Education and the politics of cyberpunk

The importance in contemporary education of critical theory as a pedagogic basis for the analysis of textual and cultural resources creates a space for educationalists to implement meaningful curriculum content. The genre of cyberpunk acts on this level, yet also activates a complex micropolitical field that will affect participants in these lessons. For example, education using cyberpunk assumes that computers shall be set into place in terms of the learning process, but contests the social functionalism of this placement as a means to enhanced, large scale capitalist organization. This is because the learning process that is initiated due to cyberpunk does not try to unify the fractured individual. Pierre Bourdieu (1980) in Outline of a Theory of Practices invoked the category of habitus to explain the subordinate relationships inherent within worker/manager, student/school administration, and child/parent complexes. He spoke of symbolic violence as being a characteristic relation of pedagogic communication, which is charged with the transmission of the “cultural arbitrary,” the special effect of symbolic relations in the reproduction of power relations, within a framework of legitimate authority. Power is imposed by a system of social domination via symbolic means, and through pedagogic authority, but its effectiveness in transmitting the cultural arbitrary is mediated by the strength of polarized classes and movements. The relative strength of the reinforcement given to the balance of powers between the groups or classes by symbolic relations expressing these power relations rises with the strength of various classes, and with the power of the market to confer higher value on the goods delivered by legitimate school authorities