Heretical patagogy

Abstract

This essay imagines how the “quasi-philosophy” of Alfred Jarry (1873–1907) might function as a fulcrum for overturning the legacy of “standard” thinking and writing now profuse within the Educacene, or rather, the epoch of globalized educational standardization. This essay will consider how Jarry’s pataphysics or science of imaginary solutions initiates a new image of thought by suspending the Educacene’s naming of reality and by inducing alien axiomatics capable of producing new forms of thought and relation. In place of critical theory’s arguable inertia within educational scholarship, Jarry’s “pataphysics” founds an “ironic theory” that curtails the expectations in which “standard” modes of academic thought and writing continue to labor. In this vein, “pataphysics” might be understood astride the “non-philosophy” of Francois Laruelle as a mode of thinking philosophy dishabituated from those automatic models and methods in which contemporary thought is founded. In this vein, the ultimate aim of the essay is to re-envision the so-called “planned curriculum” as a cite for fabulating new thoughts and practice. This task is fomented by deploying pataphysical thinking in order to produce a heresy against the dogma of “standard” educational thought, and moreover, to subtract the Real from its capture in the rigidified forms of “standard” educational thought. In general, this essay attends to two ideas integral to the field of curriculum studies. First, the essay attempts a radical rereading of Canadian curriculum scholar Ted Aoki’s idea of “planned” and “lived” curriculum. Such rereading posits that we might think of both the lived and planned curriculum as a fulcrum for relaunching education and its theorization. Second, the essay advances the developments of speculative pataphysics as a means to circumvent the division of curricular thought into the two distinct territories of planned and lived formations, herein habilitating a renewed approach to the powers of accelerated abstraction and simulation.