Is education exhausted?

Abstract

In the article I argue that the category of exhaustion constitutes the key to contemporary instrumental education. In my analysis I draw from Sloterdijk’s diagnosis of modern consciousness and the Deleuzian concept of exhaustion.

My contention is that an explanation for a durable rule of market logic can be found in the fact that traditional narratives, that is, narratives which place God or Reason as arche of the world, have expired and exposed the emptiness. The space, not occupied anymore by God or Reason, has become empty and as such needed to be filled in. As this (empty) space cannot be filled by the humanities with their so-called higher values, an economic narrative has taken over this task and, as a further consequence, transformed education into its instrument. However, neither the content of traditional narratives, nor economic ones, directly produce this emptiness, since it is an effect of the exhausted life. In my contribution I argue that a triangle consisting of higher values, economic values and the (empty) space is a sort of trap caused by two ways of being of the exhausted life, that is, by judgement and domination. Moreover, I will attempt to show that a shift to non-instrumental education present in the field of contemporary philosophy of education is also a problem within the exhausted life. In addition, perhaps the only chance to overcome this exhaustion lies in negation, which is found through despair.

Introduction

It goes without saying that the discourse of our modern world, including the educational discourse, has been taken over by market logic. The main figure of the discourse has become homo economicus, for whom labour, justified on the basis of supply and demand, is the primary value. For it is the market and its rules that decide, through the prism of success, who is worthy of respect and who has value as a human being. This is reflected not only in society’s demands on universities to provide students with job skills, but also in the corporate newspeak recently acquired by universities (for example: human resources or content providers instead of academic teachers). It is also reflected in university regulations, especially in the corporate up or out (with emphasis on the latter) policy work, which requires moving up or moving out and promotes the rat race. The world has become a huge enterprise based on the category of achievement, and knowledge has become ‘a commodity to be traded and exchanged in the same way as other goods and services’ (Roberts, 2016: 41). Human beings ‘are constantly pushed to achieve goals and tasks, thus they are expected to be faster and more productive than ever before’ (D’Hoest and Lewis, 2015: 1). Furthermore, teachers and students have been reduced to being instruments in a machine that should function with absolute efficiency, constantly running, with no right to rest. In that way, the ‘promises of education to transform, ennoble, and enable, to create the conditions for new understandings of our worlds and ourselves, have become tired and devalued promissory notes’ (Liston, 2000: 81).

This picture has been recalled not in order to discover something new, but because it is closely intertwined with the issues that I intend to deal with, namely with the problems of the (empty) space, exhausted life and despair. My argument is that an explanation for a durable rule of market logic can be found in the fact that traditional narratives, that is, narratives which position God or Reason as arche of the world, have expired and exposed the emptiness. This space, no longer occupied by God or Reason, needed to be filled. Since it cannot be filled anymore by the humanities with their so-called higher values – the answer to the question why this is the case goes much beyond the scope of this paper – an economic narrative has taken over this task and, as a further consequence, transformed education into its instrument. However, to clarify the problem, it needs to be said that it is neither the content of traditional narratives, nor economic ones, that directly produce this emptiness. They merely fill it and, in doing so, conceal its existence. The emptiness in question is an effect of the exhausted life. In the following, I will try to argue that a triangle consisting of higher values, economic values and the (empty) space is a sort of trap caused by two ways of being of the exhausted life, namely by judgement and domination. Moreover, I will attempt to show that a shift to non-instrumental education – education that is neither for ‘democracy, solidarity, inclusion, tolerance, social justice and peace’ (Biesta and Säfström, 2011: 540), nor for ‘league tables, benchmarks, return rates, and educational surplus value’ (Hodgson et al., 2018: 17) – present in the field of contemporary philosophy of education is also a problem within the exhausted life, and that perhaps the only chance to overcome this exhaustion lies in negation, which can be found through despair.

Enlightened false consciousness

We are involved in the aforementioned triangle: we are stuck between market reality, which changes us into things, bygone ideals and emptiness. Our approach to the market reality, especially visible in the politics of humanist faculties, might be described in terms of simultaneous immersion and alienation, a simultaneous yes and no, since we function in it and at the same time we reject it. Following Sloterdijk’s diagnosis, I argue that this state of affairs is closely linked with the consciousness that he called an enlightened false consciousness. He identified this ‘collaborating consciousness’ (Sloterdijk, 1987: 6) as a state that appeared after the disappointment of the expectations of the mid-1960s, when ‘a thin thread of political culture — public dispute about true living’ (Sloterdijk, 1987: XXXV) emerged and disappeared.

