13. Philosophy of Education
Paper
'Whatever Singularity': Ethico-Political Considerations in Teacher Education
Anne Phelan1, Dion Rüsselbæk Hansen2
1University of British Columbia, Canada; 2University of Southern Denmark
Presenting Author: Phelan, Anne;
Rüsselbæk Hansen, Dion
Due to the legacy of Western modernity (e.g., hierarchical power and market capitalism), education is burdened by an ideology of supremacy and haunted by “imperialist amnesia” (Kapoor, 2020, P. 12). Inspired by the writings of Agamben (1998) and Mignolo (2011), we ask: What are the challenges and possibilities of thinking in new ways, that is, beyond a Western socio-symbolic order?
Despite various forms of critique education is still assumed to be ‘a place’, both metaphorically and literally, in which thoughtful consideration about ourselves, others, and the world can be nurtured.
In (un)conscious ways, however, education can be “a reiteration, indeed a celebration, of the limits to thought and of the impossibility of moving beyond those limits” (Collet-Sabé and Ball, 2022, p. 2). Education can (re)produce certain aesthetical perceptions that can make it difficult to transcend our intellectual, emotional, and sensory horizons of experience (Rüsselbæk Hansen and Phelan, 2019). Of course, education can encourage us to think and comprehend things in new ways. But if we (educators and students) are ‘caught’ in a socio-symbolic (Western) order, we may only be able to think and perceive someone/something that (only) makes sense within this order. Witness, for example, the following reflection of a Canadian student returning from a trip to Nicaragua:
"With government corruption and civil war, Nicaragua has now become the poorest country in Central America, wracked with social problems and oftentimes with little hope for growth or change […] I wanted to bring out the fairy dust, sprinkle it all over the place and free them of their misfortune, be it disability, violence, poverty or illiteracy. […] I wished I could pocket some of their optimism in times of personal despair […] Not all of Nicaragua is bleak. Central America is big on relaxation and taking it easy. […] I am a little closer to discovering the true me, and I would return to those same chicken buses, heat waves and unreliable water sources in a heartbeat." (Benham Rennick & Desjardins, 2013 in Andreotti, 2016, pp. 16-18)
The student exhibits a “projective empathy that forecloses the connections between privilege and underprivilege” (Andreotti, 2016, p. 115) and “reproduce[s] a Canadian-centric global imaginary that does not engage with the invisible complicity of modern/colonial institutions and subjectivities in the creation of inequalities” (p. 115). As social entrepreneur, the student assumes their right to dispense knowledge, skills and values thought to be of universal worth and “to use the community as a resource for personal growth and accumulation of symbolic capital” (p. 115).
The epistemological attitude mirrored in the student’s reflection is that “we go out to the world in order to comprehend it, which literally means to grasp it in its totality, and thus end up with a world of objects outside of us, where we are in the centre and the world is ‘out there’ … for us” (Biesta, 2021, p. 97). The self’s horizon of experience – a “hermeneutic monism” (Benhabib, 1992, p. 228) – dominates the situation disavowing the presence of the other.
The vignette underscores the need for students – repositioned as social critics – to learn to distance themselves from their Western legacy and to think in new ways about themselves, others, and the world. Social criticism requires “epistemic delinking” (Mignolo, 2011, p. 139), a decolonial project which involves both uncovering the particular origins of universal claims to truth and the symbolic violence inherent in “the categories of thought and logic” (p. 116) that sustain Western colonialism. Paradoxically, the Western modern legacy can be the starting point to criticize it; it can be used, as it were, against itself.
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources UsedTo be educational (Biesta, 2017), ‘epistemic delinking’ (Mignolo, 2011, p. 139) must enable engagement not only with the intellectual, emotional and sensory horizons of experience that constitute its potential to “interrupt the being-for and with-oneself” (p. 17), but also with language itself.
