Education after the end of the world. How can education be viewed as a hyperobject?

Abstract

This article considers a series of ideas disturbing the conventional wisdom that decrees education an essential force in saving the world. Taking Morton's descriptions of hyperobjects seriously, we consider his radical idea that the world has ended amidst the eco-political depredations of the Anthropocene. Accordingly, we claim that education in modernity most properly belongs - materially and ideologically - with technological enframing and the rise of biopower. In other words, what is taken almost universally as the sacred realm of education is, in fact, a contributory factor in the global eco-ontological crisis. Morton describes global warming, plastics and nuclear arsenals as hyperobjects: viscous, nonlocal entities that exist in temporal and spatial planes vastly different from our own immediate worlds. They are the threatening, difficult to access entities that express the Anthropocene. While most will propose that education will be vital in combating looming ecological apocalypse, we consider that education is a hyperobject itself. Education, we opine, is aligned with the forces and conditions that have generated the present crisis. This is because education embodies the same qualities as the hyperobjects of modernity; according to any rigorous historical ontology, education as we know it must be seen as the most extensive expression of a dangerous biopower that is beyond control. If this position is to be taken seriously, education is not merely impotent in combatting ecological catastrophe, but is a key apparatus supporting the Anthropocene. Education is thus another element of the end of the world.

Keywords:

• Morton
• hyperobject
• education
• anthropocene
• apocalypse
• biopower

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nick Peim

Nicholas Stock is a postgraduate researcher in philosophy of education at University of Birmingham and a lecturer of English Literature in a sixth form college. He is interested in ironic approaches to education, particularly those that embrace literature, poststructuralism and post-Nietzschean ontology.

Nicholas Stock

Nick Peim is Senior lecturer in the College of Social Science at the University of Birmingham, Nick Peim has written extensively about English teaching, cultural and curriculum politics, about education as governance, about research theory and philosophy and about the history of schooling as a human technology. Nick’s main intellectual interests are in continental philosophy, especially ontology, history and social theory. Recent publications include Thinking in Education Research (Bloomsbury, 2018) and various critiques of the contemporary world order of education. [email protected]