Logically, the term, coined by Sloterdijk, is a paradox, for how could enlightened consciousness still be false? Still, it accurately describes the duality and tension of our times. As Sloterdijk confesses, writing Critique of Cynical Reason was accompanied by a strong desire to make the tree of philosophy, the tree of criticism, blossom again, simultaneously being fully aware that this was impossible. The enlightened false consciousness, being a false consciousness, must be overcome, but at the same time it is enlightened, which means that the veil has been thrown off already, revealing nothingness. We all know that there is something wrong with our world, that it is not the way it ought to be, but we also know that we can do nothing about it. The enlightened false consciousness is the state in which we discover that human consciousness changes nothing and the truth will not set us free; masks have been thrown off, secrets have been revealed, but the world has not been cured. The enlightened false consciousness is a consciousness that has become sick with experience and enlightenment. It no longer believes in any ideals, a belief that was central to both the Enlightenment and Marxism, since no ideal can be realised in this world. We are enlightened, but instead of new energy, our knowledge has brought us apathy. It has not opened us to public debates, but rather isolated us in private lives. We only sporadically free ourselves from this apathy, in a sudden and fleeting glimmer of zeal. Yet, we return to our exhaustion since we remember that we cannot change the world.

The enlightened false consciousness, as Sloterdijk holds, has also revealed the cynical world of surviving and adjusting. We might not agree with something, but we remain in established positions since bills are waiting to be paid. Everyone has something to lose. ‘New values? No thanks! With the passing of defiant hopes, the listlessness of egoisms pervades’ (Sloterdijk, 1987: 6). Do we not recognise and try to fight this modern cynicism in our students who, in too many cases, are concerned not with knowledge, but with gaining a diploma, a piece of paper that would facilitate finding a well-paid job? Do we not recognise this cynicism in ourselves?

We are not the ones who wait for Godot, because we have decided not to wait, but rather to get to work. However, the figure of the modern cynic portrayed by the German philosopher has to be distinguished from the ancient kynic. The first one, as he points out, did not appear outside the city and society, but inside them, becoming a mass figure. ‘Modern mass cynics lose their individual sting and refrain from the risk of letting themselves be put on display. They have long since ceased to expose themselves as eccentrics to the attention and mockery of others’ (Sloterdijk, 1987:4). Herein, a small correction, or rather a remark, needs to be made, since according to Sloterdijk the figure of the mass cynic is bereft of any trait of individualism, whereas we all can agree that nowadays being individual remains a strong cultural and social requirement. Therefore, I would say that we are individuals, but our individualism is a mass individualism, a great illustration of which can be found in a well-known scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian, where a crowd, in answer to Brian’s words (‘You don’t need to follow anybody. You’ve got to think for yourselves. You’re all individuals’), replies in unison: ‘Yes, we’re all individuals’. Only one man, in distancing himself from this unanimous chorus, responds: ‘I am not’. Thus, our individuality has nothing to do with August Landmesser’s ¹ gesture, and is more akin to that of Monty Python’s crowd.

The account of the cynic needs to be complemented by an important psychological characteristic he possesses, namely melancholy. The enlightened false consciousness is an unhappy consciousness. However, this sadness has to be hidden or at least kept under control, since the essential point of modern cynicism is to be able to work ‘in spite of anything that might happen, and especially, after anything that might happen’ (Sloterdijk, 1987: 5). We live under constant pressure produced not only by an obsession with effectiveness, but also with happiness; ‘we are all encouraged to believe that happiness should be our principal goal in life’ (Roberts, 2016: 105). As human beings, we are expected to control and manage our life, time and career in order to reach fulfilment. As educators, we are required to keep our students happy and interested. Discomfort or boredom should be avoided wherever possible. ‘If we appear too serious, or sad, or depressed, or in despair, this becomes another matter for scientific investigation and resolution’ (Roberts, 2016: 105). We need to fit into a social machine and prove, throughout conformity, that our lives have value. In a similar way, we have to conceal the exhaustion that has become both a taboo and an inseparable part of our lives.

For faculty, to admit fatigue is to admit to a ‘lack of willpower’ or to a ‘lack of productivity’ or to a ‘lack of passion’ or even worse, such admissions demonstrate a certain ‘ungratefulness’ for one’s professional life. For students, this means that they are labeled ‘unreliable’ or ‘lacking promise’ and thus are cut from large research projects, conference panels, and so on. (D’Hoest and Lewis, 2015: 3).

Are you tired? Pop a pill and don’t tell a soul.