When we invite students to recount their experiences, we witness the way in which language connects as well as separates us. As a recodification of experience, language inserts us into a series of social and legal categories such as oppressed/privileged or poor/rich. It is not only that these categories are abstract but that their political content can blind us to who we ‘are’ or might ‘be’ if all predicates and attributes were stripped away (de la Durantaye, 2009). As Agamben (1999) writes: “the presuppositional structure of language is the very structure of tradition; we presuppose, pass on, and thereby – according to the double sense of the word tradio – betray the thing itself in language” (p. 35). This state of affairs poses immense challenges when we consider how, as educators, we can engage with students about their experiences without falling into exclusions and violence, attributing forms to each other via language (de la Durantaye, 2009). For Agamben (1999), it is at the moment just before signification that there exists an instance of openness and potentiality. It is on the threshold between the thing and its signification that “the luminous spiral of the possible” (pp. 254 -257) is found.
Curiously, it could be educational to refuse language by suspending signification. But how to do so? One intriguing way that Agamben addresses the challenge of language is through the concept of whatever – itself “a strange and estranged concept” (Motha, 2012, p. 142). Whatever signifies a liminal space “between the poles of the abstract structure of language and its real manifestation, the universal and the particular, the potential and the actual” (Kishik, 2012, p. 83). A whatever being assumes a mood or strategy of someone who exists on the fringes of a profession [e.g., substitute teacher] or a society [e.g., immigrant], those “who constantly move between multiple vocations or identities….” (p. 79), an ‘absent’ presence, as it were. As a result of their positioning, the whatever being, is freed, temporarily, from the weight of habitual thought and feeling, becoming conscious that language both conveys and betrays the traditions that shape one’s thinking and living (Phelan and Rüsselbæk Hansen, 2021).
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsThe educative point here is not to eradicate particular categories of thought by transcending them BUT to recognize that no category is sacred and that the ethical task is to profane language, play with it, examine it, render it inoperative in one’s life, but without trying to resolve the immense challenges it poses, once and for all (Kishik, 2012).
What if we invite students to temporarily take on a whatever state of mind (by stripping away all those prior influences) and to wonder what would the whatever being that remains (the remnant) say about its experience? What kinds of questions might a whatever being ask? What kind of being would speak of ‘fairy dust’? What does it mean to be ‘the poorest country’? In foregrounding ‘growth, what is cast in the background? What is rendered invisible when we assume ‘competition’ among states? In raising such questions, how might narratives of experience be (re)told? What would this mean for co-existing with different others, colonized and colonizer?
None of this is to suggest that experience can be read from nowhere. Recognizing and attempting to disrupt the (Western) socio-symbolic order, even slightly, by playing with it, enables students to consider realities that have been rendered invisible. Being touched by what has been rendered absent in one’s language constitutes “an entirely different encounter with the world … one where the world comes to us, gives itself to us, surprises us” (Biesta, 2021, p. 97). These moments – events – “capture the contradictions that bind the speaker to the situation” (Grumet, 2015, p. 238), generating many questions about what it means to be touched by and represent an experience, rendering the ‘impossible possible,’ and momentarily dislodging us from ordinary western life (Ruti, 2012). The possible consequences of such educational provocations will be illustrated and discussed.
ReferencesAgamben, G. (1998). Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. (D. Heller-Roazen, Trans.). Stanford University Press.
Agamben, G. (1999). Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. (D. Heller-Roazen, Trans.). Stanford University Press.
Andreotti, V. (2016). Review of “The world is my classroom: international learning and Canadian higher education, edited by Joanne Benham Rennick and Michel Desjardins. Canadian Journal of Development Studies, 37(1): 113-128.
Benhabib, S. (1992). Situating the Self. Routledge.
Biesta, G. J. J. (2017). The Rediscovery of Teaching. Routledge.
Biesta, G. J. J. (2021). World-Centred Education: A View for the Present. Routledge.
Collet-Sabé, J. & Ball, S. J. (2022). Beyond School. The challenge of co-producing and commoning a different episteme for education. Journal of Education Policy, https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2022.2157890
de la Durantaye, L. (2009). Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction. Stanford University Press.
Kapoor, I. (2020). Confronting Desire: Psychoanalysis and International Development. Cornell University Press.
Kishik, D. (2012). The Power of Life: Agamben and the Coming Politics. Stanford University Press.
