T E Lewis
Biographic Data
| ID | 68013 |
|---|---|
| NAME | T E Lewis |
| GIVEN NAMES | T E |
| FAMILY NAME | Lewis |
| SIGNATURE | LEWIS T E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of North Texas |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4303-752X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 80 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 151 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 80 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Marxist pedagogy and form
New Materialism and the Wonderous Pedagogy of Puppetry
The Marxist educational logic of the seminar
This article argues for the primacy of the seminar in theorizing Marxist educational practices. To do so, it turns to the writings of Fredric Jameson, especially two late transcripts of his seminars at Duke University. In particular, the seminar emerges as a unique educational space and time for a quasi-public rehearsal of thinking dialectically with an intergenerational audience of students. This interpretation of the seminar is supplemented wit…
Images of agitation
Final Thoughts and Future Possibilities
Toward an Ethic of Adjacency
The authors propose critical breaching experiments as a means to destabilize and render inoperative the white, male, colonialist gaze. We begin with an overview of breakdowns in phenomenological and critical phenomenological literatures and how this can be articulated within the breaching experiment model composed of four dimensions including collective and sustained breakdowns, hesitant looking practices, critiques of how bodies hold onto sedime…
Inoperative Education as Drift between Eastern and Western Philosophies
“Inoperative Education as Drift Between Eastern and Western Philosophies” expands upon recent notions of “inoperativity” in educational philosophy in the West through an encounter with the Taoist philosophy of Zhuangzi. Thus far, the concept of inoperativity has largely been inspired by Giorgio Agamben, the contemporary Italian critical theorist. Educational theory has taken up inoperativity in order to rethink the school as a space of free time,…
Benjamin on Occultism and Progressive Education
For the first time, Walter Benjamin's critical comments on educator and philosopher Rudolf Steiner are examined in depth. In particular, Benjamin detected protofascist themes within Steiner's seemingly progressive notion of child‐centered, arts‐based, developmentally appropriate early childhood education. But this does not mean that Benjamin completely rejected Steiner's work as mere ideology. Instead, we can find the subtle trace of Steiner's in…
Late fascism and education
Antifascist education
Anti-fascist education in an age of dis and mis-information
Fascism's Spatial Imaginary at the Threshold
This article returns to the work of Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman to theorize the spatial imaginary of fascism, a dimension missing from existing analyses of the social psychology of the authoritarian personality. The fascist spatial imaginary can be defined in terms of a Manichean sense of world space, a dominance of spatial binaries such as inside versus outside, mythic/romantic spatial imagery, a paranoid mood, and finally, spatial projec…
Educational Soundings
Hopelessly joyful in dreadful times
This article argues that hope is not an adequate affective response to dread. Indeed, hope and dread are more closely aligned than either critical or postcritical forms of educational philosophy would like to admit. The article proposes a shift from hope to joy as an under appreciated educational affect. To make this claim, the author pivots to Spinoza's emphasis on joy as an affect that increases one's potential to think and act in a world with …
The American agitator goes digital
Given the rise in extremist radicalization using digital media, antifascist education must develop its own philosophy of digital technologies. The first half of this paper turns to Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman's theory of the American agitator as well as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's notion of fascist projection and paranoia to provide groundwork for this project. Though written in the 1940s, Frankfurt School essays on agitation and p…
Response to Critic
Outline of the Psychophysical Educational Problem in the Work of Walter Benjamin
This article contributes to the growing literature on Walter Benjamin as an educational philosopher. In particular, it reassesses the claim made by prominent Benjaminian scholars that education can be defined as a form of awakening. To further develop this central educational claim, the article turns to Benjamin's early essay "Outline of the Psychophysical Problem" and in particular, its emphasis on the existential categories of nearness and dist…
(De)facing the face of lecturing with Deleuze and Guattari
This paper articulates the separate accounts of facial education and lecturing found in A Thousand Plateaus in order to theorize a new concept of lecturing for a post-digital university. Many accounts of Deleuze and Guattari in educational theory turn away from lecturing as hierarchical and striated, yet this approach denies Deleuze and Guattari's deterritorialization of the practice through their description of a lecture by the character Profess…