Exhaustion

Our adjustment to reality has nothing to do with affirmation. Yes, we keep running faster and faster, powered by the logic of achievement, but our energy seems to be able to realise itself only through repeating. This is a state of exhaustion, which, however, cannot be thought of as belonging to psychology or medicine, but to philosophy, and especially to the philosophy of education (D’Hoest and Lewis, 2015). On the problem of exhaustion, Sloterdijk’s diagnosis can be discussed alongside Deleuze’s philosophy, which gives us an ontological supplementation of Sloterdijk’s observations. Thus, these two studies might be taken as complementary analyses of the same issue, one from a social and cultural view, and the second from an ontological perspective, in line with the Deleuzian ontology of forces. Following the French philosopher, and the path drawn by Nietzschean genealogy, it could be said that in order to understand the situation in which we find ourselves, and also the situation of contemporary education, one needs to, firstly, comprehend the type of forces at work within it. For we will never be able to grasp the sense ‘of a human, a biological or even a physical phenomenon’ (Deleuze, 2002: 3) until we recognise:

The force which appropriates the thing, which exploits it, which takes possession of it, or is expressed in it. A phenomenon is not an appearance or even an apparition but a sign, a symptom which finds its meaning in an existing force. (Deleuze, 2002: 3)

Exhaustion, as Deleuze holds, has to be distinguished from tiredness. As he explains:

The tired no longer prepares for any possibility (subjective): he therefore cannot realize the smallest possibility (objective). But possibility remains, because you never realize all of the possible, you even bring it into being as you realize some of it. The tired has only exhausted realization, while the exhausted exhausts all of the possible. The tired can no longer realize, but the exhausted can no longer possibilitate. (Deleuze, 1995: 3)

The French philosopher examines exhaustion mainly in two texts: in the chapter ‘Powers of the false’ of his book Cinema 2: The Time-Image, which is concerned with cinematography, and in his essay ‘The exhausted’ a few years later, which is devoted to Beckett’s television plays. In the first one, he deals with the concept of the exhausted force that forms the exhausted life, while in the second he explores the figure of the exhausted. ‘The exhausted’, kept in Beckettian mood, differs in certain respects from the earlier essay. Without going into detail, since this goes beyond the scope of this article, the crucial issue of ‘Powers of the false’ is the problem of the exhausted life and the forces that exhaust life, whereas ‘The exhausted’ focuses on the relationship between the exhausted and the possible. It is worth mentioning that, in his earlier essay, Deleuze ascribes the possibility of being exhausted by life only to the noble force (in the Nietzschean sense), that is, the force able to be generous, to give, ‘putting itself at the service of what is reborn from life’ (Deleuze, 1989: 142). Thus, it can be said that, in terms of exhaustion, there are two different states and two different, or at least separate, issues. However, there is a common denominator between the description of the exhaustion of the exhausted and of the exhaustion of the exhausted life: exhaustion is ‘an impoverishment of the vital force’ (Deleuze, 1989: 146), infertility or, as D’Hoest and Lewis (2015) put it, a state of being breathless and dried up. Therefore, the exhausted life can manifest itself only through repeating schemes, finding its realisation in ‘tables and programs denuded of sense’ (Deleuze, 1995: 5) and in the combinatorial (la combinatoire) called by the French philosopher ‘the art or science of exhausting the possible, through inclusive disjunction’ (Deleuze, 1995: 5). The exhausted force is a force that is ‘able to respond to others only in a single, uniform and invariable way … the type of force which no longer knows how to metamorphose itself according to the variations of what it can affect and what it can be affected by’ (Deleuze, 1989: 140), and no matter ‘how large it is, it is exhausted because it no longer knows how to transform itself’ (v: 140). Consequently, we can assume that if life according to Deleuze, following the Nietzschean tradition, is the relation of forces (le rapport des forces) – differentiated qualitatively and quantitatively – then the exhausted life is a life dominated by forces that are unable to transform. This inability to change and to create is what causes the exhausted forces to exhaust life. In order to better explain the exhausted force, Deleuze brings up a well-known story about a scorpion and a frog: ‘the scorpion… knows only how to sting, and stings the frog that carries him over the water, even if it means death by drowning’ (Deleuze, 1989: 140). In a way, one might say that in the contemporary world Donald Trump embodies everything the exhausted life is about. Representing what Braidotti calls ‘ideals of white masculinity, normality, youth and health’ (Braidotti, 2013: 67–68), he can establish his relationships with the world only through possessing other bodies, through ‘free access to and the consumption of the bodies of others (Braidotti, 2013: 68). In addition, he does so regardless of whose body it is, in other words, whether the body belongs to a woman, an animal or the Earth.