Grumet, M. (2015). Autobiography: The mixed genre of private and public. In W. F. Pinar and M. Grumet (Eds.) Toward a poor curriculum (pp. 220-243). Educator’s International Press.
Mignola, W. D. (2011). The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Duke University Press.
Motha, (2012). Colonial sovereignty, forms of life and liminal beings in South Africa. In Marcelo Svirsky and Simone Bignall (Eds.) Agamben and Colonialism. (pp. 128-15). Edinburgh University Press.
Phelan, A. M. & Rüsselbæk Hansen, D. (2021). Toward a “thoughtful lightness”: Education in viral times. Prospects, 51: 15-27.
Ruti, M. (2012). The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within. Fordham University Press.
Rüsselbæk Hansen, D. & Phelan, A. M. (2019). Taste for democracy: A critique of the mechanical paradigm in education. Research in Education: Theory, Practice and Policy, 103 (1): 34-48.
13. Philosophy of Education
Paper
Bruno Latour and the Education of the Moderns. Modes of Existence, Dreams of Progress, and the Idea of Emancipation.
Hans Schildermans
University of Vienna, Austria
Presenting Author: Schildermans, Hans
In a brief article, published shortly after the passing of Bruno Latour, Didier Debaise (2022) takes stock of the French sociologist and philosopher’s contribution to our understanding of modernity. In his major work, Enquête sur les modes d’existence, Latour (2012) defines the Moderns as a “people of the Idea” (p. 33). Debaise argues that Latour’s philosophical project can best be conceived as a pharmacological inquiry into the pragmatic value of our ideas, which, in spite of their innocent appearance, have all too often functioned as disqualifiers of what was put away as ‘belief’, domesticators of all kinds of (scientific) knowledge, and colonizers of other ways of inhabiting the Earth. Latour’s inquiry into the efficacy of ideas takes place within a more general framework of questioning modernity as the progressive emancipation of human beings from natural constraints. Although Latour rarely refers to discussions in educational theory, it is remarkable that the notion of emancipation—an educational concept par excellence—takes such a prominent position in his problematization of modernity.
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources UsedAgainst this background, the aim of this presentation is double. First, and inspired by Latour’s definition of the Moderns as a ‘people of the Idea,’ it stages a conversation between Latour’s work on modes of existence and approaches within history of ideas. Latour is often read as a philosopher of objects, materialities and technologies. This presentation, in contrast, will focus on how intellectual history can treat ideas through a Latourian lens. It is interesting in this regard that in the aforementioned project of the modes of existence, Latour (2012) extensively engages with the work of philosophers of language and speech act theory that has had decisive influence on Skinner’s contextualist understanding of history of ideas (Skinner 2002). In opposition to all too mentalist or culturalist conceptions of the nature of ideas, this first, more methodological part will elaborate a concept of ideas that does justice to their pragmatic intents and practical effects.
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsThe second part of the presentation exemplifies and develops these methodological considerations by bringing them to bear on the idea of emancipation and the role it has played historically both in the rhetorical construction of modernity and the meaning that education can or should have in a modern project of progress (Tröhler 2020). More in particular, the focus will be on the notion of emancipation within the discourse of the German ‘kritische Pädagogik/Erziehungswissenschaft’ (Mollenhauer 1968). Particularities of this discourse of emancipation will be elaborated via a contrast with the use of the notion of emancipation within Freirean critical pedagogy (Freire 1968/1996). Developing these contrasts in a historical-comparative manner allows for analyzing the particularities of each specific discourse while shedding light on contrastive modes of existence, each with their own educational vocabulary. My hypothesis is that there is no educational mode of existence sui generis, but that the modern-progressive educational vocabulary should be understood, at least as long as it is articulated within the “Modern Constitution” (Latour 1993, p. 13), as a byproduct of the politico-moral imagination.
ReferencesDebaise, D. (2022). Le peuple de l’Idée. Ce que Latour fait à la philosophie. Esprit, December 2022. Retrieved online via https://esprit.presse.fr/article/didier-debaise/le-peuple-de-l-idee-ce-que-latour-fait-a-la-philosophie-44379.
