Abstract
This paper draws attention to the tendency of a range of technologies to reduce pedagogical interactions to a series of datafied transactions of information. This is problematic because such transactions are always by definition reducible to finite possibilities. As the ability to gather and analyse data becomes increasingly fine-grained, the threat that these datafied approaches over-determine the pedagogical space increases. Drawing on the work of Hegel, as interpreted by twentieth century French radical philosopher Alexandre Kojève, this paper develops a model of relational pedagogy which highlights three points of incompatibility with a datafied learning environment reduced to finite measures. Firstly: Kojève’s accont of authority in Hegel posits two aspects to the mimetic relation between teacher and student: recognition and realisation, which belong to the ipseity or about-self-ness of the subject, and are incompatible with a general definition of data. Secondly, the Hegelian approach to human historical time, in particular the assertion that time and desire are begun in the future, not the past, renders it incompatible with mathematical time as used in data processing. Finally, from these it is possible to derive a distinctive notion of the work of pedagogy, grounded in Kojève’s realist reading of Hegel, irreducible to information processing. In consequence of this threefold irreducibility, the paper draws attention to a need for relations of human pedagogical work to be inherent in the design of educational technologies and highlights the dangers of presuming a machine intelligence model in the design of learning environments.
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Notes
Indeed, in a radical attempt to assert the completion of the Hegelian conception of history, Kojève in his later work begins to lose signt of this, himself positing something akin to the penurious notion of interchangeable call-authenticate recognition (Kojève 2000) with the same penurious consequences for the project of self-becoming.
Following the Second World War, the question of a just or proper authority is rendered absurd by the atrocities of its exercise. Empirical findings in cognitive and individual psychology begin to pathologies the ‘authoritarian personality’ (Adorno et al. 1950) while Anglophone political philosophy reorients toward questions of economy and distributive justice (Rawls 2009; Nozick 1973) or community and identity (Sandel 1998; Nussbaum 2004). Kojève, both in 1942 and in his mature work in subsequent decades, is somewhat exceptional, perhaps anachronistic, in still clearly addressing the same central question of authority in politics which animated Aristotle, Hobbes and Rousseau’s analyses in previous centuries.
Justice (the locus of authority of the judge) and recognition (the Hegelian locus of authority of the master) are to be distinguished from one another precisely in regard to the interchangeability of mediation. While all authorities are socially mediated (Pippin 1993), justice requires impartiality. Kojève’s emphasis on the dependence of philosophical concept on human historical possibility leads him in his later work to the conclusion that the revolution and the end of history, as theorised by Hegel, had already arrived. While this attempt to presage a final reduction and resolution to the Hegelian dialectic proves unconvincing, it is not entirely penurious for the argument advanced in this paper. The characterisation of Kojève as ‘romantic bureaucrat’, concerned primarily with the administration of authority-as-justice in established conditions of universal mutual recognition introduces the thesis that the sage-philosopher and the administrator have a shared work of making manifest this ‘ideal’ reality in the material social conditions of the polis (Groys 2013). Under such an understanding, even should the first two incompatibilities—that of recognition/authentication and human-historical/processing time—be resolved, the critique that human (and specifically pedagogical) work is irreducibly distinct from machine work, remains valid.
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Lundie, D. Authority, Autonomy and Automation: The Irreducibility of Pedagogy to Information Transactions. Stud Philos Educ 35, 279–291 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-016-9517-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-016-9517-4