Some Prefatory Remarks

In the opening of their most recent book, Declaration, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri put forth a provocative assertion: their text is not a manifesto but, as their title suggests, a declaration, the key distinction being that a manifesto aims to summon something into existence, whether it be a new world or a global subject of opposition. In contrast, for Hardt and Negri (2012), a declaration puts forth “a new set of principles and truths” derived from the already-present desires of the multitude (p. 1). The insight of this inversion proves to be valuable, for it calls on a type of responsiveness to the form and content of social movements that are already occurring. It is a methodological approach that maintains that theory must be responsive to practice. Moreover, it assumes the primacy of a constituent social ontology or what we might regard as an “extra-capitalist commons, the social dark matter of neoliberal society” (Fleming, 2014, p. 7). For the purposes of this chapter, the distinction between a manifesto and a declaration can serve as a helpful starting place to begin thinking about the relationship between pedagogy and the common.

One could make the argument that in Paulo Freire’s (2000) writings we find a similar line of thought in his cautionary remarks about the impatient revolutionary educator who seeks to bypass a form of problem-posing education, opting instead to “utilize the banking method as an interim measure, justified on grounds of expediency” (p. 86). In such a scenario, the impatient educator, like a prophet with a heightened urgency for the revolutionary moment, seeks to guide students along an already-determined, proper path. Here, the educator as prophet verges on the position that “knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing” (p. 72). The cost of this epistemic arrogance is that the educator—as “proprietor of revolutionary wisdom”—denies communion and impairs students’ creative power (pp. 60–61). For Freire, this approach violates what he understands to be a dialogical revolutionary process and, as such, the impatient pedagogy of the manifesto must be understood as a form of banking education. The collective process of inquiry that is so crucial to Freire’s model of problem-posing education is negated in the pedagogy of the manifesto, supplanted by an inexplicable mistrust of the creative and social power of students. Thus, in an effort to liberate, the pedagogy of the manifesto utilizes an instrument of alienation that closes “the dynamic present” in order to summon a “predetermined future” (p. 84).

In this chapter, I consider two readings of Freire that are helpful in pointing the way beyond the pedagogy of the manifesto. Tyson Lewis and Frank Margonis have both extended Freire’s analysis and attempted to counter the most insidious aspects of the pedagogy of the manifesto by reading Freire through a messianic and Levinasian lens, respectively. Moreover, through these readings I try to pinpoint a number of the key tensions that have productively aggravated theories of the common. Namely, in the form of a question, I ask: In what situations might we think of the common as already-here and in what situations might we conceive of it as not-yet? Or, put differently, should the common be imagined as a place of arrival, or one of departure, or perhaps even neither or both? Such explorations are crucial and potentially expand or constrict the ability of theories of the common to mobilize around ongoing struggles, particularly those rooted in forms of identity politics. We might attribute some confusion around these questions to the opening remarks in Multitude, where Hardt and Negri (2004) somewhat enigmatically suggested that the common “is not so much discovered as it is produced” (p. xv). While this rightly safeguards against romantic propositions of recovering the common as if it were an originary subjective essence or an a priori identity, it tends to be dismissive of forms of struggle in which identity politics is a central component, not to mention the edifying forms of biopolitical production that emerge from such struggles. Hardt and Negri offer something of a correction in Commonwealth. There, we find a more nuanced discussion of identity politics, the abolition of identity and the paths to altermodernity—paths that grow out of but also go beyond struggles rooted in the identities of antimodernity. Thus, in their later writings, Hardt and Negri (2009) frequently describe a process of encounter through which “the common is discovered and produced” (p. 256, emphasis mine).

This shift calls for us to be ever-more attentive to the already-here dimensions of the common. To fully accept the common as a point of arrival, however, is to conceal difference and multiplicity. As Gilles Deleuze (1994) has suggested, the emphasis on a fixed identity, and its tendency toward representation, not only conceals difference and multiplicity but obstructs forms of becoming. The problem here is that the biopolitical production of the common may be foreclosed, or, worse yet, tend toward forms that are consistent with capitalist command or the constituted order. Thus while the aim is to move away from a politics fixed on identity, Hardt and Negri (2009), nevertheless, suggest that we cannot preclude the possibility of starting there. In other words, while there is the risk of constraining singularity in the forms of identity, we must not deny or neglect to “build on the promises of the common they mobilize” (p. 164). This raises a number of complications, and suggests that an important task for educational theorists exploring the relationship between pedagogy and the common is to attend to the above questions and the implicit presuppositions contained in our responses.

