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Undercover Education: Mice, Mimesis, and Parasites in the Teaching Machine

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Abstract

What happens to education when the potential it helps realizing in the individual works against the formal purposes of the curriculum? What happens when education becomes a vehicle for its own subversion? As a subject-forming state apparatus working on ideological speciesism, formal education is engaged in both human and animal stratification in service of the capitalist knowledge economy. This seemingly stable condition is however insecured by the animal rights activist as undercover learner and—worker, who enters education and research laboratories under false premises in order to extract the knowledge necessary to dismantle the logic of animal utility on which the scientific-educational apparatus rests. The present article is based on a semi-structured interview with an undercover worker. It draws on a synthesis of critical education and posthumanist theories to configure knowledge creation and subjectification processes in the “negative spaces” of education. The techne of undercover work includes mnemotechnical and prosthetic devices, calculation of risk, and mimetic labor. The article argues that the agenda of the undercover worker generates a multi-strained mimetic complex that composes a parasitic educational subject-assemblage redirecting scientific knowledge away from the animal stratification logic of the knowledge economy into different viral circuits; different lines of flight. It invites a rearticulation of the formal education state apparatus in more indeterminate directions, provoking scientific-educational knowledge-practices to become a catalytic impulse for their own disintegration.

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Notes

  1. It could be argued that stratification is a too rough and uni-dimensional way of conceptualizing systemic animal oppression. A more “posthumanist” articulation could be to see the animal body as a composite site of multiple micro-practices of capitalist predation, all with their own instrumental rationalities and logics of efficiency (cf. Shukin 2009).

  2. Other works published within this project are Pedersen (2010b, c, 2011a, b). The character of the relation between theory and empirical material in the project as a whole, as well as in the present article, involves employing a limited empirical material to infuse theory development and theoretical ideas with life, meaning, and contact with a socio-material context, rather than “interpreting” empirical data to produce results understood as a set of statements about educational reality. These relations become particularly expressed in the present article with its rather speculative end.

  3. As mentioned in footnote 2, I have used these interviews not primarily to “understand” or “interpret” Adrian’s story (although there are such dimensions to my analyses as well), but rather to “insecure” data (Lenz Taguchi, ““Becoming-barkboat” in the event. A feminist agential approach to analysis of educational data and observations of pedagogical practices,” in progress) and use the radical indeterminacy in meaning as a constant force of new forms, spaces and possibilities (Scheurich 1995). My own interview with Adrian took place around 10–15 years after the events and experiences described by it actually occurred. This has a number of methodological implications that would have been problematic in a study with the aim of producing evidence-based knowledge about relationships between individuals and their educational situations. A study with such an aim, would, in my view, have benefited from an ethnographic approach, which is, needless to say, an impossibility in the particular case of undercover work, given the premises under which it is carried out. Inspired by Scheurich (1995), Lenz Taguchi (in progress), and other poststructuralist scholars, I approach (as mentioned above) these methodological limitations as a potential rather than as a lack.

  4. All English translations of excerpts from Rolke’s book are my own.

  5. With “scientific-educational apparatus,” I refer to the complexity of institutional relationships between the formal education system, the research enterprise, animal science, and agribusiness that contributes to organizing the social reproduction of animal exploitation. Compared to Althusser’s (1971) notion of the school as the dominant Ideological State Apparatus (ISA), the scientific-educational apparatus is more closely linked to Foucault’s (1980) elaboration on the “apparatus” as “/…/a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions—in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus. The apparatus itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements.” (p. 194) However, I also want to stay with Althusser’s (1971) analysis of the educational ISA as operating through different modalities of materiality.

  6. In Swedish this statement produces a rhyme: “90% åt buren, 10% åt djuren.”

  7. This mimetic complex differs from previous definitions and analyses of mimesis in educational theory and philosophy (see, for instance, Kemp 2006; Pierce 2006), as well as from Shukin’s (2009) application of the term.

  8. For a detailed account of convergences of poststructuralism and anarchism, see May (1994).

  9. I want to emphasize that the above extension of Adrian’s actions is mine, and that Adrian explicitly distances himself from romanticization of his undercover activities (as well as of his person) when underlining my previous account of his work as unattractive menial labor that wears down the undercover worker more than the system: “Working undercover is not as glamorous and exciting as it may seem. It’s not exactly a Bond movie. It is often underpaid, usually lonely, hard, and it destroys you. In other words—a real chore. But someone has to do [that kind of work], too.” (Quoted in Rolke 2005, p. 95).

  10. Again, I wish to emphasize that this is my own speculative vision, not Adrian’s. When asking Adrian what he would change if he were in a position to create a new, non-anthropocentric animal caretaker education, he replies that he wants an education with more critical perspectives, more integrated discussions on animal ethics, and more geared toward animal rescue. His conclusion is, however, that it is doubtful whether “there would be any animal caretaker education left after [I reworked it]… It is difficult to know what it would be for, since the system is built on the premises that the animal caretaker students should be employable.” (Interview transcript).

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Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to SPED’s anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback on an earlier draft of this article.

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Pedersen, H. Undercover Education: Mice, Mimesis, and Parasites in the Teaching Machine. Stud Philos Educ 31, 365–386 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-011-9281-4

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