Remembering and Antifascist Education
Simple, Dark, and Deep
In Defense of Walter Benjamin’s Constellational Curriculum
Rethinking Philosophy for Children
This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. By utilizing the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, the authors propose a radical reconceptualization of the practice known as Philosophy for Children (P4C) that focuses on the experience of one's potentiality to speak rather than the development of specific skills or types of speaking. 'Philosophy for Infancy' (P4I) emerges …
Cities Gone Wild
Education for potentiality (against instrumentality)
In this article, the author problematizes two well-known positions on the relationship between means and ends in education. On the one side, there are those who problematize the means of education without necessarily redefining its ends, and on the other hand, there are those who challenge the purported ends of education while maintaining certain means. These two positions can take any number of progressive and conservative forms. While there are…
Education Out of Bounds
Exopedagogy
In this paper, Tyson E. Lewis challenges the dominant theoretical and practical educational responses to globalization. On the level of public policy, Lewis demonstrates the limitations of both neoliberal privatization and liberal calls for rehabilitating public schooling. On the level of pedagogy, Lewis breaks with the dominant liberal democratic tradition which focuses on the cultivation of democratic dispositions for cosmopolitan citizenship. …
The Fundamental Ontology of Study
In an effort to disrupt the hegemonic dominance of learning theory, in this article Tyson Lewis explores the unique educational logic of studying. Drawing on the work of Giorgio Agamben, we can understand the operation of study as one of suspension through three modes: preferring not; no longer, not yet; and as not. But the relationship between the operation of suspension and the everyday mode of learning remains an open question requiring furthe…
A Marxist Education of the Encounter
This essay traces out a new organization of Louis Althusser’s work that rests on his fundamental educational problematic: interpellation. There are three moments where Althusser discusses education in his writings: in the famous essay on schools as Ideological State Apparatuses, in his infamous essay on the university and the pedagogical function, and in a much more obscure reference to trade unions. In all three, Althusser is dealing with the pr…
Study Time
Journal Article Study Time: Heidegger and the Temporality of Education Get access Tyson E Lewis Tyson E Lewis Correspondence: Tyson E. Lewis, University of North Texas, College of Visual Arts and Design, 1201 W. Mulberry St., Denton, Texas, USA. Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 51, Issue 1, February 2017, Pages 230–247, https://doi.org/10…
Rethinking the Learning Society
Education in the Realm of the Senses
In this article I re-examine the role that aesthetics play in Paulo Freire's pedagogy of the oppressed. As opposed to the vast majority of scholarship in this area, I suggest that aesthetics play a more centralised role in pedagogy above and beyond arts-based curricula. To help clarify Freire's position, I will argue that underlying the linguistic resolution of the student/teacher dialectic in the problem-posing classroom is an accompanying shift…
Biopolitical Utopianism in Educational Theory
In this paper I shift the center of utopian debates away from questions of ideology towards the question of power. As a new point of departure, I analyze Foucault's notion of biopower as well as Hardt and Negri's theory of biopolitics. Arguing for a new hermeneutic of biopolitics in education, I then apply this lens to evaluate the educational philosophy of John Dewey. In conclusion, the paper suggests that while Hardt and Negri are missing an ed…
But I’m not a racist!” Phenomenology, racism, and the body schema in white, pre-service teacher education
In this article, I call for a phenomenological turn in educating white, pre-service teachers. As opposed to dominant pedagogical models which focus on changing one’s beliefs about race, phenomenology points toward the importance of pre-conceptual, pre-critical forms of racial embodiment. Here I draw upon recent work on the different between body image (beliefs about the body) and body schema (what the body can do). The worry is that existing form…
Paulo Freire's Last Laugh
In several enigmatic passages, Paulo Freire describes the pedagogy of the oppressed as a ‘pedagogy of laughter’. The inclusion of laughter alongside problem‐posing dialogue might strike some as ambiguous, considering that the global exploitation of the poor is no laughing matter. And yet, laughter seems to be an important aspect of the pedagogy of the oppressed. In this paper, I examine the role of laughter in Freire's critical pedagogy through a…
Swarm Intelligence
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue that contemporary political and economic struggle entails reappropriating the monster as a potent image of multitudinous insurgency against Empire. This essay critically appraises the status of the monstrous in Hardt and Negri's work by bringing the field of critical animal studies into dialogue with Hardt and Negri in order to demonstrate how their conceptualisation of the monstrous nature of the multitude i…
