I'll be presenting at TUCON 2024

De-programming the Schooled Subject with Illich and Lacan

Jul 10, 2024

I’m excited to share that my paper proposal was accepted for presentation at Theory_Underground‘s annual conference TUCON 2024! Thanks to David McKerracher and the rest of the TU team for this opportunity to speak and attend the event virtually.

I’ve tentatively titled the piece “De-Programming the Schooled Subject with Illich and Lacan.” For years I’ve found myself using the language of “having school brain” or becoming “a schooled subject” to informally describe the intellectual condition I had to overcome after I graduated from college and got my first job working in a software startup. I see this presentation as a chance to really flesh out and clarify that concept in order to share it with others.

As someone who does not work in the academy, I’m thankful for opportunities to push my research forward, and in a context like Theory Underground where people are at once critiquing our current educational regime while also building a convivial alternative. David and friends are not just complaining, but actually trying something new, learning, failing, and growing all the time. It’s refreshing to watch, and it’s exciting to have a chance to make my own small contribution to the larger theory scene (hopefully someday, milieu) emerging.

Below you can read my paper proposal to get an idea of what to expect from the presentation (it’s only 5 paragraphs — I kept it nice and tight)

Paper proposal for TUCON 2024

“De-Programming the Schooled Subject with Illich and Lacan.”

Kitarō Nishida argues that no piece of knowledge can justify any other piece of knowledge, and we come to realize this when the quest of radical doubt fails to terminate on a thought. There can always be one more thought. Instead, he says, we can only justify knowledge on the basis of an intuition, and thus the aim which all knowledge seeks is, tragically, a point at which it cannot arrive on its own. Thus, the truth of direct experience can never be directly delivered to a subject through the proper application of a technique.

Older forms of pedagogy display a clear understanding of this. If we take the example of the master-disciple relationship, we see that a transference must take place in which the teacher is seen as "the subject supposed to know" (in Lacanian parlance), and that learning only comes to full completion once the disciple manages to surpass this fantasy of the uncastrated teacher who holds all the answers. Even the master's teachings must fall away for the full experience of learning to emerge.

But what happens when an educational system is predicated upon the ongoing maintenance of an uncastrated master? What types of subjects does this form, and what sort of symptoms appear within the system to sustain its founding disavowals? Ivan Illich argues that such systems produce "dis-abled" subjects, persons who are constitutively crippled by their relation of dependence upon the fantasy that subjective activities, such as learning, community, or health, could become finished products available for delivery through repeatable procedures.

Students today have developed what I call "school brain" – a chronic condition in which they crave clear procedures, structured bodies of knowledge, transparent standards of excellence, the production of legible artifacts, the receipt of graded marks, and, ultimately, the recognition of authority figures who represent the value-giving eye of the uncastrated master who stands behind the entire system. The school brained subject cannot exist even for themselves unless they are legible from within the representational structures which the master provides for them.

In additional to developing the above account in greater detail, this paper uses religious and psychoanalytic notions to elucidate much older theories of learning and personal transformation to discover subjective strategies for de-programming from school-brain and rehabilitating our own innate capacities to learn. These theories involve resurrecting and acknowledging that the learning process demands a subjective shift on the part of the learner, a dynamic process of co-creation which can only come about in the context of a teacher-student relationship.

The lineup is currently coming together, but the people working in and around the Theory Underground space are top-notch and passionate scholars, so I highly recommend getting involved if you have interests in contemporary European philosophy, critical theory, Marx, ideology, or simply theorizing our present situation. In my opinion, it’s the right mix of safe and challenging to help philosophy first-timers and theory veterans learn and hone their craft together.

The conference will be in Boise, ID, and online (where I’ll be!) from October 24-27. Use this link to purchase your ticket before registration closes on August 15. It’s only $20 to be an attendee, which I believe is an absolute steal. See you there!