I try to address these tensions by embracing Lewis’ messianic interpretation of Freire, as well as Margonis’ Levinasian reading, while, at the same time, insisting on the indispensability of a Marxian analysis of the capitalist modes of relation. This latter emphasis allows for an understanding of the expropriating logics of constituted power and, more importantly, acknowledges the forms of biopolitical production that are already here and very much the product, so to speak, of antagonistic struggles with and through forms of identity politics. Moreover, I enthusiastically adopt Lewis’ and Margonis’ suspicion of the prescriptive thrusts of educational projects, whether by calling forth a predetermined type of student subject or guiding students from the improper to the proper. In this way, I follow Lewis (2010) in his skepticism of “the pedagogy of the manifesto,” for it attempts to “dictate proper political action and proper political goals” (p. 244, emphasis mine). It is an approach that risks becoming insensitive to “new forms of revolutionary politics” that are already taking place (Badiou, 2012, p. 3). Similarly, by attempting to be more responsive to the already-here dimensions of the common, I follow Margonis (2008) in thinking that a pedagogical ethics begins with a basic understanding of students as “collective beings, whose abilities to learn and think and act are developed most powerfully when they are positioned within intersubjective spaces that draw out their strengths, bolster their confidence, and call their intelligence to a higher level of attunement” (p. 65). For these reasons and others, I am tempted to extend Lewis’ analysis and cast it on all forms of pedagogy. That is, I am inclined to ask: Can pedagogy ever really escape the problematic tendencies and teleological strivings of the manifesto? Is pedagogy always an exhaustion of potentiality, a depotentiation of the common?

Finally, with these considerations I pivot to Noah De Lissovoy’s insightful essay “Pedagogy in Common,” which explores various iterations of the common: transnational, communicative, postcolonial and ecological. Alongside these constructions, De Lissovoy introduces the idea of the pedagogical common. The concept, however, remains unexplored and is eclipsed by his development of what he calls “pedagogy in common.” While De Lissovoy’s concept of pedagogy in common offers a number of important—and similar—insights that contribute to the idea of the “pedagogical common” that I elaborate here, I want to suggest that these two framings are very different and that the pedagogical common warrants theoretical consideration as a concept in itself. Thus this chapter takes some liberty in exploring an imaginative reading of the unexplored within De Lissovoy’s text.

To develop this concept, I draw from Arjun Appadurai and his distinction between culture and cultural in order to offer a similarly tentative sketch that delineates pedagogy from that which is pedagogical. I suggest that the adjectival form potentially connotes a common dimension that is often concealed in proprietary conceptions of pedagogy. Moreover, pedagogy is often conceived and employed as a technology that is attached to a teleological outcome. Thus, if pedagogy (in its revolutionary form) crudely attempts to bring about a particular type of subject, then attending to that which is pedagogical entails a different type of operation: a collective responsiveness to the already-animated intersubjective spaces that we inhabit. It calls for educational theorists to be attentive to that which is already here, namely constituent forms of life and the productive dimensions of the common. Furthermore, to be attuned to that which is pedagogical is to insist on a conception of “men and women as beings in the process of becoming—as unfinished, uncompleted beings in and with a likewise unfinished reality” (Freire, 2000, p. 84). Finally, it better enables us to appreciate not only what is common about the pedagogical but what is pedagogical about the common.

In what follows, I will suggest that the pedagogical common is an important concept that allows us to explore forms of educational praxis that not only withdrawal from the most insidious pedagogies of the manifesto but the proprietary logics of pedagogy in general. The break from the property relations of pedagogy is a potentially subversive challenge to the logics of coloniality, patriarchy and whiteness that subsume many educational projects, relations and spaces. Moreover, the turn to the pedagogical common opens a horizon for the production of a new political terrain, one in which youth, particularly those most vulnerable in what bell hooks (2003) describes as an “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchal” social order, are understood to be the main protagonists whose collective faculties of living labor and living knowledge nourish new visions of society (p. 1).

