On education as idiotextual initiation: towards transeducation as idiotextual comprehension

The present article continues my work in logomachy and the philosophy of education. It turns to Bernard Stiegler’s concept of the ‘idiotext’ as the means of terming what I have previously called ‘particular sets of sense’. The gambit of the article is that ‘intropy’ (uncertainty provoked by informational complexity) provides a very useful concept to describe how idiotexts locally make-sense, and their idiomatic nature. Over and above this, and pertinent to the philosophy of education, intropy aids in criticising the esoteric and initiative nature of conservative educative structures (first theorised by R. S. Peters) since it describes the modality of uncertainty when faced with sets of sense that one is not initiated into—the inside and outside of sense. The article is, therefore, also concerned with education as the reproduction of idiotexts qua domains of knowledge. Using figurative spirals (first proposed by Stiegler), spiral mathematics and a novel formula that integrates entropy into logarithmic spirals, I represent the maintenance of idiotexts as resisting the ineluctable increase in entropy of downward spirals—understood as the deferral of the degradation of sense. Finally, I argue that instead of education as initiation, which can be described as the educative opening of the gates to particular domains of knowledge, what is sorely missing is education as idiotextual as com-prehension, something I term transeducation.