In that way, the exhausted forces impoverish life instead of strengthening it through constant transformation. What is crucial is that exhaustion does not inevitably involve passiveness. The exhausted force is not passive. It is active, but machine-like. Being exhausted ‘does not mean that you fall into indifferentiation, or into the celebrated identified contraries, and you are not passive: you press on, but toward nothing’ (Deleuze, 1995: 4). The exhausted life can produce, but never create, since its energy manifests itself in mechanical repeating, not in giving birth to anything new. A great illustration of what such busy exhaustion might look like can be found in Melville’s (2018) book Bartleby, the Scrivener. Bartleby works; he is busy all the time. He has no private life, no passions or weaknesses. He spends his days and nights copying documents. As Melville puts it:

There was no pause for digestion. He ran a day and night line, copying by sun-light and by candle-light. I should have been quite delighted with his application, had he been cheerfully industrious. But he wrote on silently, palely, mechanically. (Melville, 2018: 21)

Bartleby’s activity, as well as he himself, belong to a blind, mechanical order of things. There is nothing ‘ordinarily human about him’ (Melville, 2018: 22), and he is as dead as a ‘pale plaster-of-Paris bust of Cicero’ (Melville, 2018: 22).

In opposition to the exhausted force, Deleuze suggests a force that is able to create, one embodied in the figure of the artist, whom he also calls a creator of truth. He describes it in terms of a protean, ‘outpouring, ascending life the kind which knows how to transform itself … always increasing the power to live, always opening new ‘possibilities’ (Deleuze, 1989: 141). He also identifies this creative force as ‘generosity’ and as Nietzsche’s Zarathustra’s ‘virtue which gives’ (Deleuze, 1989: 141). The figure that represents the exhausted forces is more complicated, as it takes the dual form of the truthful man with his higher values, and the powerful impotent – the market logic’s dream come true – who only knows how to dominate. Deleuze’s thought does not allow us to give in to the temptation to simplify a vision of the world. In this sense, it goes much deeper than Sloterdijk’s idea in comprehending what exhaustion is. It keeps us away from an easy conclusion that the world was better when guided by higher values and that these values need to be restored if we want to heal the world. For higher values, in other words the good, the truth and so on, as well as a will-to-dominate, are two faces of nihilism, that is, the types of forces that exhaust life. Both the truthful man and the powerful impotent, despite their different approaches to life, embody nihilism conceived of as the degeneration and decline of life.

Consequently, education, regardless of whether it is instrumental to traditional narratives with their higher values, or to the market, may serve to exhaust and impoverish life, since the mechanism on which these narratives are based, consisting of judgement and domination, seems to be much the same. Whatever wants to dominate over life or judge it at the same time cuts itself off from the changeable flow of life, from life as becoming, in other words, from its creative power. In order to appropriate or judge one needs some external, superior perspective towards, and imposed on, life. Instead of immersing in a changing flow of life, one positions oneself in a place outside the object of one’s domination or judgement. The (empty) space, abandoned by traditional narratives and taken over by a market narrative, seems to be an effect of this phenomenon. This leads us to the conclusion that the existence of the (empty) space does not depend on particular content, but rather relies on the mechanism of acting forces, on the way they are. The exhausted life will always involve the (empty) space that calls to be filled by some narrative.

Educational vitalism

Therefore, I argue that our problem does not lie in the rule of market logic, but in the phenomenon of the exhausted life unable to create and change. Consequently, it could be said that the issue of the instrumentality of education and an attempt at a shift to a radically non-instrumental form of it remain within the framework constituted by an impoverishment of life from which we suffer. Of course, I do not want to label this turn as remaining only inside the limits of the problem of the exhausted life, just to point out that despite differences between particular voices, they refer to something that is common, unintended and symptomatic. This shift, paradoxically because of the vitalist hallmark it bears (understood in the Nietzschean fashion), might prove a lack of life as a flow of becoming. It can be interpreted as a rejection of the exhausted life, as a strong longing to be immersed in the flow of life and as an attempt at a shift towards pedagogy that would be more amenable to be exhausted by life than be a force that exhausts life. However, such education, aimed at strengthening life through change and transformation, could not be non-instrumental in any case. Rather, as something that serves life, it would be instrumental to it.

