Critical Studies in Education, 2014 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2014.903502

Educational commons and the new radical democratic imaginary Alexander J. Means* Social and Psychological Foundations of Education, State University of New York, Buffalo State, Buffalo, USA

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(Received 7 February 2014; accepted 8 March 2014) This article reflects on emergent (radical-progressive) languages of democracy to consider what common educational institutions might mean today. It explores distinct philosophical and political tensions that cut across these languages in relation to educational organization and pedagogy including – antagonism versus exodus, transcendence versus immanence, pluralism versus multiplicity, democracy versus communism. In contrast to other theorists in education who have tended to privilege certain conceptual positions in these debates to address a wide range of educational issues, the author argues that these tensions should be read selectively and generatively for linking political questions concerning democracy to educational transformation. In conclusion, the article calls for a language of insurrectional democracy that integrates aspects of each approach and where strategic engagements with, and creative lines of flight out of, public institutions and the State play a role in reimagining a common education for a democratic society to come. Keywords: educational reconstruction; post-politics; radical democracy; social transformation; the common

Introduction The name democracy covers ambiguities which are so considerable as to make its use almost impossible without declaring in which sense it is used, especially in a period where the most questionable actions, ethically and politically, are performed in the name of democracy (but was it ever really different?). And if it is certainly not the case that clarifying the history and functions of the name democracy by itself produces any political effect which changes the order of things in the world, it is perhaps the case, negatively, that without such a clarification, no progressive politics can be waged. In order to change the world, one needs to interpret it: which means interpreting its (many) languages. (Balibar, 2008, p. 524)

In recent years, there has been a reinvigoration of progressive political engagement and action around educational issues. From Oaxaca, Montreal, Chicago, London, Santiago, to Madrid – coalitions of parents, students, educators, and activists have sought to confront and challenge the intensification of privatization and austerity in public education through occupations of educational spaces, educational strikes, testing boycotts, and mass demonstrations. A central challenge for educational theorists and activists has been how to reconcile the need to defend and strengthen public educational institutions while simultaneously trying to find a new language and set of principles from which to reimagine these institutions in ways that do not reproduce their historical and/or present limitations. The question posed with increasing frequency is: How might we reconstruct common *Email: [email protected] © 2014 Taylor & Francis

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educational institutions against their imaginative and political enclosure?1 In order to approach this question, I follow Balibar’s call in the epigraph above by critically reflecting on three emergent (radical-progressive) languages of democracy – (1) Radical Democracy, (2) Absolute Democracy, and (3) Communist Democracy.2 I explore distinct philosophical and political tensions that cut across these languages in relation to educational organization and pedagogy (antagonism versus exodus, transcendence versus immanence, radical pluralism versus multiplicity, democracy versus communism). In contrast to other theorists in education who have tended to privilege certain conceptual positions in these debates to address a wide range of educational issues, I argue that these tensions should be read selectively and generatively for linking political questions concerning democracy to educational transformation. This reading will enable a reconceptualization of the value public education not as a private commodity or a State asset, but as a commons that should ideally be oriented to the diverse needs and aspirations of plural communities. As such, in the final section of the paper, I call for an integrative language of insurrectional democracy where strategic engagements with, and creative lines of flight out of, public institutions and the State play a role in reimagining a common education for a democratic society to come.3 Radical democracy – common action for equaliberty Étienne Balibar (2008) has suggested that democracy is an almost impossibly ambiguous term. Part of this ambiguity can be traced to semantic tensions found in its early Greek and Roman articulations. Balibar observes that ‘in Greek the name of the citizen, politis, and his quality or capacity, politeia, derive from the name of the city, polis’. This contrasts to Latin where ‘the name of the city, civitas, with its internal constitution or system of rights, derives from the name of the citizen, civis’ (p. 523). Thus, in Greek, citizens and their qualities appear as expressions of the city, whereas in Latin, the city appears as an expression of ‘the common action or interaction of the citizens’ (p. 523). Balibar observes that the relationship between the citizen and the city in the Greek and Roman traditions was not quite as neat as these philological distinctions might suggest. However, for Balibar, these opposing perspectives on the city and citizen nonetheless raise fundamental tensions and aporias concerning ‘the kind of ‘space’, abstract and concrete, or sensible, in which the citizens act as a community, and the extent to which the membership in the community is something that is imposed on the citizens, ascribed to them or simply inherited by them, or something that they create and permanently recreate through their common action’ (p. 524). Balibar notes that in Greek the cognate for democracy, demokratia, was a term used to describe the disruptive and anarchic element brought into the aristocratic city when the people, or demos, exercised or enacted their common power. For Balibar, it is this expression of ‘common action’ and the ‘becoming common of action’ of the people to make and remake the political community – a process that always reflects and enacts fundamental divisions of the common – that defines the essence of democracy. This fidelity to the power and universal capacity of the demos to engage and participate directly in political life is a basic presupposition held by those who advocate for some form of radical democracy today. These perspectives contest a view of democracy as a constitutional or juridical-legal ‘model’ that can simply be ‘applied’ to a given space or territory. They also reject expressions of democracy as an ‘ideology’ that has frequently served to suppress democratic energies and legitimate imperial forms of rule (this includes a neoliberal consensus on democracy and its ideological fantasy of a

