Pedagogy of the “Not”: Negation, Exodus, and Postdigital Temporal Regimes

Abstract

Postdigital capitalist time is an incessant acceleration that acts to homogenize time and wed us to the present, to which we have to constantly catch up. While the impulse of this is no doubt economic (the realization of value), it is crucially undergirded by a pedagogical logic wherein we have to perpetually learn and re-learn the latest apps, social media configurations, operating systems, and so on. Political strategies of resistance thus need to be bolstered by an alternative mode of educational life, and I propose a pedagogy of the "not" as one possibility. Such a pedagogy is an act of suspension that sustains a detachment from the present, clearing out oppositions and thereby exposing us to a radical indeterminacy and potentiality that is always untimely. Suspension is the praxis of negation, which means that negation operates by keeping sense indeterminate to meaning and signification. Rather than suppressing, disavowing, or annihilating the stated content, negation retains even that which is negated. While this would appear as a form of exopedagogy, which withdraws from the dialectic of the private/public, I instead argue that it redefines the terms of any dialectic, redefining the very categories exopedagogy withdraws from. Before concluding, I spend some time with Sandy Grande's important critiques of Eurocentrism and progress in Western critical education, demonstrating how negation as suspension circumvents these errors through its accommodation of-or, better, insistence on-variegated temporalities and forms of life.In the postdigital age, anything seems possible but everything seems impossible. On the one hand, any group can start a trending hashtag and radically intervene in and redirect a segment of popular discourse. Disparate groups of organizers and militants can connect, build, and coordinate actions and campaigns, linking different movements and spaces together into one (think Occupy). On the other hand, capital and state

Ten Years of the Postdigital in the 52group: Reflections and Developments 2009–2019

“…), describe challenges pertaining to dealing with jerks, question existing social contracts, and call for developing new ones. Many of these themes are reflected in recent academic articles such as 'Critical Philosophy of the Postdigital' (Peters and Besley 2019), 'Pedagogy of the 'Not': Negation, Exodus, and Postdigital Temporal Regimes' (Ford 2019), 'Postdigital Education in Design and Practice' (Fawns 2019), 'Between the Post and the Com-Post: Examining the Postdigital 'Work' of a Prefix' (Sinclair and Hayes 2019) (to mention just a few), and addressed more specifically in two recent reflection papers (Jandrić et al 2018, Arndt et al 2019. After several years of researching and supporting research in and around the postdigital, I am happy to see so much convergence between insights of the 52group, and the budding community gathered around Postdigital Science and Education.…”

Marxist Education Across the Generations: a Dialogue on Education, Time, and Transhumanism

“…Here is perhaps one point where our work converges in some way. This is especially important in our current temporal configuration of postdigital time (Ford 2018b). The definition of the postdigital that makes the most sense to me is an era in which technology is no longer Bseparate, virtual, 'other' to a 'natural' human and social life^ (Jandrić et al 2018: 893).…”

Ontological Transparency, (In)visibility, and Hidden Curricula: Critical Pedagogy Amidst Contentious Edtech

“…Rather than new technologies being imposed on institutions, an imposition that carries with it a pedagogical logic of perpetually learning and unlearning educational technology (Ford 2019 ), the process of teachers, students, and staff co-imagining educational technology surfaces existing and emergent positions of pedagogical practice as well as the institutional values underpinning these practices. This paper emerges out of a project that attempted to enact such a process.…”