Pedagogy 2025

Abstract

This paper advances a rethinking of pedagogy through François Laruelle’s concepts of non-philosophy, the transcendental computer, and non-photography, reframed for contemporary debates on artificial intelligence in education. Established pedagogical frameworks—philosophical, technoscientific, or so-called anti-pedagogical—share a tendency to erase the Unteachable, that remainder of learning which resists mastery, optimization, or curricular closure. Current deployments of AI risk intensifying this erasure by automating assessment and sequencing in ways that reconfigure failure and resistance as errors to be corrected rather than signals to be preserved. I outline an alternative: a model of non-pedagogy in which AI functions as a co-educator rather than a surrogate teacher. The transcendental computer is reimagined as a formal machine that computes pedagogical materials as inputs without legislating a master pedagogy, while non-photography provides a paradigm for treating images, data, and student artifacts as clones of the Real—usable traces rather than authoritative representations. Together, these concepts support a non-sovereign pedagogy in which AI offers tools for recombination and exploration while preserving the Unteachable as essential to inquiry. Research aims: 1. To theorize AI in education as a transcendental computer that processes without legislating. 2. To design a non-pedagogical framework that treats student data and artifacts as usable clones rather than representational truths. 3. To test practices—such as preservation zones, provenance transparency, and generic access—that protect failure, resistance, and creativity within AI-supported classrooms.