A vision of education freed from any instrumentality bears a hallmark of vitalism, insofar as what is educational is substituted for what belongs to life itself. Let us remember that life, in Nietzsche, is conceived of as an innocent becoming, something that happens in the eternal present, with no beginning or end, something that has no aim beyond itself and cannot find its fulfilment in any final goal, but realises itself through constant change. Such life can be identified with the Greek notion of zoe, a Dionysian, impersonal, energetic excess, the power of inexhaustible fertilising and giving. ² There are at least two points where the substitution occurs. Firstly, when what is able to reinvigorate education is found in education itself without referring to outside sources different than education and, secondly, when what is educational is described in terms of becoming. Education, instead of being a human activity, becomes a fundamental, transgressive life experience. Thus, we deal with ‘the educational moment, the educational event’ (Biesta and Säfström, 2011: 543) or ‘the event of education’ (Hodgson et al., 2018: 17) that takes place in the absolute present as ‘the time without destination and without aim or end’ (Masschelein, 2011) or might happen out of time (Biesta, 2013), which ‘cannot be pinned down…captured, and that, in that sense, also cannot be defined’ (Biesta and Säfström, 2011: 543). Moreover, within this body of thought, teaching is perceived as giving, generosity, openness and love to the world (Hodgson et al., 2018; Masschelein, 2011). It brings to mind an association with the Zarathustrian bestowing virtue, a virtue that gives, in which the Dionysian power of fertile life is reflected. The theme of Zarathustra as a teacher and one who gives and spreads love is repeated several times in Nietzsche’s book and is one of the most important ideas of this book. In this sense, teaching is linked with Dionysian, solar energy, which, as Bataille points out in dealing with his economy of an excess, ‘dispenses…without any return…gives without ever receiving’ (Bataille, 1988: 28). According to Deleuze, Zarathustrian virtue, as ‘noble energy’, ‘the generous’, is ‘the creation of new possibilities, in the outpouring becoming’ (Deleuze, 1989: 141). Instead of judgement and domination, which result in a decline of life, it offers affect (‘I love or I hate’) as ‘immanent evaluation’ (Deleuze, 1989: 141). This removal of domination and judgement from education might be recognised in the post-critical educational philosophy offered by Hodgson, Vlieghe and Zamojski. One sees this first in this philosophy’s post-critical approach, which perceives critical pedagogy as resulting in a doubled oppression due to the fact that it is rooted in the domination of a knowing subject to whom the oppressed need to subordinate, acknowledging their oppression. Secondly, it can be noticed in its principled normativity, one that offers a practical attitude based on affirmation instead of ‘critical judgement on the situation on the basis of certified knowledge’ (Hodgson et al., 2018: 14). Also Biesta’s and Säfström’s calls (2011) to remove both populism and idealism from education, ³ when seen through the prism of exhaustion, might appear to be a reflection of a thought of education beyond judgement – formed from the idealistic perspective of what ought to be – and domination, which tries to appropriate whatever it encounters, and which remains involved in the master–slave dialectics.

Furthermore, a description of such an educational experience – as ‘an event of de-familiarisation, de-socialisation, de-appropriation or de-privatisation’ (Masschelein, 2011), at which de-centring and de-subjectivation take place – echoes a Dionysian trait that refers to a different order of reality, freed from historical, social, cultural and political constraints. Drawing on Bataille’s differentiation between the order of things and the intimate order, we can say that the non-instrumental approach positions what essentially belongs to education inside the intimate order, while maintaining the possibility of a smooth transition from one order to another. In that way, education is also perceived as a form of a break or hiatus (Biesta and Säfström, 2011: 541; Hodgson et al., 2018; Masschelein, 2011), which is able to suspend and interrupt the undesirable order of things in which we are stuck. In describing this world of things, closely intertwined with utility and effectiveness, Bataille claims:

… the reduction of ‘that which is’ to the order of things is not limited to slavery. Slavery is abolished, but we ourselves are aware of the aspects of social life in which man is relegated to the level of things, and we should know that this relegation did not await slavery. From the start, the introduction of labor into the world replaced intimacy, the depth of desire and its free outbreaks, with rational progression, where what matters is no longer the truth of the present moment, but, rather, the subsequent results of operations. (Bataille, 1988: 57)

When one comes into the intimate order, she stops being a useful thing. She immerses herself in life, in timeless excess energy. As Bataille puts it:

I submit that madness itself gives a rarefied idea of the free ‘subject,’ unsubordinated to the ‘real’ order and occupied only with the present. The subject leaves its own domain and subordinates itself to the objects of the real order as soon as it becomes concerned for the future. (Bataille, 1988: 58)

Two illustrations of the point can be particularly helpful in dealing with these two orders. The first is given by D’Hoest and Lewis who depict a contemporary thought regime:

The old adage ‘publish or perish’ is an injunction to maximize one’s utility to a knowledge economy through research, or else one will lose opportunities for grants, research positions, or tenure. Or, even worse, researchers are caught in the trap of publish and perish. It is not enough to merely publish but one must also publish in the highest ranked journals and the most competitive venues. (D’Hoest and Lewis, 2015: 2)

The second can be found in Bataille’s statement about his book, which he bluntly calls a ‘book that no one awaits’ (Bataille, 1988: 11), a book that is a wonderful waste of time, which was written for no reason. Bataille does not allow us to live under the illusion that we could save our innocence in the world of things. For when we operate within an order of utilisation, when we ‘make a thing of the second self’ (Bataille, 1988: 56), we simultaneously give ourselves the ‘limits of a thing’ (Bataille, 1988: 56). From this perspective, effective education and the rise of the ‘measurement culture in education’ (Biesta, 2009: 2), as well as our activity adjusted to the requirements of this culture, is nothing more than increasing the world of things, since only things are measurable. In addition, the network of things that surround us has become so saturated that we can no longer breathe.

