- Venomous Ideals

Our drive is to formulate carefully devised outlooks, strategies of active living, in some kind of relation to, and even in spite of the world that surrounds us. It makes us survey for friends and enemies. But how rarely does one get to be guided by this drive; always too slow, too sleepy to follow. Then, there is also the fear of being carried away, into a complete miss; how often have we called off our decisions, how common it is to confuse a friend for a foe. But then, is it better to stay quite, move around with closed eyes and have no foes and no friends? This little project was also intended to be (it became in fact) a screening campaign, searching around for friends and enemies, a little periscope, or a radar.

The most striking thing about modern education in general is its stark cruelty as a concept, a method and a goal; not the authoritarian methods of certain educational institutions, the ample collaboration with the purposes of the reigning regime. It’s not only about disproportional distribution of knowledge among different classes of society; education as a privilege of certain classes, as a distinction mark, or even a weapon of the superior classes. Enough has been said on education in modern societies concerning these issues, in academic, or mainstream circles, as much as by radical activists. Besides, this perspective often ignores the fact that there are also “knowledges” of the uneducated, the ones with no money or appetite for this type of “candy”, people who simply are not interested to become educated. One of the primary aims of the present discussion will be to open an alternative perspective on this subject. But there is more to it; education is one of those subjects that has rarely been taken seriously among underground circles in MK. Most of us, when asked, are barely able to dig out some “ready-made”, remotely felt opinions concerning rights on education, the authoritarian character of schools or other educational facilities…Schools and universities are vaguely felt as “enemies’, as part of the mechanism of the current system. The truth is, we know so little about the place and the role of education in general, its modes of operation, its institutions, that we are still largely unable to express a coherent opinion regarding this problem. This is only an attempt to open a discussion, to place education on our agenda. An attempt to make a little sketch showing the place and the role of education in modern societies, to uncover its methods of operation, and an attempt to trace “a way out”, to arrive at an effective stance regarding this issue.

Education carries its “darker”, more fundamental side, so often overseen, or simply ignored in the debates over the “earthly” political implications of the educational system. Mostly over it’s general value, manifested in the clash between those who argue for equal access to educational services and those who stand for a complete abolishing of education. The question really raised here is whether education is “a good or a bad thing”! Such a naïve perception of the problem once more demonstrates how poorly disoriented we are, when brought in face of this phenomenon. (No one, as far as my meek experience with independent media allows to say, has really followed on problems such as the inevitability of education in human cultures, it’s development, it’s variations in different circumstances, with respect to other, closely related institutions.) Too early, we bring forward a question that would normally come up late, or rather, disappear on the way. We want to tell a friend from an enemy at the very first glance.

There is an obvious link between recruitment of labor force and education in modern societies; apart from other things, the latter is supposed to give a steady supply to the labor market. Education is conceived of as a mechanism for rejuvenation of the exhausted society in every sphere; as we can witness here, in MK, all major restructuring in production, in the relations between the large collectives that make up society, is sooner or later, reflected in the educational system, in the training programs, or in the way the institutions are set. Educational facilities are among the foremost marks of the modern age, they come along whenever modern life and production crop out. Let us remember that the ruined school became the emblem of the dying village in MK and elsewhere in the Balkans. Modern societies must constantly rebuilt and reform their educational systems; they learned this thanks to the speedy changes in the modes and intensity of production, and unlike the old alternative forms of industrial societies, managed to survive the industrial age. But no age brings eternal peace and education is facing new problems, one of which being the trouble of having to convince its subjects, at any prize, to acquire evermore specialized profiles, finer and finer arts and techniques. Everyone must be given some kind of concrete, definite and useful shape, otherwise, they’ll be lost, while organized production of such size, and on level of society, becomes impossible. Even the crippled in body or mind, the ill, junkies and criminals, the middle-aged, left unsold on the market, are being reintegrated by obtaining a new skill, under the label of another profession or degrees. What this age tolerates the least is hesitation, indecisiveness, the undifferentiated, with regards to the professional call, to consumption, to political choice…

In a sense, education is a matter of pragmatic, strategic planning, and that is how it’s been mostly presented and dealt with. People forget that it drags behind a daunting task, for it seeks a presumption over the unpredictable dynamics, both mental and physical, of every individual organism. Nothing must remain inarticulate, undifferentiated, because that’s the only way to become useless today. Schools and universities advertise themselves by making claims to produce profiles ready for life in “the new society, the new era”…Much is required and expected from the educational facilities of today, a very crucial and radical cut must be executed with as little as clamor as possible. Indeed, the business of these institutions is to produce highly precise instruments, specific organs that match and correct the needs of a society’s labor apparatus. A bad school is the one that gives the student no specific tools, that fails to turn her into a functional organ. How to turn the spontaneous, the careless, the ever gay into something definite, highly specialized, to make it choose one or two and throw away all its other potentials; isn’t this a most terrifying operation then? This is the prize that every human being has to pay for taking part in our civilized world; completeness is denied on individual level, it is even presented as impossible, and then projected on the level of society.

Little can be understood if education is seen barely as a process of imbuing a sovereign subject with concrete knowledge, with technical equipment. More precisely, this is how it’s been publicly affirmed and advertised by the elements of the regime. A whole new different perspective emerges if one views education as an act of determination of human capacities, of tempering and channeling rather than “equipping”. Its methods consist not of indoctrination as usually thought, but of leveling excesses, cutting round certain drives, suffocating others…Education is also a process of selection, of razing off and throwing away, not only of acquiring. No accident that it appears so painful to most children, it is as painful and cruel as rites of passages appear to us, modern people. Education treats its subjects as an uncharted territory, raw material that needs to be entirely refurbished, set in formation, nothing must escape its scissors.