Education and the Immunization Paradigm
Mapping the Constellation of Educational Marxism(s)
In this paper, the author maps three radically different visions of Marxism in educational philosophy. Each ‘register’ contains insights but also contradictions that cannot easily be resolved through internal modifications of the theory or through theoretical synthesis with other registers. The radical function of Marxist pedagogy is to create a constellation of Marxisms through which the outline of history can emerge. As such, the author ends wi…
Critical Surveillance Literacy
In this article, the author provides a theoretical framework for analyzing the complex and contradictory matrix of surveillance technologies being deployed in U.S. schools. Through a review of the extensive literature on surveillance, the author charts the modalities of disciplinary and sovereign power as they relate to the overall social relations of late capitalism. In conclusion, the article offers a tentative reconstructive vision for schools…
The Surveillance Economy of Post- Columbine Schools
The 1999 Columbine High School tragedy triggered an unprecedented intensification of school militarization and student criminalization. In response to the murder of thirteen individuals by the self-proclaimed "Trench Coat Mafia," schools across America adopted new and improved "safety" measures. In the name of security, information technologies and psychological profiles were deployed, heightening the abilities of the school to act as a sophistic…
The Studious University
It is not uncommon to hear criticisms of the university today. From the right, the university is seen as nothing more than a mere liberal bastion or hotbed for leftist ideological indoctrination. And from the left, the university is considered nothing more than a factory, part and parcel of the military-industrial complex, or a mere puppet of corporate control. The centrality of corporate, neoliberal logics, ideologies of managerialism and excell…
Getting a Grip on the Classroom
A major field of psychological research in education concerns the relationship between teachers’ beliefs and their practices. A contested yet fairly consistent assumption underlying this literature is that the beliefs that teachers hold concerning the educational profession directly and/or indirectly affect their practices in actual classrooms. Because of the assumed causal power of beliefs, teacher education programs should therefore help studen…
The Future of the Image in Critical Pedagogy
The American agitator goes digital
Given the rise in extremist radicalization using digital media, antifascist education must develop its own philosophy of digital technologies. The first half of this paper turns to Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman's theory of the American agitator as well as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's notion of fascist projection and paranoia to provide groundwork for this project. Though written in the 1940s, Frankfurt School essays on agitation and p…
Educational realism
In this article, the authors utilize the philosophical methodology developed by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri to formulate a theory of educational realism. The goal is to posit an embodied form of education that emerges from within the movements of the multitude. The connection between multitudinous movement and education is the concept of choreography, which destabilizes habituated movements, unleashing creative alternatives. The paper conclud…
Posthuman Phenomenologies
Western philosophical traditions have been haunted by an intellectualist thesis supported by two foundational assumptions: first, that humans can be defined in virtue of their minds, and second, that having a mind separates humans from non-human animals. Many phenomenologists have complicated this thesis, but there is nevertheless a tendency in phenomenology to remain fully within a human-centric research paradigm. This article will explore the p…
Studying with the Internet
Retaking the Test
Data-driven teaching and learning is common sense in education today, and it is common sense that these data should come from standardized tests. Critiques of standardization either make no constructive suggestions for what to use in place of the tests or they call for better, more scientifically rigorous, reliable, and authentic forms of testing. This article aims to critique the underlying logic of testing within neoliberal education by a retur…
Educational States of Suspension
In response to the growing emphasis on learning outcomes, life-long learning, and what could be called the learning society, scholars are turning to alternative educational logics that problematize the reduction of education to learning. In this article, we draw on these critics but also extend their thinking in two ways. First, we use Giorgio Agamben and Gilles Deleuze to posit two educational logics—tinkering and hacking, respectively—that susp…
Too Little, Too Late
