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.
“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.
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