FouCULT Emma Cook/Sarah Moore

Advantage

Welcome to the learning society – students across the United States are subjected to ceaseless testing, training, learning in order to activate their potential. The organizing principle of this society is to optimize the productivity of each student, to make sure that they live up to their potential, so that they can be valuable and contributing members of a risk-filled economic system. Lewis 11 – (Tyson E. Lewis, PhD. in educational philosophy from UCLA, Associate Professor of Educational Foundations at Montclair State University, “Rethinking the Learning Society: Giorgio Agamben on Studying, Stupidity, and Impotence,” Studies in Philosophy and Education November 2011, Volume 30, Issue 6, pp 585–599)//a-berg Recently there have been several important critiques of ‘‘learning discourse’’ as well as the AND conclusions concerning learning and its alternatives which these authors have not adequately addressed.

The invisible consequence of this learning society is abandonment – the demand to activate the potential of students produces the sacrifice of impotentiality, the sacrifice of those who fail or are otherwise not capable of living up to those demands. This lack of potential is projected outwards onto the vulnerable other, enabling a sovereign decision between what life is valuable and what life is not. - (1:23) Tyson Edward Lewis 13 – (It’s a Profane Life: Giorgio Agamben on the AND and fallible freedom of study which is beyond measure and beyond predefined ends.

These states of exception hold educational life in suspension, at the whim of the sovereign’s decision between valuable life and life that can be sacrificed. - (1:00) Lewis 2006 – (Tyson E., “The school as an exceptional space: AND result the biopedagogical reveals its internal complicity with an underlying state of exception.

This biopolitical determination of which life is valuable and which life is not turns politics murderous – the entirety of the world is reduced to bare life in an attempt to rid the public sphere of all risk. The only option becomes the extermination of all life. - (1:04) Duarte, 5 – professor of Philosophy at Universidade Federal do Paraná (André, “Biopolitics and the dissemination of violence: the Arendtian critique of the present,” April 2005, http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1017&context=andre_duarte) These historic transformations have not only brought more violence to the core of the political AND actions of acknowledging and welcoming, of extending hospitality and solidarity towards others.

Method

In opposition to this learning society which demands that we become good and productive students, we affirm a study of the resolution. Through our study, we render the sovereign logics embedded in the resolution inoperative by refusing to obey the logic of learning. Instead of activating our potential and becoming productive, well-educated students, we prefer the role of the studier, withdrawing from the normative pressures of the education system. This operates to interrupt the ultimate demand of the learning society – either be productive or be abandoned. - (1:50) Lewis 15 (Tyson E., associate professor of art education at the University of AND In this sense, Agamben's coming community is actually a community of study.

Studying allows us to defer and delay the pressure placed on us to realize our potentials, to become all that we are supposed to be. By changing the everyday practices and roles that define learning, we can change the sovereign logics that reside at its core. - (0:45) Lewis 14 – Tyson E., “The Fundamental Ontology of Study, Educational Theory AND that embodies this potentiality as a kind of study journal or study log.

Study is an inactivity of resistance – deferring the call to action and embracing our impotential allows us to reject the internalization of state expectations and reverse the violence of the learning society. - (0:45) Snoek 12 (Anke, PhD in Philosophy Department @ Macquarie U., Agamben’s Joyful AND are other strategies, aside from active resistance, to reverse political situations.

Structures of biopolitical control are empty of positive content, capable of only inflicting death or doing nothing --- our strategy is to desert biopolitical apparatuses such as the education system, rather than reform it. Prozorov 10 (Sergei – Professor of Political and Economic Studies at the University of Helsinki, “Why Giorgio Agamben is an optimist,” in Philosophy Social Criticism, Volume 36, Number 9, p. 1059-1060, November 2010, http://psc.sagepub.com/content/36/9/1053.abstract) In a later work, Agamben generalizes this logic and transforms it into a basic AND achieved by the practice of subtraction that we address in the following section.