Freire, P. (1996). Pedagogy of the oppressed (M. Ramos, Trans.). Penguin Books. (Originally published in 1968).
Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern (C. Porter, Trans.). Harvard University Press.
Latour, B. (2012). Enquête sur les modes d’existence. Une anthropologie des Modernes. La Découverte.
Mollenhauer, K. (1968). Erziehung und Emanzipation. Polemische Skizzen. Juventa Verlag.
Skinner, Q. (2002). Visions of politics. Volume 1: Regarding method. Cambridge University Press.
Tröhler, D. (2020). Learning, progress, and the taming of change: the educational aspirations of the Age of Enlightenment. In D. Tröhler (Ed.), A cultural history of education, volume 4: The Age of Enlightenment (pp. 1-23). Bloomsbury.
13. Philosophy of Education
Paper
On The Modes of Existence of Educational Beings
Jonathan Tummons
Durham University, United Kingdom
Presenting Author: Tummons, Jonathan
Modes of Existence are a concept taken by Bruno Latour from the works of Souriau and of Simondon, which he expands to define as being ontological features of the world, brought into view – not constructed – by empirical inquiry, derived from experience, and capable of being added to. They are labelled through a series of three-letter notations such as [POL] for politics or [TEC] for technology. The fifteen modes that Latour has identified thus far are presented in a Pivot Table. In a spreadsheet, a pivot table allows the user to switch between different tables and columns, in order to filter the data. Likewise, through filtering our inquiries through different crossings between two modes (for example, we might consider the confluence of political debate with religious sentiment through [POL-REL]) we can, as ethnographers, move through different ontological frames brought to bear on any situation through being crossed together, sometimes in order to resolve questions, and at other times in order to highlight new ones. Actor-network theory (ANT) is relabelled as [NET] within AIME and works alongside the other modes. AIME has begun to be critically employed within explorations of legal theory, medieval studies, politics and postpolitics, and education (Decuypere and Simons, 2019; Tummons, 2020, 2021).
If we take seriously Latour’s claim that actor-network theory is just one amongst many different but equal modes of existence alongside politics, technology, or religion, as well as others, then what does this imply for how we employ ANT – now [NET] – to think about education? Are the fifteen modes that Latour has identified sufficient, or might we also take seriously his invitation to expand on his modes, as others have done, and include beings of the educational mode within his comparative ontology?
In this paper I argue for the necessity of considering actor-network theory alongside the other modes of existence when thinking about education. In embracing the theoretical and empirical affordances of the Modes of Existence, I argue that Latour’s ‘philosophical-ontological toolkit’ provides ways of thinking about the beings of education in many ways, from textbooks to policies and from university researchers to kindergarten teachers, all enrolled in networks within their own ontology, their own mode of existence.
I propose that education [EDU] is a mode of existence, just as law [LAW] or religion [REL] are modes of existence. This is not the first extension of Latour’s cosmology: alongside the gradual uptake of AIME as a framework for inquiry, several additional modes have been suggested: of academic practice; of form [FOR], a concept that is found within AIME , but which, it has been argued, should be considered a mode in its own right; of signs [SIG], derived from the semiotic theories of Saussure and of recognition derived from the theories of Axel Honneth. Within AIME, a mode of existence is identified through four elements: firstly, the continuities and discontinuities of the beings of the mode in question; secondly, the felicity and infelicity conditions that pertain to the beings of the mode; thirdly, the type of beings that the mode leaves behind; and fourthly, the condition of alteration of the beings of the mode. It is important to remember that these four conditions are of equal importance; nor does their presentation assume a hierarchy or an operating sequence – they all pertain simultaneously to any mode.
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources UsedI need to draw on existing empirical research that is aligned to the ontological and epistemological ancestry of AIME, that speaks to the ethnographic methodologies that underpin Latour’s work, and that foregrounds the effort involved in establishing bodies of knowledge that are simultaneously objectivized and yet also mediated, and capable of being altered, as opposed to the ‘pure’ or ‘untransformed’ positivist knowledge that Latour metaphorically labels as “double click” [DC]. I propose meta-ethnography as a suitable approach. However, I am not conducting a meta-ethnography in order to establish [EDU]; rather, I am drawing on extant meta-ethnographies, in terms of both methodological standpoint and empirical contributions, in order to be able to say something about education.