Challenging the Pedagogy of the Manifesto

Lewis has suggested that critical pedagogy is strained by prophetic tendencies. Much like Hardt and Negri, what is at stake for Lewis (2010) in the prophet’s message of a time to come is the “closure of the present” (p. 235). The pedagogy of the manifesto too hastily attempts to call forth a particular type of revolutionary subject and thus takes the form of an enclosure that “exhaust[s] potentiality in the form of actuality” (p. 247). Reading against the tendency to situate Freire’s liberation theology in this prophetic tradition, Lewis offers a compelling account of what he refers to as Freire’s messianic moment. Exploring Freire’s (2000) assertion that liberatory education reconciles the teacher–student contradiction in such a way “that both are simultaneously teachers and students,” Lewis proposes that critical pedagogy can be returned to the time of the now—kairòs (p. 72). In Lewis’ (2010) terms, “the messianic reveals an immanence between this world and the future world” (p. 239). The key to this messianic moment is the division of the division that separates teacher and students. The figures of teacher and student are suspended or deactivated, inviting a new space and time of possibility and allowing unforeseen ways of being and relating in the world that are otherwise foreclosed in the traditional student–teacher relation. In other words, this division of the division produces a remnant—a moment and zone of indistinction. The teacher as not teacher—but also as not student—is in communion with students as not students, ultimately rendering inoperative the student–teacher relation that is characteristic of banking education.

In this new space of potentiality, the corrupt script of constituted power is set aside: the archetypal and hierarchical ordering so recognizable in classroom settings is challenged by an authority that “becomes authorial through its deactivation” (p. 243). Drawing from Jacques Rancière, Lewis suggests that we read Freire’s spatial remnant as an atopia—“an immanent space of displacement and defamiliarization where individuals no longer know who they are because hierarchies and subject positions are suspended through dialogue” (pp. 245–246). The dwelling place of this atopia is one of open potentiality that—in stark contrast to the pedagogy of the manifesto—conceives of education as a pure means without end. Moreover, the becoming subject of this education is not preconfigured a priori but emerges or becomes imperceptible through this dialogical activity. This process gives new meaning to Freire’s (2000) conception of education as a common event, where “knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other” (p. 72). In this way, the temporal (kairòs) and spatial (atopia) dimensions that Freire invites offer a new foundation for the biopolitical production of the common.

Alongside Lewis, there is another re-reading of Freire that is worth considering here. In attending to the “relational closures” characteristic of student–teacher relations—particularly those strained by colonial logics—Margonis (2007) considers the reconciliation of two traditions typically understood to be bound in opposition (p. 176). On the one hand, there is the traditional Marxian emphasis of Freire. This is a mode of analysis that strives to overcome the relational gulf, and particularly the capitalist mode of relation that produces a chasm between the oppressors and the oppressed. On the other hand, from the vantage point of the Levinasian tradition, to assume a category such as “the oppressed” is an immediate act of violence, given that this tradition asserts the Other to be unknowable prior to face-to-face encounters. Thus a Levinasian approach to pedagogical relations posits that Marxian frameworks—by assuming a subordinate positionality of the Other—enact a relational closure that short-circuits pedagogical and ethical possibilities.

Similar to the messianic moments that Lewis suggests are made possible in the space of atopia, Margonis proposes that the Levinasian event is an invitation into the open, “to those moments of pedagogical exchange where teachers and students lose their scripts and anxiously search for the best ways to respond to one another” (p. 180). For Margonis, this ethics has the potential to produce a powerful intersubjective space where the preplanned aims of the pedagogy of the manifesto are discarded in favor of a Levinasian form of welcoming that refuses totalizing and finite descriptions of students. This Levinasian ethics can aid critical pedagogy and disrupt the “economy of the revolutionary narrative” that “predetermines what the critical teacher can hear and see in her engagement with students” (Margonis, 2008, p. 66). As such, it allows for the elements of mystery and surprise, creating an opening to valorize subjugated knowledges, while also producing new knowledges that might otherwise not find expression. Thus in jettisoning the prescriptive revolutionary narrative, one can be attentive to “the embodied dynamics of the educational relationship—the traits of students and teachers which are already there” (Margonis, 1999, p. 105; emphasis mine).

