Labors of Formation: Pedagogy and Collectivity in the Modernist Frame

Abstract

Labors of Formation is a study of the contested status and multiple figurations of pedagogy in modernity. I take up pedagogy as a site of conceptual, formal, and political invention, a problem-space investigated by writers and intellectuals in the modernist conjuncture. Pedagogy thus understood includes, but is not limited to, the encounter between teacher and student in a classroom. Through readings of texts by Bertolt Brecht, Wilfred Bion, and an array of Soviet educational thinkers, I put forward an expansive conception of pedagogy as the organization and production of habits of thought, behavior, and desire. The dissertation makes the case for pedagogy as a framework for examining the formation of collectives, arguing against depictions of collectives as incapable of thinking and learning and demonstrating the irreducible role of epistemic processes in collective organization. This dissertation is composed of three chapters, each of which examines the nexus of pedagogy and collectivity at a moment of crisis, rupture, and transition. Chapter One, set in interwar Germany, analyzes Brecht’s theory of eingreifendes Denken, thought that intervenes in the world or has an effect. Chapter Two investigates the contested role of labor in the educative process by considering the post-revolutionary vision for Soviet education known as the United Labor School alongside the theoretical writings of the Proletarian Culture (Proletkult) movement. Finally, Chapter Three turns to the psychic dimensions of pedagogy; the chapter links Bion’s earlier work on group dynamics, starting with his experimental treatment of soldiers during World War II, to his later psychoanalytic theories of thinking and learning. Across these chapters, pedagogy appears not only as an ensemble of educative practices but as a problematic terrain, marked by conceptual opacity and ambiguity. Accordingly, Labors of Formation is not primarily an intellectual history of pedagogical method but a literary and philosophical study of pedagogical thinking, of pedagogy’s animating tensions and conditions of possibility. The dissertation explores pedagogy’s open-ended and indeterminate character, its resistance to mechanization, and its ambivalent relationship to coercion and authority. Pedagogy, refracted through the modernist frame, appears at once as a kind of binding and a liberation, at once the imposition of order and its dissolution.