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post-political order beyond history). Radical democrats have instead built on strains of democratic socialism articulated in the 1950s–1960s by French intellectuals Claude Lefort, Cornelius Castoriadis, and others associated with the journal Socialisme ou Barbarie. Lefort’s ideas have been particularly influential. Lefort (1999) sought to reconnect democratic theory to a notion of the political (le politique) as a symbolicmaterial order defined by eradicable antagonisms and indeterminacies that form the constitutive ground of politics (la politique). These divisions and contingencies at the heart of the political, which Lefort refers to as the ‘empty space of power’, cannot be overcome without effacing the necessarily indefinite nature of democracy itself. These ideas were central to the notion of radical democracy later developed by Laclau and Mouffe (2001) in their seminal Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Like Lefort, Laclau and Mouffe argue that deepening the democratic revolution (the emancipatory promise of modernity) means retaining and reimagining elements of the liberal-democratic and socialist traditions while opposing the antidemocratic tendencies of twentieth-century liberalism(s) and communism(s). This requires abandoning what they refer to as the ‘Jacobin imaginary’ defined by vanguardism, the centering of the working class as the privileged agent of history, essentialist forms of individual and collective identity, and the dream of a final reconciliation of views and/or teleological culmination in politics. For Laclau and Mouffe, radical democracy consists of building ‘chains of equivalence’ across a proliferation of democratic struggles reflective of the new social movements of the late twentieth century including labor, feminist, antiracist, and LGTBQ struggles. Drawing on the legacy of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci and the poststructuralism of Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida, radical democracy is imagined as an ongoing antagonistic process for achieving a hegemonic bloc that is antiessentialist and radically plural. Laclau and Mouffe argue that the content and identity of such social movements can only emerge through a process of extending the values of democracy (freedom and equality) to ever-new domains of social life and by raising particular demands to the status of the universal. This is not a transcendent vision of universality, but a universality that is contested, subject to power relations, and is always open to new articulations. Thus, for Laclau and Mouffe, the radical democratic imaginary is inherently contingent. It can never achieve an ultimate resolution. It can never escape power or antagonism. Yet, it always exceeds enclosure. The perspectives of Laclau and Mouffe have been widely influential across the social sciences and humanities including in education, where they have had a significant impact on critical education studies since the 1990s (see Giroux (1997, 2005, 2011), Lummis (1996) and Trend (1996)). This is understandable considering radical democracy affirms two foundational claims guiding almost all progressive approaches to education. The first is that education is inherently political – that is, as an institution and a complex social process, education is intimately connected to conflicts over values, knowledge, and visions of the future. Radical democrats thus view public educational institutions as locations of common struggle, where social antagonisms and dominant forms of knowledge and power are (re)produced and challenged. The second is that education, in terms of its organization and in terms of pedagogy, should both mirror and work to serve democratic principles and deepen democratic social relations. For radical democrats, as with critical pedagogues, this is meant not as a means to incorporate students into the given material and symbolic order, but to create the conditions in which students may develop the intellectual tools and consciousness to participate directly in making and remaking social life – thus enacting democracy as an open-ended and unfinished process of informed criticism and collaborative possibility. Theorists in education have thus

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mobilized Laclau and Mouffe’s radical democratic theory to consider a range of issues concerning educational justice and the critical pedagogical dynamics of teaching, learning, and engaged citizenship (Giroux, 1997). Here, however, I want to briefly consider two emergent expressions of radical democracy by Jacques Rancière and Étienne Balibar. These perspectives both compliment and diverge from the projects of Laclau and Mouffe, while providing necessary insights for complicating the question of what common educational institutions might mean today. While sharing some affinity with Laclau and Mouffe, Rancière (1999) frames democracy not simply as a struggle for hegemony and the raising of particular demands to the status of a contested universal, but as an anarchic force rooted in the eruption of radical equality. As such, Rancière contrasts his vision of democracy to what he refers to as police logic representing the Platonic tradition of defining for the demos the ‘proper’ assignation of parts and roles. For Rancière, democracy is a contingent expression that turns on those moments when radical equality – the creative capacity of all human beings to think, speak, dream, and act in common – is pressed into service in a singularized form by those denied full inclusion within a political community. This means that radical equality is not simply an ideal or a principle that needs to be put into practice through antagonistic practices. Nor does it belong to liberal institutional arrangements. Radical equality is rather a living force capable of disarticulating the entire institutional and perceptual space of liberal orders, including educational orders.4 Étienne Balibar (2008) has largely endorsed this reading of democracy as a conflictual eruption of political demands by the excluded. Balibar notes that the idea of democracy, understood in a radical manner, is not the name of a political regime, but only the name of a process…the name of a struggle, a convergence of struggles for the democratization of democracy itself. (Balibar, 2008, p. 526)

However, Balibar argues that Rancière tends to emphasize the egalitarian dimensions of democracy at the expense of concerns over freedom from illegitimate and repressive forms of authority. He states: Rancière has a tendency, it seems to me, to substitute for the lexicographic order of the liberals…a preference of equality over liberty; he replaces liberalism with a form of egalitarianism, perhaps strategically, as if the struggles of the demos, the popular multitude, were mainly about inequality and exclusion, and not also about autonomy and against tyranny or authoritarianism. (Balibar, 2008, p. 526)

In short, Balibar argues that Rancière’s philosophy neglects the institutional dimensions of democracy. He states that ‘equality’ has to be written into institutions and that this ‘writing’ constitutes the very ‘crux of the revolutionary tradition’ (Balibar, 2008, p. 526). For Balibar, it is not enough for the demands of the excluded to disrupt the arrangements that exclude them. Demands must also be institutionalized in some capacity, in order that eruptions of radical equality and liberty, what Balibar has referred to as égaliberté or ‘equaliberty’ (an ideal/contested universal always to come that is at once impossible to fully realize yet necessary for democratic politics), may be preserved and therefore incorporated into ongoing democratic struggles for human emancipation as well as used to safeguard against authoritarian politics (Curcio & Özselçuk, 2010). Balibar suggests that the ‘democratization of institutions, including “public institutions”, should not be confused with the problem of the construction of the sovereign state’ (Balibar, 2008, p. 526). This is another way of saying that democracy, as the condition and demand of