Here, however, we stumble upon some of the key tensions identified earlier: the question of whether we imagine the common as already-here or not-yet. Moreover, should the common be imagined as a place of arrival, or one of departure? Or, perhaps neither or both? Margonis’ exploration of Freire’s educational thought provides some helpful insights to consider such questions. By exploring a pedagogical ethics that is at once imbued with a Levinasian openness and also attuned to “the social, political, and existential dynamics of relational closures,” Margonis (2007) posits a formulation that begins to displace the oppositions between unity and plurality and form and content that potentially muddle our understandings of the common (p. 176). Instead, we arrive at a pedagogical conception of the common that acknowledges its dual dimension: Our communication, collaboration, and cooperation, furthermore, not only are based on the common that exists but also in turn produce the common (Hardt & Negri, 2004, p. 128). The common, then, is already-here and not-yet, already targeted by and exceeding the logics of expropriation and, at the same time, an indiscernible condition of potentiality in the form of the as not or not-yet.

If it is the case, however, that we are to read Freire through a messianic and/or Levinasian lens, it is likewise the case, as Margonis (2007) suggests, that within Freire we can also find the critiques that force us to attend to the limitations and “very real constraints” that accompany these readings (p. 181). Simply put, the colonial, gendered and racial asymmetries of the constituted order inescapably pervade educational spaces. While one can aim to suspend these relations, this is not easily achieved nor is to desirable to gloss over the epistemological remainder that such asymmetries produce. That is, the “subjugated knowledges” and standpoints that take form from such asymmetries must not only be validated but they must play a crucial role in undermining the logics and knowledge of an imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchal system while leading the way in imagining and valuing alternative ways of being that violate this constituted order (Collins, 2000, p. 251). In other words, the desire to read Freire through either a messianic or Levinasian filter must be strongly tempered by a recognition of “the adversarial field of classroom relationships” (Margonis, 2007, p. 181). We might think of such relationships as relational closures of the common that infect educational spaces, constrain singularity, and often crystallize representational forms of identity. Following Margonis (1999)—who does not merely reconcile a Levinasian ethics with a Marxian mode of analysis, but more importantly makes us aware of how they can both inform a pedagogical ethics—I propose to engage in a generous and creative re-reading through which we acknowledge that “one of the distinctive strengths of Freire’s relational perspective is the capacity to capture both the dynamics of the face-to-face encounter and the ways in which microscopic relationships are partly constituted by sociological and political institutions” (p. 102, emphasis mine). It is with this task in mind that I attempt to elaborate the concept of the pedagogical common.

The Pedagogical

In Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Appadurai develops an important distinction between culture (the noun) and cultural (the adjective). In Appadurai’s (1996) view, “much of the problem with the noun form has to do with its implication that culture is some kind of object, thing, or substance” (p. 12). Here, culture falls into a trap. It appears as a fixed, settled substance—a property. In this regard, the term culture takes on a conceptual form that tends to obscure difference, friction and, ultimately, operations of power. The dimensions of difference only emerge through the adjectival use, cultural, to indicate, for instance, that something has a cultural dimension. Starting from this concern for difference and contestation, Appadurai elaborates on how the term culture develops and delimits certain understandings:

culture is not usefully regarded as a substance but is better regarded as a dimension that attends to a situated and embodied difference. Stressing the dimensionality of culture rather than its substantiality permits our thinking of culture less as a property of individuals and groups and more as a heuristic device that we can use to talk about difference. (pp. 12–13)

Immediately, we can follow Appadurai’s lead and establish some useful distinctions between pedagogy and pedagogical. Pedagogy, as a noun, connotes a sort of fixed substance that one possesses or employs, often—but not always—independent of any consideration of context. Some have sought to account for context with the idea of a situated pedagogy but this fails to address the proprietary assumptions about pedagogy in the first place, for it still assumes that pedagogy is a technology to be employed by the educator as owner.

Such proprietary assumptions are difficult to shed. We might even say that there seems to be a proprietary logic that is endemic to the very term, making it incomprehensible outside of a relationship to an owner with deliberate end goals. For instance, it is not uncommon for prospective and practicing educators to be queried: “What can you tell me about your pedagogy?” Such questions assume an asymmetrical educational relationship where the educator is the proprietor of a particular pedagogy which can be wielded to produce a predetermined learning outcome or, in the case of the impatient revolutionary educator, a predetermined student subject. What is at stake here, closely orbiting questions of ownership, are struggles concerning the uneven terrain of knowledge validation and the widespread dismissal of some populations as “agents of knowledge” (Collins, 2000, p. 266). Thus struggles materialize not just for “the right to learn but also the authority to know” (De Lissovoy, Means, & Saltman, 2015, p. 73). If an embrace of pedagogy secretes a form of banking education, then it also mobilizes the capitalist modes of relation along with it. This point better allows us to understand institutions of schooling as “a key space of conflict, where the ownership of knowledge, the reproduction of the labor force, and the creation of social and cultural stratifications are all at stake” (Caffentzis & Federici, 2009, p. 125).

