Beyond Our Depths: Imagining and (Un)Forgetting Education

This chapter explores issues relating to imagination and memory as they affect education in postdigital contexts. In particular, it asks how critical theory can reinvigorate how we imagine, understand, and do education. To achieve this, we draw extensively on a range of theory exploring art and its reception to draw parallels between the consumer of art and the learner in education. Central to our analysis is Walter Benjamin’s celebrated essay, ‘The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, which we explore in relation to postdigital reproducibility and postdigital aura in education. We also examine a number of images of postdigital reproduction and educational reimagination, filtered by Sontag’s polemic ‘Against Interpretation’ and Rancière’s suspicion of explanation. We then look briefly at the lingering effects of the pandemic, drawing on Haraway and Berardi, and their potential for effecting change. The urgency of the need for this kind of affective (re-)imagination of education is our recognition that ‘human understanding is beyond its depths’, regarded as imaginative possibility as much as existential threat.