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equaliberty, always exceeds and challenges the institutional foundations out of which it emerges. Importantly, however, while institutional inscriptions of equaliberty, such as human rights and civil liberties, are written into the State, they also constitute a key register in which the power of the State and the legitimacy of its property and legal arrangements can be formally challenged in the interest of justice and emancipatory politics. A fundamental task for radical democracy, according to Balibar, is thus the need to think a public sphere beyond the State but not necessarily beyond institutionally inscribed human and citizen ‘rights’, where the eradicable divisions and conflicting movements of the common can be mediated and democratized. The radical democratic perspectives of Laclau and Mouffe, Rancière, and Balibar enable us to reconnect the revolutionary dynamics of common action to democracy. Democracy is imagined not as a model, nor as an ideology. It is rather an anarchic and contingent force of ‘the people’ rooted in the impossible ideal of universal equaliberty. Radical democracy highlights the centrality of antagonism and contingency to all social orders. It is therefore inherently political. It also provides tools for thinking through how divergent political demands across differences (class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, citizenship) can find commonality and transformative efficacy. Thus, radical democracy offers a strategic process of common action that is antiessentialist, radically plural, and open-ended. However, radical democracy has a fraught relationship to liberalism and its institutional foundations in capitalism. As critics like Wendy Brown have observed, radical democrats tend to restrict their focus largely to the aesthetic, epistemological, cultural, and legal arenas while having far less to say about the need to directly challenge and think beyond the evolving structural and ecological realities of exploitation imposed by global capitalism and its State forms (Brown, 1995). Such a position limits our imaginative horizons for thinking fundamentally different conceptions of educational organization and pedagogy. As I will revisit in the final section of this paper, of the radical democrats, only Balibar has posed the necessity of building common institutions through inscriptions of equaliberty beyond capital and liberal sovereignty – points I take as critical to thinking through possibilities for common educational institutions today. Absolute democracy – the lost pirates and non-places of exopedagogy Absolute democracy is the expression given by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri to describe the becoming of what they refer to as the global Multitude against Empire. In their trilogy Empire (2000), Multitude (2004), and Commonwealth (2009), which has become influential in various social movements in recent years, Hardt and Negri develop an immanent ontology of the common as a foundation for thinking a new emancipatory horizon beyond all forms of transcendent foundations and authority – epistemological (Metaphysics), economic (Capital), cultural (Identity), Political (Nation). This immanent emancipatory horizon of the common that absolute democracy calls into being is traced to the origins of European modernity where, Hardt and Negri argue, two forms of power developed in opposition to one another. The first form, constituent power, which they develop from Baruch Spinoza and Gilles Deleuze, signals ‘the discovery’ of the plane of immanence and the unconditional freedom of the multitude (understood as a vast multiplicity of human singularities). The second form of power, constituted power, arose to capture and control these potentially explosive energies. It is embedded within those apparatuses of modernity that attempt to install transcendent philosophical foundations and hierarchical disciplinary rationalities. Constituted power is thus one of static

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universality over multiplicity, representation over experience, and identity over difference, whereas ‘the plane of immanence is the one on which the powers of singularity are realized and the one on which the truth of the new humanity is determined historically, technically, and politically’ (2000, p. 72). Hardt and Negri argue for a process of altermodernity that overcomes all forms of constituted power in the name of a new commonwealth and absolute democracy of the multitude. If all of this sounds a bit theological or even messianic, that is because it is. However, despite the limitations of Hardt and Negri’s project, which I elaborate below, they also offer some dynamic perspectives from which to deepen our discussion of constructing a common education. Radical democracy forwards a theory of politics as common action that creates and recreates a necessarily divided community in the name of equaliberty. This shares some affinity with the notion of constituent power developed by Hardt and Negri, in the sense that it places the essence of democracy within the immanent potential of the demos to participate directly in political life. However, where radical democracy tends to limit its focus to the formation of agonistic expressions and institutional inscriptions of equaliberty, itself a kind of oppositional commonality in difference, Hardt and Negri argue that the common and possibilities for radicalizing democracy in its name cannot be subtracted from the contemporary realities of global capitalism and related transformations in labor and social life. Hardt and Negri suggest that rapid advances in technology, finance, and communications have deterritorialized capital accumulation from the nation-state, integrating it into a new global networked form of sovereignty, which they refer to as ‘Empire’. They argue that under Empire, capital has become increasingly biopolitical as social relationships, ideas, images, codes, and affects, produced in common, become central to the production and extraction of surplus value from living labor. This is not to suggest that industrial production has declined in either volume or in its exploitive substance (the rise of neofeudal sweat-shop labor across the postcolonial world attests to that), but that the command and control aspects of valorization are increasingly dependent on what Marx referred to as the ‘general intellect’ that includes forms of collective knowledge, immaterial labor, affect, and subjectivity – i.e. the common of shared social production in all its myriad forms. This is perhaps most readily visible when one thinks about how digital technology allows the workplace to extend into the home, while the preferences we register and data we produce through Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Google etc. become the basis of direct production of information as future exchange value and intellectual property for capital. It is also present in efforts to privatize and control all aspects of educational organization and pedagogy where the common of creative educational experience becomes a site of profit extraction (Means, 2013a). Hardt and Negri argue that the increasing dependency of capital on the common threatens to overrun Empire in its entirety. The common is positioned here as distinct from both public and private forms of property. ‘The political project of instituting the common…cuts diagonally across these false alternatives – neither public nor private, neither capitalist nor socialist – and opens a new space for politics’ (2009, p. ix). While capital attempts to set up systems of enclosure to expropriate value from the common, there is always a constituent element or surplus to human relationships, ideas, affects, and creativity that evade capture, or what can be thought of as the surplus element of the common. Hardt and Negri argue that while capital increasingly requires the common, the common is increasingly independent of capital. It is this independent surplus-common and the impossibility of full enclosure that presents an immanent potentiality for realizing an alternative democratic project: the ‘becoming-Prince of the