The adjective pedagogical, however, immediately calls our attention to difference, disrupting the proprietary dimensions that are associated with the noun use of pedagogy. For instance, we could say that something has a pedagogical dimension, stressing “the idea of situated difference in relation to something local, embodied, and significant” (p. 12). Similar to Appadurai’s adjectival use of culture, the adjectival use of pedagogical permits a way of thinking that is less about an educator as proprietor and, instead, points us toward a recognition of the differences, dissonances and asymmetries that pervade the contexts we inherit and navigate. In other words, it may be the case that our continued use of pedagogy as a noun not only forecloses an alternative future but it also tends to conceal. What is concealed are pedagogical dimensions that already animate a particular educational space.

This concealment, if unexplored, has grave consequences, for education unfolds in something akin to what Margonis calls social fields. Such fields are alive with forces, and are animated by subjects who are thrust into intersubjective relation with others. Educators, then, would be wise to ask, “What are the pedagogical dimensions of the social fields that we inherit and inadvertently inhabit?” Considering this question would entail, as Margonis (2011) points out, “Viewing educational spaces as social fields with rhythms and patterns of communication allow[ing] us to assess the dynamism of the educational relationships in play” (p. 437). In this way, social fields precede us and pervade our interactions. We enter into them and inherit their histories, values, logics and rationalities. Hence, all education unfolds on a particular social and political terrain, within a particular field. This is the inescapable reality that Freire’s Marxian analysis never allows us to jettison. This means that the pursuit of knowledge and education—the biopolitical production of the common—can never be a neutral endeavor. Given that the social logics of white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy and imperialism have been so durable despite varying degrees of contestation, what W. E. B. Du Bois (2002) called “deep education” remains, for many, a dangerous, collective, liberatory and subversive act (p. 72). It is necessarily a clash with constituted power. This is so because, as Jose Medina (2013) claims, “Social injustices breed epistemic injustices” (p. 27). In other words, if social injustices persist—and they certainly do—then epistemic injustices engulf social fields, further contributing to the devaluation of subjugated knowledges while bolstering “processes whereby some lives and forms of life are made more or less valuable than others” (Means, 2013, p. 18).

Needless to say, given this asymmetrical “topography of exploitation,” the relation of the common to capitalist command takes different forms (Hardt & Negri, 2004, p. 151). Indeed, as Hardt and Negri (2004) suggest, “the logic of exploitation … is not by any means the same for everyone” and “we should recognize that this implies divisions of labor that correspond to geographical, racial, and gender hierarchies” (p. 151). Perhaps the uneven unfolding of the logics of expropriation and exploitation for different populations is best understood by grasping capital’s dual relationship with the common. That is, the common is both a source and threat for capital, which is “vampire-like,” for it “lives only by sucking living labour” (Marx, 1976, p. 342). Clayton Pierce (2013) offers a thorough account of how this plays out educationally in a process he refers to as extractive schooling, through which “educational vitality has become a mineable good” (p. 3). In this process it is a rather banal or benign form of the common that capitalist command seeks to proliferate. For the most part, as Gigi Roggero (2010) explains, such a form of extractive schooling abides by “upstream” logics of capital, whereby “the act of accumulation, the capture of the value produced in common by living labor/knowledge, takes place more and more at the end of the cycle” (p. 359). Here, capital kindles the common with the aim of expropriating its productivity.

Opposite of this type of kindling, however, capitalist command also has a more arsonous relation to the common. If for some populations there is an expropriation of the common at the end of a cycle, for others—those “dangerous classes from the perspective of the forces of order”—there is a preemptive enclosure or clearing of the common early in its life cycle, or even when it is in embryonic form (Hardt & Negri, 2012, p. 23). This type of fire to the common does not aim to expropriate its productivity but to suffocate its biopolitical production and burn its subversive character to the ground. This is exemplified quite clearly in Alex Means’ (2013) critical ethnography, Schooling in the Age of Austerity: Urban Education and the Struggle for Democratic Life, in which the school functions as an apparatus of enclosure that circumvents opportunities for students of color to be, interact, and produce educational life “in common with others” (p. 29). For instance, dress codes, scripted curricula, surveillance, the school-to-prison pipeline, and other policies and practices of disposability operate in this fashion to preemptively enclose the common and arrest biopolitical production.

