The Pneumatic Common: Learning in, with and from the air

Abstract

Air is an immersive substance that envelopes us and binds us together, yet it has dominantly been taken for granted and left out of educational and other theorizations. This article develops a conceptualization of the pneumatic common in order to address this gap. The specific intervention staged is within recent educational literature on the common by Noah De Lissovoy, Tyson E. Lewis, and Alexander Means. This literature is surveyed and analyzed in relation to educational theory, curriculum, pedagogy, and policy. Claiming that the air is a central feature of and paradigm for the common, I then concentrate on making the air conditions of the educational common explicit. I do this through a theoretical, historical, and sociological reading of air conditioning. While this explicitation is itself educational, I return to the educational common at the end of the article to ask how and what we can learn in, with, and from the air.

Keywords:

• air
• air conditioning
• common
• globalization
• space
• pedagogy

Notes

1. Lewis (2012) marks the distinction between his notion of exopedagogy and De Lissovoy’s ‘common education’ in a footnote: ‘If common education emphasizes pedagogy as a product of the productive nature of the commonwealth, I would argue that exopedagogy emphasizes pedagogy as an action of exodus that organizes study for the extension and intensification of the common’ (p. 859, fn 3).

2. Air conditioning technology is what led to the social phenomenon of the ‘summer blockbuster’, as the theater provided a place for people—primarily but not only white—in cities to escape the summer heat.

3. Horkheimer and Adorno (1987/2002) mention the air conditions of the theatre in passing: ‘The unemployed of the great centers find freshness in summer and warmth in winter in these places of regulated temperature’ (p. 111).

4. Engineers and architects argued that it was cheaper to build a school with air conditioning, largely because the school could be more compact, as it wouldn’t have to be designed ‘to catch a breeze in every classroom’ (Jacobs, 1961, p. 115). Air conditioning is technically the control of the air’s temperature, humidity, quality, and circulation. Thus, a heating system is an air-conditioning system. A year-round or total air-conditioning system, by contrast, also includes the ability to cool the air in the warmer months.

5. To be sure, it was not as though popular and political opinion had consistently and progressively favored air conditioning until this point. For more on this, see Ackerman (2002).