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multitude’. Hardt and Negri suggest that the multitude, as a multiplicity of singularities, can rule directly without the mediation of liberal institutional arrangements on the horizontal basis of the surplus-common. This notion of absolute democracy is to be constructed via a process of exodus from the private and public forms of property on which Empire is based. The idea is to flee Empire and engage in the constituent coproduction of a new commonwealth beyond all divisions and antagonisms. The most insightful mobilization of these ideas in educational theory can be found in the work of Tyson E. Lewis. In his collaborations with Richard Kahn (Lewis & Kahn, 2010) and in his own growing body of work, Lewis has developed from Hardt and Negri a notion of exopedagogy as a form of ‘education out of bounds’ based in the immanent ontology of the commonwealth. Lewis (2012b) argues that exopedagogy describes ‘a praxis of exodus’ that creates a ‘new location’ for education. He suggests that critical education needs to reevaluate its concepts to move past a defense of ‘public education’ against neoliberal privatizations so as to realize absolute educational potentiality. This marks a new ‘educational commonwealth’ that explodes the boundaries of the public and private property, state and capitalist command, and liberal and cosmopolitan frameworks of national and global human rights pedagogy and citizenship education. He states: …exopedagogy is a new notion of educational organization and location that moves beyond education as private property (a corporatized image of the school and the attending reduction of education to job training), public property of the state (as regulated from above by national standards), or political cosmopolitanism (where the model of the relation between the state and a rights bearing subject becomes a transcendental model for global regulation). Thus exopedagogy is an attempt to align teaching and learning with the creative and productive labor of what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri refer to as the multitude and its struggle over the commonwealth. (pp. 845–846)

Lewis argues that the privileged metaphors for this new location of the educational commonwealth are derived from the history of struggles over the common at the periphery of Empire including the sea, the shoreline, and forest. These locations ‘out of bounds’ of Empire represent privileged ‘zones of indistinction’ from which ‘educational pirates’ (modeled on Ivan Illich) might launch projects that break with the binaries of public and private and with liberal-progressive traditions in educational theory. This call for a ‘piratical’ education out of bounds is elegantly elaborated and represents a provocative challenge. Moreover, in a moment where educational institutions and purposes are being swiftly reconfigured through narrow neoliberal market imperatives, Lewis’ insistence that educational theory begin reevaluating its own concepts and assumptions in the service of imagining fundamentally different ways of thinking educational philosophy and practice could not be more urgent. However, exopedagogy, to the extent that it adopts immanent ontological categories without critically reflecting on them, tends to reproduce some of the same theoretical, organizational, and political limitations as Hardt and Negri’s project. To begin with, absolute democracy contains an implicit teleological moment that appears to assume that the present contradictions of capitalism, as expressed in attempts to extract surplus value from the common, necessarily create the conditions for the dissolution of capitalism and the realization of a new commonwealth. This underestimates the historical capacity of capitalism to self-revolutionize in order to overcome its own internal and external barriers to expansion, control, and social reproduction (a point eloquently made by Deleuze and Guattari along with most contemporary Marxists). The present scramble by capital to enclose the commons of the public sphere (including education) and the natural world through privatizations are, of course,

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symptomatic of this historical process. There is very little evidence to suggest that such enclosures are necessarily leading to new emancipatory forms of political and/or educational organization. Second, and more directly related to Lewis’ call for an exopedagogy as a praxis of exodus, absolute democracy does not have an adequate theory of the political – or in slightly different terms, it substitutes a richly differentiated notion of politics for an immanent ontology of differentiation. This ontological commitment, particularly in its theory of constituent power, offers some powerful frames for decentering various forms of educational authority. However, it seems to suggest that the multitude can somehow escape to a place outside contradictions and confrontations, what Lewis refers to as the ‘shoreline’ or the ‘forest’ of Empire, where it can rule horizontally and directly beyond all forms of constituted organization. Lewis argues that this is the proper location of exopedagogy, where the new humanity can liberate itself through constituent education in the name of absolute democracy. The problem here is that this is a virtual location that disavows any antagonism or negative moment in relation to existing institutional arrangements, calling instead for ‘a politics beyond politics and an education beyond education’ (p. 859). This privileging of exodus implies a debilitating withdrawal from political engagement with public institutions, including educational institutions, the State, and the legal mechanisms, that maintain the seemingly inexorable momentum toward the total commodification of all life on the planet (including common shorelines, waters, and forests). In this sense, absolute democracy seems to mirror the neoliberal ethos of libertarianism and public abandonment (defined exclusively as State property, as opposed to also a site of collective investment, collaboration, dialogue, dissent, struggle, culture, intellect, experience, and contestation). This effectively cedes the public sphere to the political Right. Chantal Mouffe (2013) observes: … It is not enough to organize new forms of existence of the common, outside dominant capitalist structures, as if the latter would progressively ebb away without any confrontations…They [Hardt and Negri] celebrate the ‘common’ over the market, but their rejection of the ‘public’ and all the institutions linked to the state displays uncanny similarities with the neoliberal attitude. Their insistence on seeing the state as a monolithic entity instead of a complex set of relationships, dynamic and traversed by contradictions, precludes them from recognizing the multiple possibilities for struggling against the commodification of society that controlling state institutions could offer. (pp. 116 and 117)

Despite these shortcomings to thinking the political, Hardt and Negri’s project nonetheless offers innovative resources for linking democratic struggles over the educational common to the movements of global capitalism. For instance, attempts to extract value from public schooling through its privatization tends to drain the innovative and creative value of the educational common by setting up rigid systems of command and control, encouraging competition over collaboration, and by privileging the standardized testbased transmission of knowledge over open-ended dialogical knowledge production. This analytical framework for understanding present struggles over the common opens important fissures for challenging neoliberal educational arrangements. It also provides insight for thinking through how we might enlarge those elements of educational experience within public institutions that resist enclosure and point toward alternative ways of organizing education and pedagogy. A radical educational theory based largely on the ontological priorities of exodus cannot account for such an intensification of the educational common, however, as it privileges escape from all constituted formations, including public educational institutions. This neglects to recognize that elements of public