By being attentive to asymmetries of power, enduring colonial legacies, and the uneven logics of expropriation and exploitation, we could say that the educator begins with an attentiveness to the pedagogical, that is, with an attentiveness to the rivaling epistemic and ontological tensions that already animate educational spaces. To be clear, the pedagogical—returned to noun form—is that which is inherited and therefore must be unveiled and attended to with responsibility. It is always already acting on us and we must constantly discern its unfolding logics and confront the ways in which they are sustained. However, there is another dimension of the pedagogical that reveals itself here—the pedagogical common—and we must attend to it “from a position of receptivity,” for doing so may offer a way to counter the logics of disposability described above (Margonis, 2008, p. 65).

The Surplus of the Pedagogical Common

In the metamorphosis from noun form (pedagogy) to adjectival form (pedagogical), and back to noun form (the pedagogical), something significant occurs: the pedagogical sheds its proprietary dimensions. Such a shift gestures toward a process of “transforming that which was once private property into that which belongs to no one” (Lewis, 2012, p. 847). This is significant because the pedagogical, as a noun, acquires a dual meaning. On the one hand, as suggested above, it connotes a social field of constituted power. Attending to this dimension of the pedagogical allows one to retain a Marxian analysis that is necessary to identify logics of exploitation and abolish capitalist modes and hierarchies of relation. On the other hand, by jettisoning proprietary dimensions, the pedagogical is immediately relational and thus becomes a key site of the common—a collective and intersubjective site of biopolitical production. Thus while the pedagogical is a social field that is imbued with the dynamics of constituted power, we can also say that such pedagogical social fields are always-in-formation, unsettled and contested. Moreover, I would propose that the common is the constitutive motor, the foundation of the pedagogical, while constituted power merely emerges as an apparatus of capture. This autonomist formulation places certain responsibilities on educators that are easily elided when pedagogy is relied on as a technology, for in attending to the pedagogical—in noun form, as a concrete situation (a here and now) of a particular social field—one is simultaneously engaging the frictional undercurrents of the common and the reactionary rhythms and patterns of constituted power.

Ultimately, I want to suggest that a collective attentiveness to the pedagogical is a crucial component of what Margonis (1999) refers to as a “pedagogical ethics” (p. 105). Such an attentiveness is a necessary step to appreciate the generative aspects of the common. Attending to the pedagogical might begin with some very basic questions: What are the hierarchies that are presumed to operate in this social field? What ways of knowing and thinking are valued or devalued in this field? What are the investments that particular groups have in the unfolding of knowledge production in this space? While educators must perpetually wrestle with such questions, it is important to invite students to collectively engage in these inquiries as well and, moreover, to recognize the ways in which youth are already wrestling with such questions. The point here, then, is not for educators to be the ones that ask these questions or pose problems. This paternalistic type of educational relationship should be problematized. Many students already confront such questions on a daily basis while doing the difficult labor of valorizing subjugated knowledges and inventively violating the codes of constituted power. But educators do have a responsibility to allow for and foster educational openings or events that, rather than leading to a particular end, affirm perspectives and ways of being that can initiate new beginnings and allow for the indeterminacy of “a new thing,” emerging “into an old world” (Arendt, 1963, p. 193).

Not surprisingly, Freire provides partial insights about what it might mean to attend to the pedagogical. Through a collective process of posing the “‘class as a text’” to be read, Freire (2005) suggests that the class can arrive at “a new understanding of itself,” leading “to the production of new knowledge about itself, through a better understanding of its previous knowledge” (p. 90). As Freire describes it, this process of knowledge production starts with concrete realities, but is ultimately open-ended. This reading of the educational space itself and its absent-presences, along with the collective body that inhabits it, cultivates unanticipated forms of imagination and offers a “new understanding of teaching and learning, and of discovery” (p. 96). In fact, this section of Freire’s text, Teachers as Cultural Workers, may offer some of the best clues for how both Levinasian and Marxian traditions can, together, inform a pedagogical ethics. Moreover, it also reveals that Freire was very much attuned to the dimensions of the pedagogical common, for he sought to violate, at every step, “the claim to ownership” over educational spaces (p. 95). For Freire, the educational space stripped of proprietary dimensions is always common and in formation because, as Roggero (2011) puts it, the knowledge produced in and through the pedagogical common is “embodied in living labor, its production, and its struggles” (p. 8).

