On the Educational Potentiality of Disinterpellation

• In Event: Education and Counterinterpellation: A New Look at Louis Althusser

Abstract

Althusser's theory of interpellation and the Institutional State Apparatus (ISA) has had an important role to play in structuralist Marxist theories of educational reproduction (Morrow & Torres 1995). Whereas Althusser (2014) argues that ISAs--including the school as the dominant ISA in contemporary society--function to interpellate individuals into subjects of capitalism, Giorgio Agamben (2009) has recently suggested that ISAs now function to dis-interpellate subjects. For example, instead of providing a subject position that is meaningfully oriented toward certain kinds of practices, ISAs merely reduce individuals to abstract numbers without existential destination. In education, T. E. Lewis (2006) has explored this idea in relation to lock-down procedures, in school suspensions, and increasing push-out rates. In all cases the school does not function to make students subjects but rather traumatizes and excludes certain students--especially poor students of color--from taking up functional roles within the information economy. Thus, the school is, as Lewis argues, a state of exception that excludes rather than includes a significant portion of the student population.
In this paper, I argue that the solution to the problem of dis-interpellation does not lie in returning to a more functional form of interpellation. Nor does it lie in a new notion of counter-interpellation. Both rest on an unexamined educational assumption: that students are learners.
Dis- and counter-interpellation share a reliance upon the logic of learning which always orients students toward predefined outcomes with measurable success conditions. For students who do not have the ability to measure up, exclusion awaits.
A real state of exception for education does not return to a new model of interpellation so much as propose a redemption of dis-interpellation. Rather than a form of dis-interpellation from above (which results in traumatized students pushed out from school), the challenge is to think a positive form of dis-interpellative practice from below that interrupts and suspends both the inclusion of students as subjects of capital and their exclusion as economic deadweight. This would be a new notion of educational dis-interpellation, which does not rest on the logic of learning.
In conclusion I propose that the practice of studying is a positive form of educational dis-interpellation. Again drawing on Agamben's work on study (1995), I argue for a Marxist form of educational practice that does not merely interpellate or counter-interpellate but rather dis-interpellates students, freeing them from destination without guarantee. Stated in Marxist terminology, they are free to experience their potentiality to labor-and-not-to-labor simultaneously. In this sense, I return to the original impetus of critical pedagogy as an attempt to find educational forms that disrupt relations of inclusion/exclusion.

References
Agamben. G. (1995). Idea of Prose. New York: SUNY Press.

Agamben, G. (2009). What is an Apparatus? Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Althusser, L. (2014). On the Reproduction of Capitalism. London: Verso.

Lewis, T.E. (2006). “The School as an Exceptional Space: Rethinking Education from the Perspective of the Biopedagogical,”Educational Theory 56(2): 159-176.

Torres, C.A., and Morrow, R.A. (1995). Social Theory and Education. New York: SUNY Press.

Author

• Tyson E. Lewis, University of North Texas