Technics and the Ecological Turn: D.H. Lawrence and the Education of People1

Abstract

In his long essays on education, “Education of the People” and Fantasia of the Unconscious, D.H. Lawrence wrote provocatively against the principal of universal literacy. How could Lawrence get things so grievously wrong? While maintaining that much about Lawrence’s views on education is toxic, this article takes up the concept of the pharmakon to explore the relation between poison and cure in Lawrence’s educational theories. Starting from Ursula Brangwen’s first experience as a teacher in The Rainbow, it pays close attention to “Education of the People” in order to locate in Lawrence’s educational thinking an ecologically-orientated theory of technics. This is substantiated by bringing Lawrence into dialogue with two key thinkers of technics, Gilbert Simondon and Bernard Stiegler. Lawrence’s proposed system of education is closely related to Simondon’s proposed rebalancing through technics of the hierarchical pedagogical relationship between culture and technology. His trenchant ideological critique of liberal British educational policy is also closely compared to Stiegler’s account of the systemic stupidity and industrialization of the spirit generated by corporate digital culture. Lawrence’s concern for the care of the young, I conclude, is an ecophilosophy rooted in a rethinking of the body’s relation to the nonhuman world, and it produces a radical holistic conception of equality-in-inequality oriented towards a future beyond the economics of growth.