Thus we might be well served to read Freire not as a technician of pedagogy but as an astute observer of the pedagogical. Moreover, we might creatively read Freire as a theorist of the common who offered numerous clues about the common dimensions of the pedagogical and the pedagogical dimensions of the common. In this view, communion is one of his central concepts, albeit one that remains underdeveloped and, as such, open to reinvention. What is clear, however, is that communion is pivotal for Freire because it is a precondition for forms of biopolitical production. But if communion does not appear prominently in Freire’s (2000) writings or if it seems to fade at times in his analysis, it is largely because he so keenly discerned the machinations and parasitic tendencies of a “praxis of domination” (p. 126). He painstakingly focuses on the ways in which constituted power and capitalist command seek to eradicate the biopolitical production and processes of natality that communion engenders. Reading Freire through an autonomist framework, we could say that a praxis of domination emerges to preempt actors in intercommunication laboring through common problems (p. 129). His concern for communion, then, ends up taking form in a detailed analysis of its opposite, a praxis of domination, or what we could call enclosures, the “historical antonym and nemesis” of the common (Linebaugh, 2014, p. 1).

Still, it may be that Freire offers some of the best clues about the questions I posed earlier: is the common already-here or not-yet? Is it a point of arrival or one of departure? In one of his most dynamic passages that illuminates his understanding of the pedagogical dimensions of the common, Freire (2000) writes, “we cannot say that in the process of revolution someone liberates someone else, nor yet that someone liberates himself, but rather that human beings in communion liberate each other” (p. 133). Here, Freire reveals the biopolitical and pedagogical dimensions of the common. Such an insight takes on new meaning, however, when we pair it with Hardt and Negri’s (2009) elaboration of the distinction between emancipation and liberation: “whereas emancipation strives for freedom of identity, the freedom to be who you really are, liberation aims at the freedom of self-determination and self-transformation, the freedom to determine what you can become” (p. 331). 1 Freire’s invitation to continuously reinvent and re-read his ideas creates the possibility for an interesting interpretation of these passages. Either that, or we discover that Freire was way ahead of his time. As it goes: just when we think we are past Freire, we find him again, ahead of us. In either event, these passages help us understand the dual dimension of the common: it is discovered and produced; it is a product, but also a precondition. Moreover, Freire indicates that this process of liberation, of becoming, is a collective endeavor, a production of the common that produces a new common. This could be thought about as a form of exodus in common that “requires taking control of the production of subjectivity” (Hardt & Negri, 2009, p. 332). Such a move amounts to what Lewis (2012) refers to as a de-appropriation of the commonwealth “in the name of the creative and productive powers of the multitude” (p. 846). Interestingly, however, we might make the case that Freire shows that this pathway to altermodernity can start with the identities of antimodernity. For Freire, this doesn’t necessarily have to result in the foreclosure of ethical and pedagogical possibilities and it doesn’t necessarily stunt the possibilities for new subjects to emerge.

Key to this process is that such a de-appropriation takes form as a unique type of disaccumulation. If, as Silvia Federici (2004) notes, “primitive accumulation has been above all an accumulation of differences, inequalities, hierarchies, divisions, which have alienated workers from each other and even from themselves,” then disaccumulation might involve the dissolution and abolition of such tendencies. Thus disaccumulation and communion are joint processes to labor through, but for such processes to be pedagogical, the conception of communion with which we start must be one that allows for distance and mystery to remain. It must be a tenuous notion of communion that calls into question totalizing and finite constructions of identity. Singularities have to remain. Thus communion cannot be an untroubled point of arrival; it must be both questioned and explored. In this way, we could think of communion as a tentative staging ground for the expression of grievances, where singularities explore what they share in common and what they do not, ultimately laboring toward some type of disaccumulation—a destituent project of the abolition of capital and its modes of relation. Accompanying this, there must be the constituent project of common-valorization or what Hardt and Negri (2009) refer to as “the accumulation of the common,” meaning “not so much that we have more ideas, more images, more affects, and so forth but, more important, that our powers and senses increase: our powers to think, to feel, to see, to relate to one another, to love” (p. 283). It is these two projects that subtend the pedagogical common and they must be conceived as joint processes.

