Politics and Pedagogy in the Age of Digital Reason: From Party to Party

• In Event: Learning in the Age of Digital Reason: Reinventing Dialogue

Abstract

Petar Jandrić (2017) opens his book, Learning in the Age of Digital Reason by stating his desire to “throw a party” (p. xi). His guests would be “everybody who wants to say something about human learning in the age of digital reason.” Such a real-life party isn’t in the cards, and so he offers his book, which consists of a series of conversations he has had with friends (new and old) about digital learning, in lieu. The book does indeed take on a party-like atmosphere: there are multiple unique overlapping conversations that nonetheless address certain common themes, there is a genuine desire for communication, a feeling of fun amidst the academic citations and political banter, and, like any good party, the book is exhausted without any hard and fast conclusions (and indeed, without any concluding remarks from the author himself). In this presentation, I show that, while such parties are indeed necessary in the age of digital reason, they present urgent political limits that must be addressed.
After demonstrating why and how the book takes on the aura of a party, I introduce the concept of “communicative capitalism” (e.g., Dean, 2009; De Lissovoy, 2015). This term names the contemporary confluence of capitalist economics, democratic politics, and digital networked technologies. The democratic ideals of access, participation, inclusion, diversity, transparency, and critique become actualized through capitalist technological infrastructure. New forms of communication technology increase the possibility of democratic participation and discussion by bringing more people into conversation with each other. In such a setting, what is lacking politically is not the absence of conversation or participation, but rather than absence of the antagonism that makes political struggle possible. In other words, the problem is not that one can’t have or express dissenting viewpoints, but that this dissent isn’t able to be mobilized against the contemporary order.
To address this problem, I propose that we move from the party to the Party, or from the convivial party that Jandrić’s book embodies to the political organization form of the Communist Party. Using the work of Georg Lukacs (1971) and Jodi Dean (2016), in conjunction with autobiographical information of American communists (Gornick, 1977; Mischler, 1999; Kaplan & Shapiro, 1998), I argue that the two kinds of party bear an intimate connection, and that Jandrić’s party is a pre-requisite for the Communist Party, which ultimately serves to organize and mobilize the conviviality into a political force capable of winning power.

References
Dean, J. (2009). Democracy and other neoliberal fantasies: Comnmunicative capitalism and left politics. Durham: Duke University Press.
Dean, J. (2016). Crowds and Party. New York: Verso.
Gornick, V. (1977). The romance of American communism. New York: Basic Books.
Jandrić, P. (2017). Learning in the Age of Digital Reason. Rotterdam: Sense.
Kaplan, J., & Shapiro, L. (1998). Red diapers: Growing up in the communist left. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Mischler, P.C. (1999). Raising reds: The Young Pioneers, radical summer camps, and communist political culture in the United States. New York: Colombia University Press.

Author

• Derek R. Ford, DePauw University