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educational institutions, while embedded within the disciplinary mechanisms of capital and the State, always, at the same time, exceed these mechanisms in untold ways within the everyday experience of education, and thus always remain partially autonomous, or what we might refer to as the surplus-educational-common. Thus, rather than transforming public educational institutions on the basis of the surplus-educational-common within a radical theory of constituent political action, exopedagogies imply a withdrawal from political engagement. Ultimately, we need these pirates to come back from the shorelines and the forests to help us build common educational institutions that enlarge our constituent powers and imaginative democratic potentiality within the locations where most of us live, work, and organize. Communist democracy? – educational lessons from the red revival In the wake of the global financial crisis in 2008, there has been a broad attempt by a variety of radical philosophers to rescue communism from the historical dustbin. There have been sold-out international conferences such as ‘On the Idea of Communism’ at the Birbeck Institute for the Humanities in 2009, and ‘Communism as a New Beginning’ at Cooper Union in 2011. There have also been two edited collections, ‘On the Idea of Communism’ by Coustas Douzinas and Slavoj Zizek, along with various books and articles reflecting on the history and future of the communist idea. These interventions have sought to redefine communism beyond its twentieth-century legacy of authoritarian state-capitalism, or what Slavoj Zizek (2013) has described as the biggest ‘ethico-political fiasco in the history of humanity’ (p. 99). How do we explain this reemergence of communism? What are its features? What lessons might it have for educational projects? While Jacques Rancière, Étienne Balibar, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have each contributed to discussions of the new communism, I want to suggest that its specific features and its framing of democracy depart in significant ways from radical and absolute forms of democracy. A key difference is that Jacques Rancière, Étienne Balibar, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri are still committed to the language of democracy. In contrast, the most strident purveyors of the new communism, such as Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek, and Jodi Dean, are ambivalent and/or reject the very concept. The revival of communist theory can largely be traced to a 2007 essay by Alain Badiou titled, ‘The Communist Hypothesis’, that appeared in his book The Meaning of Sarkozy and was later published in the New Left Review. Here, Badiou describes communism as an indelible historical tendency. For Badiou, communism refers to a ‘general set of intellectual representations’ or ‘patterns’ similar to a Kantian Idea. As such, communism acts as a regulatory ideal rather than a program. It is at once impossible to fully achieve, yet stands as the truth content of any effort to engage in egalitarian emancipatory projects. Badiou outlines the meaning of the communist hypothesis largely in traditional Marxian terms. He states that the communist hypothesis means foremost ‘a different collective organization is practicable, one that will eliminate the inequality of wealth and even the division of labor’ (p. 115). Within this framework, not only ‘massive fortunes and their transmission by inheritance will disappear’ but the ‘existence of a coercive state, separate from civil society, will no longer appear a necessity’ (Badiou, 2007, p. 115). Communism is thus ‘a pure Idea of equality’ that must be reimagined within each historical epoch. He observes ‘the communist hypothesis remains the right hypothesis and I see no other … if this hypothesis is to be abandoned, then it is not worth doing anything in the field of collective

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action. Without the perspective of communism, without this kind of idea, nothing in the historical and political future is of such a kind of interest to the philosopher’ (Badiou, 2007, p. 115).

Badiou’s hypothesis can be credited with sparking a wave of interest in thinking a communism for the twenty-first century. Slavoj Zizek, for instance, has endorsed the spirit of Badiou’s hypothesis; however, he has suggested that as a Kantian Idea it runs the risk of reducing emancipatory politics to an ethical norm detached from history and political economy. For Zizek, Marx’s statement that communism is neither ‘a state of affairs which is to be established’ or ‘an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself’ but ‘the real movement which abolishes the present state of things’ remains valid. This is not to suggest that the conditions for communism are objectively prescribed in reality, but that the antagonisms that define the Real of our contemporary historical condition generate ‘the need’ for communism as well as its ‘practical urgency’. For Zizek, the Real of our present historical conjuncture is, of course, global capitalism and its systemic and ecological limits. Communism, Zizek argues, is understood not as a solution, but rather as the name of a set of problems or antagonisms rooted in the capitalist enclosure of the global commons – the commons of nature as the substance of our life, the problem of our biogenetic commons, the problem of our cultural commons (‘intellectual property’), and, last but not least, the problem of the commons as the universal space of humanity from which no one should be excluded. (Zizek, 2013, p. 21)

The most important of these antagonisms is the fourth referring to new forms of de facto apartheid and new walls and slums separating the included and excluded. Increasingly, as global capitalism faces new constraints to expansion, produces surplus populations globally, and pursues the endless commodification and exploitation of the planetary bios, all of humanity potentially becomes excluded ‘bare life’. This antagonism of the included and excluded represents the demand for a universal humanity against all four of these enclosures – a demand signified by the name ‘communism’ as the impossible historical limit of capitalism. Theorists of the new communism, such as Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek, Peter Hallward, Bruno Bosteels, and Jodi Dean, not only situate communism as anticapitalism, but also against liberal, social, radical, and absolute forms of democracy. They are particularly critical of a post-political void that emerged after 1989 where liberal-democracy was positioned as the only game in town. This has had the effect of pushing the agendas of Western states and traditional social democratic parties further to the right, as embodied by the ‘centrist’ governments of Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama, where the political has largely been reduced to a de-politicizing logic of individual preferences, lifestyle distinctions, and the empty spectacle of bought elections. Even more than a triumph of the Right, however, these developments largely reflect a failure of the Left to pose credible alternatives to neoliberalism, preferring instead to pursue postmodern deconstructive projects and identity politics. For instance, in her book The Communist Horizon, Jodi Dean (2012) argues that democracy represents the ‘ambient milieu’ in which we live. It is the accepted language and frame of reference for governments, corporations, and politicians from both left and right. As such, she suggests that democracy traps us within a narrow language and horizon of possibility that naturalizes capitalism as well as the class structures, subjectivities, and desires that reproduce it. Here