This essay situates Fredric Jameson's theory of pedagogy within his larger project of the aesthetics of cognitive mapping in order to demonstrate the importance of teaching and learning for defining Marxist theory and practice. The article excavates Jameson's pedagogical unconscious, which forms the backdrop for many of his most compelling insights into aesthetic representation. Through a dialectical analysis, the relation between aesthetics and …
The Reptoid Hypothesis
Research Article| April 01 2005 The Reptoid Hypothesis: Utopian and Dystopian Representational Motifs in David Icke's Alien Conspiracy Theory Tyson Lewis; Tyson Lewis Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Richard Kahn Richard Kahn Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Utopian Studies (2005) 16 (1): 45–74. https://doi.org/10.2307/20718709 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Cita…
The Surveillance Economy of Post- Columbine Schools
The 1999 Columbine High School tragedy triggered an unprecedented intensification of school militarization and student criminalization. In response to the murder of thirteen individuals by the self-proclaimed "Trench Coat Mafia," schools across America adopted new and improved "safety" measures. In the name of security, information technologies and psychological profiles were deployed, heightening the abilities of the school to act as a sophistic…
The Reptoid Hypothesis
Research Article| April 01 2005 The Reptoid Hypothesis: Utopian and Dystopian Representational Motifs in David Icke's Alien Conspiracy Theory Tyson Lewis; Tyson Lewis Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Richard Kahn Richard Kahn Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Utopian Studies (2005) 16 (1): 45–74. https://doi.org/10.2307/20718709 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Cita…
The School as an Exceptional Space
In this essay, Tyson Lewis theorizes current lockdown practices, zero-tolerance policies, and No Child Left Behind initiatives in U.S. schooling by drawing on Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben's analysis of the concentration camp and the state of exception. Agamben's theory of the camp provides a challenging, critical vantage point for looking at the ambiguities that emerge from the complex field of disciplinary procedures now prevalent in inne…
Critical Surveillance Literacy
In this article, the author provides a theoretical framework for analyzing the complex and contradictory matrix of surveillance technologies being deployed in U.S. schools. Through a review of the extensive literature on surveillance, the author charts the modalities of disciplinary and sovereign power as they relate to the overall social relations of late capitalism. In conclusion, the article offers a tentative reconstructive vision for schools…
Liberal Humanism and the European Critical Tradition
The birth of the modern European critical tradition can be traced back to the Enlightenment and in particular the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s (1724-1804) critique of reason. Kant’s revision of the liberal humanist tradition replaced metaphysics (speculation about external reality) with critique. For Kant, critique consisted of tracing the origins of experience back to the faculties of the mind. Stated simply, before Kant, science described the wo…
Cultural Critique
Cultural critique is a broad field of study that employs many different theoretical traditions to analyze and critique cultural formations. Because culture is always historically and contextually determined, each era has had to develop its own methods of cultural analysis in order to respond to new technological innovations, new modes of social organization, new economic formations, and novel forms of oppression, exploitation, and subjugation
Biopolitical Utopianism in Educational Theory
In this paper I shift the center of utopian debates away from questions of ideology towards the question of power. As a new point of departure, I analyze Foucault's notion of biopower as well as Hardt and Negri's theory of biopolitics. Arguing for a new hermeneutic of biopolitics in education, I then apply this lens to evaluate the educational philosophy of John Dewey. In conclusion, the paper suggests that while Hardt and Negri are missing an ed…
On Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse was one of the most important and renowned philosophers of the 20th century. His thought and his involvement in global student movements played a decisive role in transforming the political landscape of the 60's and 70's in the United States. For many he is remembered as the father of the so-called New Left, a figure who represented theoretical clarity through the fog of war, counterrevolution, and the repression of freedom in adv…
Exopedagogies and the Utopian Imagination
Exopedagogies and the Utopian Imagination: A Case Study in Faery Subcultures Tyson Lewis (bio) and Richard Kahn (bio) ...the earth we pace Again appears to be An unsubstantial, faery place; That is fit home for Thee! (Wordsworth, 2004) Spirit, n. 1. Intelligent or immaterial part of man, soul....3. Rational or intelligent being not connected with material body, disembodied soul, incorporeal being, elf, fairy. (The Shorter Oxford English Dictionar…
Capitalists and Conquerors Teaching Against Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism Rage and Hope
