At the recent Philosophy of Education Society annual meeting, I responded to a paper about the concept of place in education. I’m including that response below, which will eventually be published with the conference proceedings (a working paper of which can be found here, with citations, etc.)

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I was going through the Epstein files the other day, looking for connections to public finance. I found an unsettling correspondence between Epstein and Jem Sendall, a professor of sustainability leadership at the University of Cumbria in England. It was 2012, and Sendall was looking for investors in his project to create and maintain community currencies in the developing world to ‘help’ poor people secure monetary sovereignty from the churn of dollar capital and its rampant oil industry, which only four years previous had suffered its largest financial crisis since 1929. In the emails, Sendall was excited to be connected to Epstein, who expressed a mild interest in the community currency project, making his investment conditional on funneling any funds through a US nonprofit connected to Sendall’s university.

I found it unnerving to say the least to find this professor of sustainability seeking funding from the conductor of what we now know is a neoliberal ruling class ring whose ur-currency was/is pedophilia and rape. Generally, it’s always haunted me too that Epstein was a high school math teacher, and how the prefix symmetry between pedagogy and pedophilia at least implies a certain approach to the child that became acceptable and normal to the titans of industry, politics, and culture in Epstein’s orbit. An Epstein class pedagogy.

I mention this upsetting episode to set the scene for my response to John Mullen’s incisive paper on the revenge of place in educational theory. His careful, and purposely selective, genealogy of the concept of place “from ethical dwelling to mediated relation,” drawing from Gruenwald, Ruitenberg, and Saari and Mullen; then, in large part, presenting a helpful reading of Morton’s concept of the revenge of place, wherein place morphs from background to foreground, passive scene to active force, a frothing up of the interconnectedness of everything that modern subjectivity was happy for so long just to treat as setting.

Mullen’s is a focused tracing of this concept through literatures spanning ecology, ethics, aesthetics, and pedagogy, the metaphysical sculpting of which has a clear curricular upshot: when doing eco-pedagogy, let’s not blackpill our kids with an overload of negative information, teaching the doomscroll. Incidentally, this insight was a trend recently in the larger discourse around the climate crisis: that some authors are too dark and gloomy, and we need to focus on the constructive, agentic aspects of our place in the ecological whole. Mullen’s is a theoretical treatment of this imperative. He writes that, instead of the gloom, let’s teach the mesh of us with everything else, with the objects and relations of everything alive, teaching its terrains, which are also alive, and thus educate for the ecological thought. In other words, let place have its active revenge on our passivization of it. From there, Mullen tells us, proper next steps for change, so needed in a time of polycrisis, can be better conceived and taken.

Mullen’s paper also provides some helpful resources for what to do with this at once pedestrian and intimidating term place, as opposed to space, for instance. Space, as a concept, appears in Mullen’s text as marking ecology qua consciousness, like calling plants weeds or certain bugs and rodents, pests. These aren’t natural kinds, they’re artificial kinds, and perhaps as Derrida would prompt, space so conceived prevents us from accepting the animals that therefore we are, prohibits our encountering the infinite boundary between what we think of as “nature” (the arch artificial kind) and the roiling real realm of place that doesn’t, for Morton, take place on our terms.

In that vein, and ultimately more parenthetically, there were some sources I wanted to know what Mullen’s Morton thought of: Bellamy Foster’s concept of the metabolic rift, Lefebvre’s everyday life, Malcom Harris’s recent work on paths out of the planetary crisis, David Blacker’s (not me!) recent work on eco-consciousness against post-work identities, Misiaszek’s work on Freirean ecopedagogy, and Knight-Abowitz and Burbules’s situated philosophy. I know Mullen said his genealogy is partial but I’m wondering how expansive it might get in fuller or larger treatments of this theme.

But I’ll devote the rest of my response to a more focused question worthy of the focused account of place’s revenge in Fullen’s paper.

Going back to the Epstein class’s pedagogy, what’s so striking for me about the revelations of our global ruling class’s intimacy with Epstein is the way the whole mess makes neoliberal social structure visible: the supra-governmental arrangements made by the most atavistic hoarders of the social product, who took glee in shredding the social contract for their own pleasure, slaking their worst preferences with the awful confidence of a master of the universe. But it’s not just about these individuals. It’s about the structure of our society over the last generation, the relations that hold these individuals’ places in place. The places they occupy and the places those places bring into being.

By social structure, to be more precise, I mean something like the relations of exploitation and repression that have developed over time which we find ourselves inheriting despite our discomfort or desires for other relations: the privatization of the public, deindustrialization, the marketization of everything, white supremacy, patriarchy, colonizations, etc. This structural frame is key for the question I want to ask; that there’s a difference between the individual and the place in the social structure they occupy. When Saussure said that no single speech act can change language, and that thus language and speech differ (the former being structural), a tradition of thinking about the social more or less concluded that any given subjectivity’s individual or intersubjective difference cannot necessarily shift the structure, that the structure does indeed change, and those changes have something to do with shifts in subjectivities, but this structural change happens in a differential flow of history and collective struggle, the play of forces, etc. The distinction, I think, holds also for ecology: there’s a difference between the ecological whole and social structures, whose places individuals occupy. So I wonder what Mullen and Morton’s account might be of the effectivity of social structure with respect to this ecological thought. Does ecological thinking come to bear on social structure? If so, how?

One can imagine a world in which Epstein funded Bendell’s project, for example; or even taught ecologically when Epstein himself was a high school teacher; or, worse, had an ecological orientation to the place of his terrible island. In this case the ecological subjectivities occur within a social structure that exerts its own force, as a third player in the drama between consciousness and ecology.

My question, therefore, is one that I’ve often come to and one to which I don’t really have an answer: what does it take to educate a social structure, and how does this differ from educating individual consciousness or even groups of consciousnesses? In past work, I’ve used the old philosophical metaphor of a river to illustrate the question. A river is a quick flow of massive amounts of water, but the water is held by a riverbed and larger geological context, guiding the waters in unique swerves. The water has its own relative autonomy, its own power, which shapes the rock and sediment; but the rock and sediment also have their own effectivity on the water, with their own relative autonomy as well. In this metaphor, the social structure is the riverbed and consciousness is the water. Under what circumstances might water overwhelm the structure? And under what circumstances might the riverbed exert its structural influence on the water, no matter how fast or warm or choppy it flows?

My sense is that the analogy is schematic. For any given situation, degrees of effectivity differ and are uneven such that we can’t rely on something (eg, ecological education) being always more effective than something else (eg, social structure), but rather we have to assess. Yet, in general, it seems to me that if you educated every consciousness in a social structure with ecological thought there would be some non-negligible structural effectivities to the contrary, immanently if not transcendently, and if those effectivities are left in place then no amount of ecological pedagogy of any kind might shift it, just as one speech act cannot shift a language. But certainly speech acts have a role to play in any particular context in shifting the language. What is that role, and how can ecological thinking, informed by the revenge of place, help us to make those determinations viz. social structure, not merely ecology and consciousness?

In other crasser words, there’s more to the social than just stuff in the head and stuff in ‘nature’. From Mullen and Morton we know that, when it comes to place, being before setting. But if we conceive of place as being before setting, aren’t there distinctions within being that we need to make, like between structure and subject? The subject not only occupies the place of ecology qua not-setting, but also occupies a place in social structure. To what extent is there a “place” of the social structure, places that we occupy like offices in a building or rivers in riverbeds, that are neither only of consciousness nor only of ecology— and how can Morton’s revenge of place, as Mullen renders it, include social structure as place takes its revenge?