from its complicity with commodity forms, even attenuated ones, and practice it again, in the everyday, as a sensibility of the gift” (Wark 2012, par. 9).

The sound of this utterance is a resolute NO to the bewilderment caused by versatile interpretations of the concepts such as valueless / value-free / virtuelessness. One of the meanings concerns valuelessness in terms of objectivity. The other echoes a slightly metaphorized version of the concept implying ethical signification. In other words, it can be related to the meaning of the word virtuelessness. Needless to say, this stands in sharp contrast with the antiutilitarian aspect of supposedly value-free education. It might be neither entirely objective, as the epistemological paradigm teaches us how it operates, nor is it divested of virtue. That its purpose might exceed precise verbalization can mislead one to conflate it with the valuelessness of corporate culture. This constitutes the second ramification of the aforementioned possibility of wandering along the sinuously logical alleys. Their erratic curves are by no means the only way of thinking about the subject matter.

        It is crucial to maintain the distinction between these seemingly reverberating meanings and phenomena: “Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing” (Wilde 2007, 42). Neither a nostalgic longing for the times bygone, since no historical epoch is worthy of complicity in the proliferation of inhumane social relations, nor idealized future anticipations--neither in the key of longing for the lionized past nor somnambulist projections into a romanticized future, disregarding the relevance of being present in the here and now--the remix celebrates anticarpe diem / hic & nunc perseverance in the reemergence of selfless, yet reindividualized, fellow humans enduring the hindrances to patient, persistent creation of a free culture based on love and trust. 

      Part of it can be understood through the prism of Wark’s ruminations about philoxenia. Again, it could be thought of in the context of possible interpretative nuances. The meaning of the love of strangers, or its traditional signification of hospitality, in order to exclude the possibility of misinterpretation, should be restricted, specified, and void of sweeping generalizations. Notionally, as much as it signifies relating to the other, so is it a demand for non-identification. Further, as it invites experiencing otherness as one’s integral part, so does it decisively require selectiveness with regard to relating to it.

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“Enduring Schooling : Against Noise, and in the Service of the Remix.” Genero: Journal of Feminist Theory and Cultural Studies. Eds. Katarina Lončarević, Marina Simić, and Daša Duhaček. Issue 18. Belgrade: Women’s Studies Center, 2014. 65-88. Print.