Through an immanent critique of Peter McLaren's recent work, the author demonstrates the strengths and weaknesses of critical-revolutionary paedagogy. This review reveals internal lacks, gaps, and contradictions emerging from within the three main dimensions of McLaren's overarching manifesto including passion, reason, and revolution. Although McLaren is an important voice in linking Marxist political and cultural theory to the practice of educat…
Too Little, Too Late
This essay situates Fredric Jameson's theory of pedagogy within his larger project of the aesthetics of cognitive mapping in order to demonstrate the importance of teaching and learning for defining Marxist theory and practice. The article excavates Jameson's pedagogical unconscious, which forms the backdrop for many of his most compelling insights into aesthetic representation. Through a dialectical analysis, the relation between aesthetics and …
Education in the Realm of the Senses
In this article I re-examine the role that aesthetics play in Paulo Freire's pedagogy of the oppressed. As opposed to the vast majority of scholarship in this area, I suggest that aesthetics play a more centralised role in pedagogy above and beyond arts-based curricula. To help clarify Freire's position, I will argue that underlying the linguistic resolution of the student/teacher dialectic in the problem-posing classroom is an accompanying shift…
Education and the Immunization Paradigm
Power, Crisis, and Education for Liberation
Mapping the Constellation of Educational Marxism(s)
In this paper, the author maps three radically different visions of Marxism in educational philosophy. Each ‘register’ contains insights but also contradictions that cannot easily be resolved through internal modifications of the theory or through theoretical synthesis with other registers. The radical function of Marxist pedagogy is to create a constellation of Marxisms through which the outline of history can emerge. As such, the author ends wi…
Paulo Freire's Last Laugh
In several enigmatic passages, Paulo Freire describes the pedagogy of the oppressed as a ‘pedagogy of laughter’. The inclusion of laughter alongside problem‐posing dialogue might strike some as ambiguous, considering that the global exploitation of the poor is no laughing matter. And yet, laughter seems to be an important aspect of the pedagogy of the oppressed. In this paper, I examine the role of laughter in Freire's critical pedagogy through a…
Swarm Intelligence
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue that contemporary political and economic struggle entails reappropriating the monster as a potent image of multitudinous insurgency against Empire. This essay critically appraises the status of the monstrous in Hardt and Negri's work by bringing the field of critical animal studies into dialogue with Hardt and Negri in order to demonstrate how their conceptualisation of the monstrous nature of the multitude i…
The Future of the Image in Critical Pedagogy
Rethinking the Learning Society
Exopedagogy
In this paper, Tyson E. Lewis challenges the dominant theoretical and practical educational responses to globalization. On the level of public policy, Lewis demonstrates the limitations of both neoliberal privatization and liberal calls for rehabilitating public schooling. On the level of pedagogy, Lewis breaks with the dominant liberal democratic tradition which focuses on the cultivation of democratic dispositions for cosmopolitan citizenship. …
The Architecture of Potentiality
The article first examines the interrelationship between time and space in Giorgio Agamben's formulation of messianic utopianism. While time has been given a privileged position in Agamben's philosophy of potentiality, I attempt to uncover the equally important spatial logic of potentiality. In particular, I examine four spatial figures that appear throughout his books: the stanza, limbo, the door, and the operational image. The operational image…
On Study
In an educational landscape dominated by discourses and practices of learning, standardized testing, and the pressure to succeed, what space and time remain for studying? In this book, Tyson E. Lewis argues that studying is a distinctive educational experience with its own temporal, spatial, methodological, aesthetic, and phenomenological dimensions. Unlike learning, which presents the actualization of a student’s "potential" in recognizable and …
A Genealogy of Life and Death
Response to Derek Ford’s Review of On Study
It’s a Profane Life
In this article, I explore the importance of Giorgio Agamben’s theory of potentiality for rethinking education. While potentiality has been a long-standing concern for educational practitioners and theorists, Agamben’s work is unique in that it emphasizes how potentiality can only be thought of in relation to impotentiality. This moment of indistinction—what I refer to as im-potential—has important implications. First, I argue that if potentialit…
Sociology (62 works) · Epistemology (53 works) · Philosophy (53 works) · Law (41 works) · Political science (41 works) · Philosophy (39 works) · Law (32 works) · Psychology (30 works) · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism (26 works) · Politics (25 works)