Despair and ominous passivity

Yet, there is another view regarding the problem of the exhausted life, and it offers a solution that does not involve filling the (empty) space with another narrative, distinct from the market narrative, nor omit its existence, but rather by revealing and exposing it completely. To put it in other words, we need to face the exhausted life as well as exhausted education. This road does not lead through hope and affirmation, but, as Carusi (2017) points out, through despair and negation, which, however, does not equate to a simple rejection. Nevertheless, the concept of a disruption is given a critical role in this approach as well.

Carusi, following Laclau in distinguishing between the ethical and the normative, between a negative ethics and a positive normative order, conceives of despair as an ethical act that disturbs the normative order of contemporary education. He analyses, as an example of such a break, a survey designed to understand the reasons for high teacher attrition rates, in which over two-thirds of respondents ‘would not encourage teaching as a profession to graduating students’ (Carusi, 2017). In this way, he argues, instead of suggesting ways in which the normative order can be mended, which in fact would mean maintaining this order, teachers, propelled by despair, ‘are taking up a negative position in relation to teaching that conforms to despairing the ethical. In other words, teachers are negating teaching by not recommending the profession to those who express interest in teaching’ (Carusi, 2017). Consequently:

… teachers are negating their position in the normative order where teaching is the primary instrument by which test scores are raised or lowered. Where policy discourse emphasises the centrality of teaching and places teachers in front of the classroom, teachers recommend that no one take that place. That ‘most important’ place where the teacher stands becomes void, an absence that through despair marks an exercise of ethical teaching. (Carusi, 2017)

Despair seems to be the only offspring of the exhausted life and in this frame of reference, first of all, I want to explore this issue. In other words, I suggest that when thinking of despair and education, we should go beyond the perspective in which despair is perceived as a component of teachers’ work (Liston, 2000), a reaction of educators to a certain political situation (Ali-Khan and White, 2019) or an educative element of the human condition (Jaarsma et al., 2015; Roberts, 2016). Consequently, our thinking of despair cannot be limited to perceiving it as an experience of ‘persistent discomfort’ (Roberts, 2016: 19) or a feeling of ‘perpetual unease’ (Roberts, 2016: 19), which evoke our capacity for reflective, critical thinking and openness to others.

Seen from the perspective of the exhausted life, there are two crucial features of despair described by Carusi as well by Roberts. The first one can be found in a connection between despair and emptiness that Carusi (2017) establishes through the ethical and Roberts (2016: 95) by a process of decreation. Despair points to and refers to emptiness. The second feature is its link with disorder: despair breaks a given order of things, ‘disrupts, demoralises, and sometimes destroys’ (Roberts, 2016: 57). It emerges from the very bottom of exhaustion and, paradoxically, appears as the only hope for breaking the predictable and dead order of the machinery. In the ancient Greek tradition, two great figures of despair, Niobe and Hecuba, both witness a radical transformation: the first is turned into stone, the second into a dog. From despair ‘there is no going back’ (Roberts, 2016: 36) to the point where we were before, we ‘cannot reclaim the self we once were’ (Roberts, 2016: 18). Furthermore, the element of passage from one order to another approximates it to madness, death or love, moving someone to a different reality. After all, they say that despair can make you lose your mind. In the same vein, Kierkegaard (1941) compares despair to vertigo. One gets the feeling that one is falling, losing the ground under one’s feet, and that the world starts to spin and becomes distorted.

