Conference Agenda

In this paper I consider the possibility that photography might provide an education from, for and in death. This will involve a necessary dance with clichés – clichés immediately ghoulishly crowd round talk of death: “live every minute” etc. It is perhaps worth noting that to talk about photography is always, in some sense, to talk about clichés – etymologically speaking the word “cliché” dates back to the 19^th century and means: to produce or print in stereotype.

As a prelude to exploring the relationship between education, photography, and death, I consider a famous scene from a film which “appears” to take such connections seriously. The scene in question is from ‘Dead Poet’s Society’ and contains a number of “clichés” (in both senses of the word). ‘Dead Poet’s Society’, is set in 1959 in a fictional boarding school for boys. In the scene in question, a new English teacher, Mr Keating, takes the boys out of the classroom down to the school lobby and begins to teach Robert Herrick’s poem ‘To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time’. He notes that the Latin translation of poem’s main sentiment is “Carpe Diem” (or seize the day). Keating informs the boys that soon they will be “food for worms” and encourages them to lean in and look at photographs of long dead alumni in backlit trophy cabinets. Whilst they gaze he whispers carpe diem in a mock-ghostly voice.

I focus in on this scene because it provides one (clichéd?) perspective on the relationship between photography death and education, one I wish to resist. Keating’s ventriloquizing of the photographs, a cliché violently superimposed onto clichés of another sort, is the very thing that blocks the pedgagogical potential present in the experience of being addressed by photographs. For Keating the photographs become vehicles for illustrating the meaning of a poem and, indeed, a wider philosophy that he wishes to convey. In a sense he has seized, where seizing comes close to scrunching, the photographs and encourages the boys to the same.

During the course of the paper I draw upon Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida’s writings on photography to present an alternative view of the relationship between the photograph, death and education. In Camera Lucida (2000), Barthes presents a way of relating to photographs quite at odds with the grasping approach discussed above. He famously employs two terms - studium and punctum. [MI1] The former accounts for our active relationship to what we see and is associated with learning (). The “punctum”, on the other hand, pierces through the studium to wound: “the second element will break (or scan) the stadium. This time it is not I who seek it out (as I invest the stadium with my sovereign consciousness), it is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me” (Barthes, p. 26). The punctum refers to a specific detail in the photograph. There is a subjective dimension to this experience – not everyone experiences the same punctum in the same way or, indeed, in the same photograph. For Derrida, the punctum is equivalent to the spectre, for: “Having to keep what it loses, namely the departed, does not every photograph act in effect through the bereaved experience of such a proper name, through the irresistible singularity of its referent” (Derrida, 2010, p.2-3). For Derrida and Barthes, showing hospitality to what is singular and pierces through, prompts an expressive form of writing. In the paper, I argue that this sort of expressiveness represents a form of subjectification (in Biesta’s sense) overseen by a spectral teacher.

In this paper I consider some possible pedagogic powers in Werner Herzog's documentary film Grizzly Man. This paper will dwell on three key questions. First, what is the sublime and can it be screened in film? Second, what are some core features of tragic art and how might such art ethically educate (if at all)? Third, does Werner Herzog's documentary film Grizzly Man screen the sublime or is the predominant mood tragic?

The discussion of the first research question will focus on Brady who argues that paradigm examples of the sublime are found in nature and involve vast phenomena that cause a mixture of pleasure and anxiety in a human subject. Sublime natural phenomena can include the night sky, huge waterfalls or mountains and thunderous lightning storms (Brady, 2013). Sublime experiences thus usually require interaction between two components. A sublime phenomena or object and a human subject who experiences that phenomena or object with a deeply felt mixture of anxiety and pleasure. There are however different understandings of the sublime and more than one type of experience can be sublime. While a joy filled terror on a beautiful mountain ridge is one paradigm case of the sublime, other sublime experiences may entail little in the way of overwhelming fear of imminent threat to one’s life or wellbeing. Awe or wonder of a more humbling and contemplative sort may be largely felt in place of outright fear. A stargazer may for example look upon the vastness of the night sky and space beyond and feel overwhelmingly small and insignificant in comparison (Brady, 2013). Here the sublime is more contemplatively wonder-filled than life-threatening fearsome.