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democracy is viewed as the problem and communism is the solution. For Dean, communism represents an alternative conception of the ‘sovereignty of the people’ in opposition to the sovereignty of liberal-democratic capitalism. She argues that while radical democrats like Laclau and Mouffe rightly center the eradicability of political antagonism, they fail to confront capitalism and its antagonistic class characteristics directly by remaining within a ‘democratic’ framework. Similarly, she suggests that while Hardt and Negri’s absolute democracy presupposes opposition to capitalism, it reproduces neoliberal disengagement, because as a multiplicity of differentiated singularities, the multitude denies class struggle and class-based politics. Thus, rather than a politics based on liberal representation, social democratic reform, radical democratization, or an absolute democracy of immanent horizontality, Dean argues in Marxist–Leninist terms for a ‘sovereignty of the people’ as a form of collective will and communist party organization opposed to both capitalism and democracy. While there is undoubtedly a need to confront post-political framings of democracy, the rejection of democratic language and principles represents a deeply problematic aspect of certain strains of the new communism. Rather than simply problematize the way liberalism depoliticizes capitalism, this conception of communism mirrors the neoliberal reduction of democracy to capitalism, and at the same time, it presents a false equivalency between democracy and liberalism. It also ignores the long and complicated relationship between communism and democratic ideals, as articulated by the early Marx and many others including Lenin. Certainly, the problem with actually existing communism was not that it was somehow compromised by too much democracy rather than by issues related to its own historical articulation. This is a point made eloquently by Laclau and Mouffe, who argue that communism (not unlike absolute democracy) has historically been conceived as a perfectly reconciled society beyond all divisions, which, they argue, is a fantasy that forecloses the political. I would argue that if communism is to have value as an emancipatory principle and aspiration, it is precisely in a refusal to restrict our understanding of democracy to liberalism’s limited political domain of rights and representation. Rather, communism should be rooted in commitments to the extension of democratic-egalitarianism to all aspects of society for common benefit, particularly into the realm of production, ownership, labor, and exchange – a sphere traditionally understood under liberalism as nonpolitical. The problem is that new communists, including Badiou, Zizek, and Dean, all reject this idea of ‘extending democracy’ to the economy, framing it as a reformist cop out in the struggle for genuine alternatives to liberalism and capitalism. This neglects to consider, however, that radical democracy locates the possibility of moving beyond capitalism and its State forms as an indeterminate process of common action rooted in an implicit a priori judgment that any viable alternative must be based on the ethical and egalitarian principles of democracy. Moreover, by locating communism as centrally or only in terms of the opposition to capitalism, new communists like Dean are guilty of a form of economic reductionism that ignores the central terrain of culture and ideology within capitalism as well as emancipatory movements. A communist imaginary conceived exclusively as anticapitalism does not offer much in the way of addressing the desires, hopes, and creative aspirations of people for alternative ways of organizing production, exchange, labor, cultural work, engineering, design, architecture, education, health, art, sexuality, spirituality, identity, and our relationship to nature and nonhuman life. I would argue that communism conceived only as anticapitalism detached from democratic values and aspirations cannot provide a solid ethical or theoretical foundation for reconstructing a transformative conception of common education today. The

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communist hypothesis does mark an important new willingness to open a broader discussion of emancipatory possibilities beyond capitalism without apology. However, for communism to become an inspirational historical force again, it would need to offer more than just an anticapitalist politics, but also different visions of life in common that are full of richness and meaning across all facets of human existence. Such alternative visions of common life can only emerge through educational processes of informed criticism, dialogue, collaboration, and dissent. Thus, in my view, the new communists would do well to think through how the traditions of radical-progressive education, as embodied by John Dewey, W.E.B Dubois, George Counts, Paulo Freire, bell hooks, and others, and its emphasis on human autonomy and democratic development could contribute in meaningful ways to imagining a democratic communism for the twenty-first century. Such a project also has the potential for enriching educational theory as well.

Insurrectional democracy for a common education The disintegration of the constitutive gap within liberal-democracy between economy and polity is nowhere more visible than in the educational domain (Brown, 2005). In recent years, the ‘democratic’ language of ‘consumer choice’ and the values of business have been used to present the privatization and defunding of public educational institutions as a ‘civil rights issue’ and a way to ‘fight poverty’ – even though these policies do nothing to alleviate the structural conditions of poverty and/or address the negative consequences of human insecurity and social inequality on conditions of teaching and learning. Moreover, the effort to organize educational institutions to align with a global corporate vision of endless accumulation serves to further separate teachers and students from the forms of inquiry and knowledge that might enable critical forms of consciousness to take root to challenge neoliberal hegemony. My interest in this paper has been to highlight how emergent radical-progressive languages of democracy might provide useful perspectives for the task of rethinking common educational institutions. In light of my brief tour of radical, absolute, and communist articulations of democracy, I would suggest that each language and set of positions, when read critically, selectively, and generatively, contains limitations and insights for recasting democratic conceptions of educational organization and pedagogy. I want to highlight here some distinct priorities that emerge from my reading that specifically address reconstructing common educational institutions today. First, I would argue that reconstructing a common education requires a theory of the public sphere that doesn’t relegate it simply to a form of State regulation or property. The autonomist philosopher Paulo Virno (2004) has insisted that that if the publicness of the intellect does not yield to the realm of a public sphere, of a political space in which the many can tend to common affairs, then it produces terrifying effects. A publicness without a public sphere: here is the negative side – the evil, if you wish – of the experience of the multitude. (p. 40).