The problem with the exhausted life is that it seems to keep going on without exhausting itself, thanks to its ability ‘to multiply itself’ (Deleuze, 1989: 141). It is like Bartleby, who continues copying documents at the law office. He does this until the moment when he, for the first time, expresses his strange formula, I would prefer not to, which interrupts and finally stops his work. ⁴ The formula is neither an affirmation nor a negation (Deleuze, 2018). In that way, it is a reversal of the simultaneous yes and no found in the enlightened false consciousness. The scrivener does not simply refuse, but he does not accept either. Bartleby and his words, the culmination of which is his refusal to copy and his subsequent absolute idleness, change the order of things. They enter the domain of madness, a domain of the abnormal and irregular: ‘From the initial arrangement to this irrepressible, Cain-like flight, everything is bizarre, and the attorney behaves like a madman’ (Deleuze, 2018: 53). Before examining this bizarreness, one must acknowledge the strange relationship between Bartleby and his employer. This is a ‘relationship between doubles’ (Deleuze, 2018: 53), between opposite sides of the same coin, as if Bartleby was a shadow of the lawyer, and as if his hopelessness inevitably belonged to the bright and well-organised world of a social career. Interestingly, Deleuze (1989) notices the same connection, the relationship between doubles, also between two faces of nihilism, that is, the truthful man and powerful impotent. Consequently, one notices a link between the transformations that happen in Bartleby’s and the lawyer’s lives. In the scrivener’s case, although he breaks out of a social role, there is no qualitative difference between his activity of copying and his subsequent state, where he merely stares at a wall. He continues doing nothing. He increasingly does nothing, revealing a deeper and deeper nothingness, while the lawyer immerses himself in outlandish activities. It is as though the exposed emptiness invoked madness.

Academic writings pay the most attention to Bartleby’s refrain I would prefer not to. Yet, in Melville’s novel, we deal with a whole series of events or critical moments, and this expression, although crucial, is only one of them. The series we are presented with is as follows: repeating, a lack of either an affirmation or a negation, negation and idleness. There is, however, something missing in this list, namely an element that precedes and enables Bartleby’s I would prefer not to, an element that functions like a grain of sand that disrupts the work of the perfect machinery. Bartleby carries this element within himself, bringing it when he arrives at the office for the first time. Something strange begins to happen not with Bartleby’s formula, but upon his appearance in the law office, ‘from the initial arrangement’ (Deleuze, 2018: 53) when ‘Bartleby is to sit in the attorney’s own office, next to some folding doors separating it from the clerk’s office, between a window that faces the side of a neighbouring building and a high screen, green as a prairie’ (Deleuze, 2018: 53). Later, in trying to find an answer to Bartleby’s puzzle, the lawyer finds out that the scrivener was a clerk in the Dead Letter Office. As Melville puts it:

Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men? Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters, and assorting them for the flames? For by the cartload they are annually burned. Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring – the finger it was meant for, perhaps, molders in the grave; a bank note sent in swiftest charity – he whom it would relieve nor eats nor hungers any more; pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities. On errands of life, these letters speed to death. (Melville, 2018: 38)

Although we are not told what is going on in Bartleby’s mind, this passage holds out the possibility of thinking that hopelessness and despair had become inherent parts of his personality. Therefore, one can assume that it is precisely despair that is the missing element that we are looking for, the one that precedes his I would prefer not to and his final negation. It is the only plausible option, the only fruit of life that is unable to transform. One becomes aware that nothing is left, since all possibilities have been exhausted and that there is nothing left to lose, since everything is already lost. One can only sit and wait for nothing. The posture that Deleuze recognises in the exhausted is the posture of Bartleby chained to his desk: ‘hands sitting on the table and head sitting on hands, head level with the table’ (Deleuze, 1995: 5). Exhaustion – he continues…

… allows no lying down and, when night falls, remains sitting at the table, empty head in captive hands … It is the most horrible position in which to await death, sitting without the force either to rise or lie down, watching for the signal [coup] that will make us draw ourselves up one last time and lie down forever. (Deleuze, 1995: 6)

When someone stands, she can walk, when she lies down, she can crawl, but when she sits, only despair is able to make her fall down to break the chain. Perhaps Aleksander Gierymski’s painting ‘Peasant Coffin’ provides the most impressive illustration of this posture. In it, he depicts a sitting man and woman, the parents of a dead child. One has the impression that they accept the death as a fact of life, knowing that children die all the time. They sit in front of their house, with the coffin leaning against a wall. They are frozen in exhaustion, too lifeless to get up and too hardened to collapse. All they can do is to sit, and so they do, so still that even the dog at their feet falls into a deep sleep.