Brady argues that while the sublime is primarily encountered in nature, artworks can also convey a ‘secondary’ sublime (2013, p 6). She emphasises that second hand access to the sublime through art is not without significance as it can encourage people to feel a sense of humility towards nature’s power. However, she is also clear that artworks cannot provide a full sublime experience. Brady acknowledges that a carefully crafted tornado scene on an IMAX screen could be thrilling. However, she suggests the artistic reproduction will only ever be an impoverished experience when contrasted with the real thing. The natural sublime has a ‘multi-sensory’ dimension (tactile, auditory and visual) that is absent from artistic recreations (Brady, 2013, p 128). The cinematic representation will lack the ‘in-your-face fury’ of a live whirling tornado (Brady, 2013, p 128).

In response to Brady I claim that while cinematic depictions of the sublime are qualitatively different from the sublime as it is directly encountered in nature, the screened sublime is not inevitably inferior just because it qualitatively different from the natural sublime. Instead of relegating the screened sublime to secondary, reduced status because it cannot mirror the sublime in nature (as Brady does) I argue it is worth thinking about how film might offer distinctive perspectives on the sublime, ones that invite viewers to critically reflect on whether the search for the sublime in nature is always ethically defensible and good for people and planet.

I also note that artworks can have aesthetic properties that have educational power drawing on Simoniti (2017) who offers a persuasive account of aesthetic properties in realist terms. He suggests aesthetic properties are real powers that objects have in them to dispose an audience to an experience or response. I claim some films have aesthetic properties that have the power to invoke a sublime response in their audiences and cite Jennifer Peedom's Mountain and Denis Villneuve's Dune as examples of films that screen the sublime.

Research questions

• What place does film currently occupy in Philosophy 4 Children?

• How does film-philosophy differ from philosophizing in the ordinary sense?

• How might a re-appraisal of the philosophical qualities of film change how we think of its (potential) role in the classroom?

Objectives

The main objective of the paper is to show that there might be a more significant role for narrative films to play in the philosophical education of young people if we look beyond its conventional use as an illustrative prompt for reflecting on moral issues.

Theoretical framework

Philosophy 4 Children (P4C) has a long and well-established history in classroom-based teaching, and often includes the use of film as a prompt for young people’s discussion of philosophical issues. These approaches often take for granted a specific understanding or theory of what constitutes philosophical method. Increasingly, both philosophers and pedagogues have begun to take an interest in film as a medium for ‘doing’ philosophy also, although opinions vary as to both the mode by which such philosophising is carried out and the ends to which it is oriented. The convergence of interests here has led to confusion about the philosophical character of film’s place in the classroom: This paper will provide a survey of film’s pedagogical modes and ends, before exploring the idea that the educational character of film may lie more with its cinematic qualities than its reducibility to any preconception of what philosophy does or ought to consist in. 

I take part of my theoretical cue here from a recent re-appraisal of the P4C programme by Tyson Lewis and Igor Jasinski (2022). Lewis & Jasinski argue that Philosophy 4 Children remains too directed in its ‘philosophicality’. Perhaps as a consequence of the increasing need for educational activities in institutions to demonstrate evidence of learning outcomes, they have argued that P4C too has come to desire ends of reasonableness and democracy too much for the exercise to be truly about the individual learner’s voice. Their view is that we should abandon some of the thinking around ends, and emphasise merely the joy of the means: “there is something about letting students speak, about abandoning them to their capacities for speech, about enabling them to adventure with saying what can be thought and think what can be said” (Lewis & Jasinski, 2022: vii).  

Inspired by this idea of an “end-less” education, the final part of my paper explores the potentiality of a Film-philosophy for Children (Fp4C). Film-philosophy for schools could introduce film into the curriculum as a mode of showing young people worlds other than their own, and allowing them the opportunity to give voice to their own experience of film-viewing in response. As a result, the question of what philosophy is/might be remains open, including to the possibility that film both does something different to – and can change the nature of – philosophical thought itself.