The debilitating effect is repeated at the end of the process, for highly specialized profiles are totally handicapped on their own. It is as absurd as a perfectly functional organ left alone; it’s like with the cells in an organism: the most specialized ones have but a single function. Sociologists have long since learned that modern societies function in this manner. A specialist is a complete invalid without other specialists around; the severe process of extracting and developing only certain capabilities is compensated by a total dependence and believe in the capabilities of other experts. Completeness is made possible only on the level of society; individuals are very sophisticated, but also tiny (and practically useless on their own), bits of the productive machinery. That is the basic pre-condition for the functioning of modern society, for the proliferation of specializations in each of the hundreds of already very exclusive, highly professionalzed fields, the crazy rate of production of most different kinds of experts. Such fine and complex parceling of the productive body is necessary for these types of societies, and it is education that fulfils this vital function of the system. The method of leveling and cutting is twice repeated, or more correctly, it’s reflected from one to another sphere, like the strategy and its cause; once it is on the body of the untamed, non-specific, new-born organism, the second time, or the result, is on the body of society, where everything must own a specific place, and a specific reason.

It becomes clear now, why the educational system is being advertised, dressed up to the point where all things are turned upside down. Otherwise, without the consent and the full will of the subjects, it would have been impossible even to begin work on such a radical and massive project. The entire focus in the campaigns for promoting education is thrown on the “inevitable, positive consequences of education later on in life”. “A place where the individual and the social interests intersect”, “a chance for every individual to prove capacities and potentials, “a chance for the marginalized categories to find full affirmation”; exactly the opposite attributes of those that were just suggested: termination, articulation of the strives, eliminating or channeling excesses. This is all too natural: the most poisonous of species usually carry the most attractive colors. Far from saying that propaganda solely keeps the educational system going, as much as the colors make the insect dangerous; educational propaganda is simply a result of commercialization in the educational services, of competition between schools and universities, the translation of the logic of liberal capitalism in the production of specialized profiles, experts and scholars. Education as a fundamental function in modern societies, appears along and simultaneously with the new society, with the new mode of production. They are like two, mutually pre-supposing manifestations, poles of the same object. And just like reforms, or changes of any kind in the rest of society are with no effect unless followed by changes in the educational system, so is the reverse: we cannot think of revolution or even reforms in the modern educational system without changes in the way labor and production are organized, without fundamental trembles in the other zones of society. Education cannot be radical, relieved from its well-known ills (authoritarianism, suppression, indoctrination of competitive, ego-centric ideals) under the cap of this society. Those who believe that education can be remedied within the existing circumstances, even as a stepping stone for further changes, fail to see education as a vital function of modern society; for them, it is “but another”, or “the most important” sector of modern society.

Earlier, it was held that nothing must escape the process of selection and perfection of the subjects’ qualities; even the most eccentric and seemingly useless faculty can be isolated, developed and nourished. No soul can escape the modern system as there is work to be done, role to be fulfilled for everyone. We are living with the paradox that no one can possibly become forsaken today. But the game has been since long established: ours, is to run, to try to escape, theirs is to catch, mark and bring us back to the range of utility and feasibility. For the sake of clarity, one may distinguish two types of “exits”: one, leading outside the range of the known, recognized qualities, the other is “within”, disintegration of the contours of the defined field of profession, running across the fields that are seemingly divided by an insurmountable gap (the true, original meaning of the word interdisciplinary is to be between disciplines, to belong to a neither!), transforming the old, well recognized and utilized fields faster than the system is capable of reading. In any instance the “exit”, the “escape” consists of crossing, breaking a limit, a barrier (apologies to the great study of Capitalism by Deleuze/Guatarie). But where exactly is this limit in the present case? By escaping the range of recognized, conventional technique and knowledge one is breaking the link between the educational process, the production of specialized working force and the demands of the modern market economy, one becomes useless, the nightmare of the modern age. The barrier is exactly where the “private and public interests meet”, at the junction of modern capitalist production and the complex educational system, the labor market. All education sums to a frightening amount of waste should its fruits become indigestible or poisonous. And there is an inextricable tendency to escape the forms offered by educational institutions, to fail, to fall out of the limits of a certain field, to become something incomprehensible even within the limits of conventional categories.

There is more to education than “becoming a human”, than simple indoctrination of certain types of values and codes. (See for instance Martin Small’s text in Anarchy, 92, 1968, “About Rising Hill”, for reformists, libertarian projects in education, mostly in primary, and comprehensive schools; especially the ideal of grounding the perfect, anti-authoritarian democracy in the educational institutions.) The aim was to show that education is something more than a factory of moral, that it is fundamentally linked to the modern, post-industrial mode of production, that it is cruel not in historically specific instances, methods or institutions, but universally, as a concept, a mechanism of reproducing, or rather, catching up with the swift changes in production, and finally that it cannot be remedied unless seen in relation to the demands of the modern market economy. Like in all spheres of social life, radical change cannot be dictated from outside, while all other conditions remain equal. Experience has shown plainly: it is tendencies, drives, collective and individual, at the same time, that bring forth changes, not declaration, appeals to higher morality or better tomorrows.