Drawing on Žižek’s reading of Melville’s character, one might add that not only does Bartleby’s attitude end something, but also starts something new. It ‘opens up a new space outside the hegemonic position and its negation’ (Žižek, 2006: 381–382), enabling us to move out of the dialectical deadlock between power and resistance, within which each act of protest reaffirms what it negates. Bartleby’s refrain disturbs the existing order of things. His withdrawal into passivity is not an answer to this order, and as such does not amount to resistance. It is a refusal to participate, which can be seen as ‘a kind of arche’ (Žižek, 2006: 382), a necessary step that ‘clears the ground, opens up the place, for true activity, for an act that will actually change the coordinates of the constellation’ (Žižek, 2006: 342). As the philosopher explains, in his usual provocative manner:

Better to do nothing than to engage in localised acts whose ultimate function is to make the system run more smoothly (acts like providing the space for the multitude of new subjectivities, etc.). The threat today is thus not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to ‘be active’, to ‘participate’, to mask the Nothingness of what goes on. People intervene all the time, academics participate in meaningless ‘debates’, etc., but the truly difficult thing is to step back from activity, to withdraw from it. Those in power often even prefer ‘critical’ participation, a dialogue, to silence – they would prefer to engage us in a ‘dialogue’, just to make sure that our ominous passivity is broken. (Žižek, 2007: 212)

The system ‘invites us to take action, to enter into dialogue or to participate and be inclusive’ (Bryar, 2018: 21) in order to displace its failure. In trying to improve it, to repair what, according to us, ought to be repaired, we accept the invitation and maintain the existing state of affairs. Yet, it needs to be kept in mind that Žižek’s call ‘is not simply about ‘doing nothing’… Rather, it signifies a refusal to ‘do nothing’ in the guise of radical acts of resistance, as well as a refusal to take a cynical distance’ (Bryar, 2018: 8).

Consequently, it is hard to accept the argument offered by Bojesen and Allen who claim that ‘there is nothing particularly unusual or edifying about Bartleby’ (Bojesen and Allen, 2019: 66). They read Bartleby as ‘a limit point which offers no deliverance’ (Bojesen and Allen, 2019: 66) and reject any ‘logic of redemption’ (Bojesen and Allen, 2019: 66) in the interpretations of Melville’s story, such as seen in analyses by Agamben (1999), Deleuze (2018), Derrida (1995), and Hardt and Negri (2001). Yes, Bartleby’s refusal ‘amounts to denial of life’ (Bojesen and Allen, 2019: 63), but a denial of a certain form of life, the exhausted life that he embodies. Their observations, however, are very apt and to the point with regard to the figure of Bartleby as a ‘destabilising other’ of education and knowledge (Bojesen and Allen, 2019: 68), as something broken, which triggers a need for fixing it and restoring to the order of reason and progress (Bojesen and Allen, 2019: 62). As they put it:

We argue that if there is any lesson to be drawn from Bartleby, the Scrivener it is that educators remain haunted by a commitment from which there is no escape. This inescapable commitment constitutes the educational task of the Lawyer and both redeems him through his efforts directed towards Bartleby while also punishing him for their failure. Education is tied to what it finds repugnant, that is, to a Bartleby-like presence in the classroom and society. This Bartleby-like presence must haunt the classroom so long as education continues, since education produces that spectre as its chosen problem, or problem-space, that justifies education. Here, educators are faced with a futile choice that is symptomatic of their entrapment. They can either return to education with redoubled effort, or desperately attempt to detach themselves from their commitment to it. Busy and engaged or exhausted and guilty, they are forced into themselves, tied to education (and the problem of Bartleby) by their educational bad conscience. (Bojesen and Allen, 2019: 70)

This is exactly how we perceive despair, as something that is repugnant, as a problem that immediately needs to be solved and made to disappear. In the culture of productivity and success, there is no place for despair. Consequently, in the educational context, despair is often regarded as, if not a taboo like exhaustion, then something dangerous that might hamper the process of achieving well-being. ‘It is taken as given that education should make us feel better, not worse, and that teachers have a responsibility to prepare students to become happy, well-integrated, contributing citizens in their lives beyond schools’ (Roberts, 2016: 1).

But how would ‘Bartleby’s politics’ look in educational practice? Paraphrasing Žižek, one might imagine the following dialogue: You should think about your career! – I would prefer not to. You should publish in the highest ranked journals! – I would prefer not to. You have to work harder to increase the chance of getting a grant! – I would prefer not to. ⁵ Such responses are at the same time easy and difficult to imagine, but they are, first and foremost, controversial (Bryar, 2018) and evoke a set of questions: what does it mean exactly not to act in order to act? Is it ethical not to act? Not to participate in the world that urgently demands our participation? Not to try to rebuild the world? These problems are of high importance when posed in the domain of the philosophy of education and only few would dare to give a positive answer. Yet, in our present, within the exhausted life outside of which we cannot position ourselves, instead of ignoring or omitting the problem, the only ethical way is to exhaust the exhausted life, to break the order, and to follow this path until the end. To do this, we need the courage given by despair, since despair makes one feel that there is nothing to lose, nothing to retain. In this sense despair can be understood as a state of real freedom, the only way out when there is no way out.