This thesis proposes and explores a fundamental interrelation between philosophy, education and noise. A speculative bridge is constructed between Alain Badiou’s philosophy and Paulo Freire’s pedagogy, whereby noise is posited as the
phenomenological (temporal) appearance of Badiou’s
ontological (atemporal) notion of ‘the void’. Such temporalisation of the void drives the key conjecture of the argument: if, for Baidou, philosophy is the opening of a
space for the
compossible thinking of political, artistic, scienti'c and amorous truths, I propose therefrom that education is the caring of the
time produced
in praxis by the subjects engaged in the investigations of such truths. It is within such pedagogical temporality, then, that noise emerges as the (neg)entropic, phenomenological trace of the isentropic, ontological void. Education intervenes amidst the noise as a reassuring injunction to
keep going regardless of the anxiety which will inevitably assault the subjects throughout their uncertain inquiry. Given that the subjective trajectory purely follows the consequences of an undecidable event, this pedagogical relation subtracts itself from all established laws. I claim that such an “education
in noise” is inherently Freirean insomuch as it constitutes a fundamental site of resistance to the oppression of constituted power. Noise is immanently subversive inasmuch as it enkindles
innen- and
um-subjects that are completely indigestible to the status quo of the state. This indigestibility represents the
subtractive face of noise (on the side of an ontology woven on the void): noise, however, is also immanently
relational (on the side of the inter-subjective production of a new logic). I conclude that by being ontologically subtractive
and logically relational an education
in noise manages to remain
both subversive (insofar as it subtracts itself from all established knowledge)
and criticopedagogical (insofar as it involves the dialogical, collective construction of a new world).
| Date of Award | 6 May 2021 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Awarding Institution | |
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| Sponsors | technē AHRC |
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| Supervisor | Mark Sinclair (Director of Studies) & Nina Power (Co-Supervisor) |
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