Julie Reshe: "Deprived of iek"

We do not know what the education of future will be like, however, certain
moments happening now those impressive and seemingly impossible are
the voices of the upcoming future, harbingers of the unknown that has yet to
come. A glimpse of the future can be clearly seen in the events organized by
The Global Center for Advanced Studies, including the recent one:
conference-course Parallax Futures in Philosophy.
***
According to iek, reality is itself incomplete, and it should be thought of as
incomplete. Cognition of it implies dealing with its incompleteness. It follows
that there is no objectively truthful knowledge. Truth never fully exists, it is
always only generated.
Truth is a process, it never asserts itself to the end. It is never fully formed,
once it is, truth reveals itself as a lie. It can only exist as a process of
emerging. Once it claims to be completely formed, it evaporates. Only its
generation an open space that is not fulfilled to the end, soley in a state of
fulfilling is a suitable environment for the truth to exist.

Truth remains in the lack. Place of truth is the lack, which is simultaneously its
mode of existence. Respectively, truth can not be mastered completely,
however it is possible to remain endlessly in the state of its cognition.
***
The goal of education, which takes into account such understanding of truth,
is not to gain knowledge of some objective truth it is the very process itself
that matters most. Learning fails if it is aimed at mastering the true theory
instead it ends up being a deception or a disappointment.
If there is no objective knowledge that can be obtained, there is no such
knowledge that can be gained or transmitted from the knower to the ignorant.
Knowledge is a reflection of the infinite process of cognition. Those involved in
this process join the generational point of production of knowledge.
Efficient learning is devoid of the place of a master as it functions in such a
way that does not require the very locus of power. In the case of education,
the following ieks question is applicable as well: would not the true task be
precisely to get rid of the very mystique of the place of Power? (iek, 58)
By the dissolution of an educator the very place of a master is annihilated,
creating, thus, the suitable conditions for the evolution in education.
What should remain is a platform for interaction, the atmosphere and a
network for collaboration and participation in the learning process, within
which there is no division into educator and the one who is supposed to be
educated.
This scheme implies the movement toward the possibility of equal
participation in the learning process: towards breaking the barriers of social
status, geographic location, complicated bureaucratic procedures. It is a
glimpse of the future when everyone will be able to join the collaborative
cognition, and only ones desire and abilities will place a limit on it.
Concluding his speech at the conference iek said something very
important. He stated, "I like the idea that I don't exist", meaning that he
imagines such a research event in the future that will be deprived of his

presence as a central and authoritative figure in it and for this reason it will
be a platform for the effectively free discussions.
Such a transformation would indicate the transition to the stage in which the
substantial and the solidified vanishes and only the network of connections
remains. That is the situation when there are no more those who are
perceived as bearers of knowledge. What is left is the process of obtaining
knowledge, the process of cognition and the participation in it. Accordingly, a
learner is no more the one who receives knowledge. As a part of that process
the learner is a constitutive element of the environment of cognition.
Another argument here is that somebody who learns cant be iekian or
Deleuzian or whatever. If one defines herself as iekian it implies that she
expects iek to give correct answers to all the questions, and such an
attitude has nothing to do with learning: it is more like religion the
phenomenon that is essentially opposed to learning and cognition.
***
The one who learns can never turn into the bearer of knowledge. Bearing of
knowledge presupposes that the knowledge had been attained already, thus,
the process of cognition has stopped as its goal was accomplished. To learn
is to leave the space of knowledge unfilled and to retain your selfdetermination unfixed. To leave emptiness in knowledge means to preserve
space for the new knowledge that consequently emerges. Retaining your selfdetermination unfixed opens up possibilities to use a variety of ways to
perceive the world, and this significantly improves the quality of cognition.
The one who learns and the one who teaches, to some extent they both
should remain an empty place.
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What this partial nonexistence of both an educator and a learner, attained
through mixing of their roles and places, is it not a parallax shift of
perspective? The process of cognition that admits the never fully attainable
nature of knowledge truth as a process exposes the non-coincidence of
its participants with any possible place predisposed for them. When the
described model of education is in action, the parallax shift necessarily occurs
and discloses the incomplete nature of reality, because the process of

cognition corresponds to it. Education seen in this way is a search for and
discovery of gaps. The generative emptiness that they contain has a unique
potential for the production of significance.

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Zizek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2006.