The Ideology of Performative Pedagogies: A Cultural Symptomology

Abstract

This article examines the interplay of power, identity and culture within online learning in higher education. Specifically it addresses the relation between online learning, or e-learning, and the apparent disappearance of ideology within postmodernity, in the context of teaching highly diverse cohorts of students. This conjunction is theorised through Slavoj Žižek's 1990s critique of multiculturalism and ideas of the symptom and interpassivity. The engagement with the ‘cultural difference’ of ‘international students’ problematises one current orthodoxy of online learning, enabling the re-conceptualisation of the ideological confrontation in this context as one between perfomativity-informationalisation and friction, difference and cultural engagement.