Visual Art and Education in an Era of Designer Capitalism: Deconstructing the Oral Eye

The oral eye is a metaphor for the dominance of global designer capitalism. It refers to the consumerism of a designer aesthetic by the ‘I’ of the neoliberalist subject, as well as the aural soundscapes that accompany the hegemony of the capturing attention through screen cultures. An attempt is made to articulate the historical emergence of such a synoptic machinic regime drawing on Badiou, Bellmer, Deleuze, Guattari, Lacan, Rancière, Virilio, Ziarek, and Žižek to explore contemporary art (post-Situationism) and visual cultural education. jagodzinski develops the concept of an ‘avant-garde without authority,’ ‘self-refleXion’ and ‘in(design)’ to further the questions surrounding the posthuman as advanced by theorists such as Hansen, Stiegler and Ziarek’s ‘force’ of art.

jan jagodzinski is a Professor in the Department of Secondary Education at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, where he teaches visual art and media education and curricular issues as they relate to postmodern concerns of gender politics, cultural studies, and media (film and television). He is a founding member of the Caucus on Social Theory in Art Education (NAEA), past editor of The Journal of Social Theory in Art Education (JSTE), past president of SIG Media, Culture and Curriculum, Editorial Board Member for Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (PCS), Advisory Board for Journal of Lacanian Studies (JLS), Review Board for Studies in Art Education (SAE), Journal of Curriculum Theorizing (JCT), Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education (JCRAE), Visual Culture & Gender; Co-series editor with Mark Bracher, book series Pedagogy, Psychoanalysis, Transformation (Palgrave). He is the author of The Anamorphic I/i (1996); Postmodern Dilemmas: Outrageous Essays in Art&Art Education (1997); Pun(k) Deconstruction: Experifigural Writings in Art&Art Education (1997); Editor of Pedagogical Desire: Transference, Seduction and the Question of Ethics (2002); Youth Fantasies: The Perverse Landscape of the Media (Palgrave, 2004); Musical Fantasies: A Lacanian Approach (Palgrave, 2005); Television and Youth: Televised Paranoia, (Palgrave, 2008), Arts Based Research: A Critique and Proposal (forthcoming). jan jagodzinski was awarded the Manuel Barkan Memorial Award in 2011.