To attend to the pedagogical common is, inescapably, to attend to and dwell in friction. Approaches that mitigate this friction have sought to absorb, channel, contain, or eradicate the constituent dimensions and biopolitical production of subjugated knowledges. In general, one could say that schools have sought to manage or “deal with” subjugated knowledges, while progressive educators have routinely attempted to “care for” them by harnessing them into a more proper form. Rather than seeking to rush beyond this friction, educators must attend to the pedagogical common in such a way as to dwell in it and allow for forms of contestation to remain open. This would involve adopting what Enrique Dussel (2008) calls a negative or critical ethics, one that starts from the standpoint of the “victims of the prevailing political system” (p. 78). In a similar vein, educators must embrace a “materialist reconceptualization of suffering” that understands that the experiences of the most vulnerable “offer pathways to distinctive understandings of suffering that serve as the speculative blueprints for new forms of humanity, which are defined above all by overdetermined conjurings of freedom” (Weheliye, 2014, p. 14). In dwelling in these frictions—by appreciating the indeterminacy of the pedagogical common—educators allow for forms of biopolitical production to initiate and reanimate an insurgent education and politics of transfiguration.

Finally, as mentioned earlier, De Lissovoy’s discussion of a pedagogy in common develops similar ideas to those elaborated here—ideas that should inform the development of the pedagogical common. Like Lewis and Margonis, De Lissovoy (2011) calls for “a similar unraveling of the authoritative figure of the teacher, and a similar discovery of the power and intelligence of the group, which is at the same time a recognition of the agency and autonomy of students themselves” (p. 1126). What is particularly powerful about De Lissovoy’s notion of pedagogy in common is that it is one of the few models that allows for the possibility of the not-yet common through “a utopian political project,” but does not abandon the task of imagining forms of education that are responsive to the common that is already here (p. 1125). Thus, De Lissovoy rightfully calls for a type of interaction “that not only recognizes the validity of students’ agency and knowledge, but also absolutely depends upon them, not as settled powers but rather as open-ended processes and potentialities” (p. 1131). The turn away from pedagogy to the pedagogical is intended to forefront these aspects of De Lissovoy’s ideas and to challenge more directly the proprietary dimensions and capitalist modes of relation that are endemic to pedagogy; to dispense with a particular type of certainty—the teleological striving—of pedagogy. Ultimately, in breaking with pedagogy, and particularly the most insidious pedagogies of the manifesto, the turn to that which is pedagogical is a disavowal of capital and the relations and forms of life that sustain it. As a form of exodus from pedagogy—from the capitalist modes of relation—an attentiveness to the pedagogical is an invitation to further rethink common production, relations and ways of being.

By honing in on the two dimensions of the pedagogical common, we can begin the project of conceiving educational spaces as sites of production and discovery or, alternately, experimentation and exploration. By avoiding prescriptive thrusts and being responsive to the pedagogical common, education becomes a form of exploration: a means without end. Thus like Walt Whitman’s poetry of the future, conceiving of the pedagogical common as a site of experimentation and exploration desires “to arouse and initiate more than to define or finish” (p. 202). In this form of refusal—the refusal to constitute—the pedagogical common is both constituent, in the sense that new subjectivities emerge, and destituent, in that it necessarily strives to dissolve the precepts and operations of constituted power. As a form of experimentation that allows something new to make an appearance in the world, education unfolds as a process of self-valorization in which students can violate the constituted and enclosed time, space and aims of schooling while producing a surplus common, a permanent excess that continuously escapes capitalist command and colonial logics. The pedagogy of the manifesto, obviously, will not suffice here, and it may be that pedagogy itself is too troubled by its proprietary associations. An alternative educational logic of the pedagogical common may indeed be the only way to be responsive to the surplus common and its declaration to construct another possible world.

Note

  1. 1.

    It is worth noting that, as life itself is put to work in the age of biocapitalism, the idea of emancipation—the freedom to be who you really are—more and more becomes an injunction to “just be yourself.” As Carl Cederström and Peter Fleming (2012) note, capitalism necessarily depends on forms of life that it cannot replicate and therefore “the demand to ‘just be yourself’” increasingly resembles biocapitalism’s “cunning way of capturing the much needed sociality” of the common (p. 17).