Virno embraces exodus as the privileged domain of political action. However, he argues that the multitude still requires a public sphere (consisting of a multiplicity of varied publics and counterpublics). This is necessary because one cannot simply assume that the common necessarily takes a positive valence. The common is just as likely to assume a consistency rooted in fundamentalism and violence, as it is in mutuality and love. For Virno, this is where a public sphere becomes a necessary space, where the multitude can mediate divisions and safeguard against negative manifestations and

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corruptions of the common. Étienne Balibar has made similar points while drawing on different philosophical traditions and coming to different political conclusions. He suggests that engagement with, and the democratization of, a public sphere that exceeds the State is necessary for not only deepening possibilities for equaliberty as a universality to come, but for inscribing and protecting the autonomy and ‘rights’ of individuals and communities against reactionary movements and authoritarian forms of sovereignty. He roots his arguments not in the immanent ontological principles of exodus, but in the radical bourgeois or civic form of pre-Marxist communism of the Levellers, Blanqui, and Babeuf (Curcio & Özselçuk, 2010). For Balibar, the reduction of emancipatory politics to immanence neglects the need for imagining common institutions that do not reduce political questions simply to an ontology of living labor and that take into consideration the need for a public as a contested universal space for attending to and mediating the eradicable disagreements of necessarily plural communities. The retention of a public sphere in this sense also entails retaining some sense of the private as well. In a time of escalating state surveillance and gross violations of civil rights and liberties, we need to understand that the right to privacy is not the same thing as private property and/or further privatizations of social life, but rather a crucial element in forwarding projects rooted in universal equaliberty. I would argue that the task of reimagining the public and private is central to thinking through what common institutions, common rights, and common property arrangements might mean in both theory and practice. Second, in my view, the transformation of public education from an adjunct to capital and the State to a common institution (of, by, and for the people) can only be accomplished through a process of organized common action based on the principles of democratic-egalitarianism. This requires an insurrectional theory of democracy. In recent years, in educational theory, an exciting discussion has emerged concerning the possibility of fundamentally rethinking and challenging liberal-democratic and critical-progressive educational assumptions through Hardt and Negri’s creative constituent notion of the common. This is a line of theorization that is emerging as an innovative paradigm for rethinking various modes of educational organization, pedagogy, authority, and resistance (Bourassa, 2012; De Lissovoy, 2011; Lewis, 2012b; Means, 2013a; Saltman, 2012). However, as I have argued, I am quite skeptical of exodus as a privileged mode of educational praxis and as means of reimagining a common education, because as I have argued, it neglects the constitutive role of the political within educational struggles. Further, exodus seems willing to abandon those surplus aspects of educational experience within actually existing public educational institutions that resist enclosure and point toward alternative educational values and practices. Achieving common institutions that push beyond private and public property, capital, and (neo)liberal sovereignty requires not only a revolution in values, culture, and pedagogy, but also the difficult work of organizing and agitating for alternative visions of living and learning within and beyond the historically inflected locations that we inhabit. As I have empirically documented elsewhere (Means, 2011b), the seeds of these alternative visions exist in even the most oppressive public educational environments. They can be observed whenever educators and students collaborate together to discover new knowledge, critically question and understand the world, and forge meaningful relationships within and beyond the officially sanctioned curricula that shape institutional life at all levels of the educational endeavor. The value of radical democratic perspectives is quite clear here. Rather than locate social change within a set of immanent ontological priorities that flee all constituted arrangements as in absolute democracy, and rather than reject democracy, as in certain strains of the new communism that wrongly conflate it with liberalism and capitalism,

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radical democracy insists on an antagonistic process to recreate social and educational life in the name of equaliberty. Radical democracy thus suggests that the realization of common institutions requires common action that can give rise to unpredictable, decolonizing, and experimental forms of organization, association, and critical pedagogy. However, insofar as radical democracy privileges culture, identity, and liberal law as the privileged loci of struggle, it neglects a broader conception of insurrection based on enlarging those elements of human experience and desire rooted in the surplus-common that are radically other to capital and State regulation. Such an insurrectional perspective enriches radical democratic theory and praxis by making central the struggle over the global commons as well as centering the surplus-common as a terrain of democratic possibility. An insurrectional praxis in educational theory would thus seek to engage and challenge public educational institutions and practices in the service of radically remaking them on the basis of the surplus-educational-common. Lastly, at this late stage in the discussion, I wouldn’t want the reader to have the mistaken impression that I see the only location for a common education within actually existing public schools. Quite the contrary, there are innumerable spaces where the educational common is produced. The many encampments that arose with the Occupy Wall Street movement are representative examples of educational commons outside the formal institutional structures of late capitalism. My view is that central to an insurrectional ethos of democracy is not only the goal of enlarging the surplus-educationalcommon within public schools and throughout all the institutions of society in the service of creating alternative educational values and practices, but also finding creative lines of flight, where fundamentally different institutions and subjects might emerge out of the ashes of the old. Here, the insights of Deleuze and Guatarri (2002) are useful. They view the plane of immanence not simply as an ontological stratum, but also as a weapon for constructing alternative values, desires, and ways of living. They state: …if you blow apart the strata without taking precautions, then instead of drawing the plane you will be killed, plunged into a black hole, or even dragged toward catastrophe. Staying stratified – organized, signified, subjected – is not the worst that can happen; the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse, which brings them back down on us heavier than ever. (p. 161)

Simply put, the demolition of all constituted formations is not always a wise a path to liberation. Immanence here becomes a constructivist concept of strategic decisionism rather than simply an ontological claim on being and freedom (Means, 2011a; Nail, 2013). Such a constructivist ethic orients our perspective toward thinking through how new forms of democratic-egalitarian educational organization and subjectivity might emerge through the patient work of collaboration, movement building, experimentation, and the strategic cultivation of the values and constituent desires for lives and livelihoods in common. While this contains an admittedly utopian dimension, such notions are far from an abstraction today, as represented by the recent proliferation of educational movements and protests against neoliberal privatization and austerity such as in the student protests in London in 2011, the Maple Spring student uprising in Quebec in 2012, the Chicago teacher strike in 2012, the ongoing Chilean Education Conflict, and Indignants Movement in Spain, as well as in countless lesser known actions, including building occupations and a growing standardized testing boycott movement across the United States. It is important observe here that we cannot prescribe the valences of a common life in advance, because it is something that can only arise through an

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insurrectional spirit of radical democratic action. Fortunately, as these diverse educational struggles indicate, the desire to be in common is all around us. It occurs whenever human beings produce values and forms of cooperation that exceed capital and State control. It is immanently present when teachers and students construct new and different senses of the world and the common together in the course of everyday life in schools and classrooms (De Lissovoy, 2011). The crucial task before us is to find new and creative ways to intensify these moments of the surplus-educational-common through an insurrectional process of common action, so that they spill over into new and different senses of educational organization, desire, and pedagogy in the name of universal equaliberty.

Notes

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1.

2.

3. 4.

This paper is intended to contribute to a larger conversation in educational theory that has taken up the language of the common(s) as a way of rethinking educational problems and categories. See De Lissovoy (2011), De Lissovoy, Means, and Saltman (2014), Lewis (2012b), Lewis and Kahn (2010), Means (2013a, 2013b), Saltman (2012). While different in points of emphasis and theoretical commitments, this literature suggests that to imagine a common education is to imagine a form of education that is not beholden to the private interests of capital and/or the hierarchical conditioning of the State. I follow Balibar (2008) in my use of the term ‘language’ here to signal that democracy is not a model, ideology, or static form of social organization and that its diverse historical and concrete manifestations are highly dependent and contingent on its diverse narrative and symbolic representations. Radical, Absolute, and Communist languages of democracy hardly exhaust the myriad ways of conceptualizing democracy and/or social change from a radical or progressive perspective. While my analysis here runs the risk of reducing these forms of democracy to ‘ideal types’ removed from concrete practice, I am choosing to focus on these specific ‘languages’ because they are at the forefront of discussions in contemporary radical philosophy today oriented toward developing new theoretical perspectives on emancipatory politics. Moreover, while there is a tradition of radical democracy in education, absolute democracy and new discourses of communism have thus far been largely unexplored in educational studies. For detailed explanation of ‘lines of flight’, see Deleuze and Guatarri (2002). For further discussion of Rancière in education, see Biesta (2010); Lewis (2012a) and Means (2011b).

Notes on contributor Alexander J. Means is an assistant professor of Social and Psychological Foundations of Education at SUNY Buffalo State. He is the author of Schooling in the Age of Austerity (Palgrave, 2013) and Toward a New Common School Movement (Paradigm, 2014) with Noah De Lissovoy and Kenneth Saltman. His work has also appeared in numerous scholarly journals, including Educational Philosophy and Theory, Journal of Education Policy, Policy Futures in Education, Politics and Culture, and the Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies.

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Brown, W. (2005). Edgework: Critical essays and knowledge and politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Curcio, A., & Özselçuk, C. (2010). On the common, universality, and communism: A conversation between Étienne Balibar and Antonio Negri’. Rethinking Marxism, 22(3), 312–328. doi:10.1080/08935696.2010.490356 De Lissovoy, N. (2011). Pedagogy in common: Democratic education in the global era. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 43(10), 1119–1134. doi:10.1111/j.1469-5812.2009.00630.x De Lissovoy, N., Means, A.J., & Saltman, K.J. (2014). Toward a new common school movement. New York, NY: Paradigm. Dean, J. (2012). The communist horizon. New York, NY: Verso. Deleuze, G., & Guatarri, F. (2002). A thousand plateaus. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Giroux, H.A. (1997). Pedagogy and the politics of hope: Theory culture, and schooling. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Giroux, H.A. (2005). Border crossings: Cultural workers and the politics of education. New York, NY: Routledge. Giroux, H.A. (2011). On critical pedagogy. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Press. Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2000). Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2004). Multitude. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2009). Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Laclau, E., & Mouffe, C. (2001). Hegemony and socialist strategy. New York, NY: Verso. Lefort, C. (1999). Complications. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Lewis, T.E. (2012a). The aesthetics of education. New York, NY: Continuum. Lewis, T.E. (2012b). Exopedagogy: On pirates, shorelines, and the educational commonwealth. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 44(8), 845–861. doi:10.1111/j.1469-5812.2011.00759.x Lewis, T.E., & Kahn, R. (2010). Education out of bounds: Reimagining cultural studies for a Posthuman age. New York, NY: Palgrave. Lummis, C.D. (1996). Radical democracy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Means, A.J. (2011a). Aesthetics, affect, and educational politics. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 43(10), 1088–1102. doi:10.1111/j.1469-5812.2009.00615.x Means, A.J. (2011b). Jacques Rancière, education, and the art of citizenship. Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 33(1), 28–47. doi:10.1080/10714413.2011.550187 Means, A.J. (2013a). Creativity and the biopolitical commons in secondary and higher education. Policy Futures in Education, 11(1), 47–58. doi:10.2304/pfie.2013.11.1.47 Means, A.J. (2013b). Schooling in the age of austerity: Urban education and the struggle for democratic life. New York, NY: Palgrave. Mouffe, C. (2013). Agonistics. New York, NY: Verso. Nail, T. (2013). Deleuze, occupy, and the actuality of revolution. Theory & Event, 16(1). Retrieved from http://www.academia.edu/2973497/Deleuze_Occupy_and_the_Actuality_of_Revolution Rancière, J. (1999). Disagreement. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Saltman, K.J. (2012). The failure of corporate school reform. New York, NY: Paradigm. Trend, D. (Ed.). (1996). Radical democracy: Identity, citizenship and the state. New York, NY: Routledge. Virno, P. (2004). A grammar of the multitude. Cambridge, MA: Semiotexte. Zizek, S. (2013). Demanding the impossible. New York, NY: Verso.