Meta-ethnography offers a number of methodological and theoretical affordances that are aligned with AIME. Both share a commitment to building bodies of objectivized knowledge that possess the possibility of being revised or even refuted. Both reject the synthesis of knowledge without also preserving an understanding of how that knowledge has been established. Both acknowledge the oxymoronic ambition of generating interpretive social explanations whilst preserving the uniqueness of individual standpoints (one of the distinguishing characteristics of extant ethnographic research). Meta-ethnography is not the only type of research through which objectivized knowledge [REF] relating to education can be painstakingly assembled, but it is one way to be able relatively quickly to say things about education that meet the empirical strictures of, and is epistemologically and ontologically aligned to, the AIME project.
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsFor the ethnographer/anthropologist of education, I propose that the educational mode of existence, [EDU], provides an explanatory framework that allows the researcher to maintain the uniqueness, the specificity of educational practices alongside the ubiquity and familiarity of so much of what goes on inside schools or colleges, framed within empirical fieldwork. There are two elements to this. The first is the affordance for interpretation and analysis offered by the establishment of [EDU] that is analogous to the affordance offered by the employment of any other mode of existence. With this additional tool, conceptual frameworks for making sense of how people talk and write, how non-humans and humans work together, or the ways in which objectivized knowledge is established within the social semiotic space of the mode in question, become available: the four conditions that pertain to any mode reveal what might be described as “the social institution of education”. The second is the concomitant capacity to generate new crossings between [EDU] and other modes, to identify the category mistakes that burden the Moderns and that Latour is concerned to resolve. If the object of the AIME inquiry is to “follow the indefinite multiplicity of networks while determining their distinctive ways of expanding” (Latour, 2013: 48) then the distinctiveness of [EDU] needs to be considered on its own terms but also in contrast to the other modes – contrasts that allow us to define what is specific about each one.
ReferencesBerliner, D., LeGrain, L., and Van De Port, M. (2013). Bruno Latour and the anthropology of the moderns. Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 21(4), 435-447.
Delchambre, J-P. and Marquis, N. (2013). Modes of existence explained to the moderns, or Bruno Latour’s plural world. Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 21(4), 564-575.
Hämäläinen, N. and Lehtonen, T-K. (2016). Latour's empirical metaphysics. Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, 17(1), 20-37.
Harman, G. (2016). A new occasionalism? In Latour, B. with Leclerq, C. (eds.) Reset Modernity! Karlsruhe: ZKM. 129-138.
Latour, B. (2013). An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence. Transl. C Porter. London: Harvard University Press.
Maniglier, P. (2016). The embassy of signs: an essay in diplomatic metaphysics. In Latour, B. with Leclerq, C. (eds.) Reset Modernity! Karlsruhe: ZKM. 475-485.
Ricci, D., de Mourat, R., Leclerq, C. and Latour, B. (2015). Clues. Anomolies. Understanding. Detecting underlying assumptions and expected practices in the Digital Humanities through the AIME project. Visible Language 49(3), 35-61.
Schmidgen, H. (2016). Mode D’Existence: memoirs of a concept. In Latour, B. with Leclerq, C. (eds.) Reset Modernity! Karlsruhe: ZKM. 320-327.
Simondon, G. (1958). On The Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. Translated by Malaspina, C. and Rogove, J. Minneapolis: Univocal.
Souriau, É. (1943, 2009). Les différents modes d’existence: Suivi de Du mode d’existence de l’œuvre à faire. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. doi:10.3917/puf.souri.2009.01.
Tummons, J. (2020). Education as a mode of existence: a Latourian inquiry into assessment validity in higher education. Educational Philosophy and Theory 52(1), 45-54.
Tummons, J. (2021) Ontological Pluralism, Modes of Existence, and Actor-network Theory: Upgrading Latour with Latour. Social Epistemology 35(1), 1-11.
Tummons, J. (2021) On The Educational Mode of Existence: Latour, Meta-Ethnography, and the Social Institution of Education. Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, 29 (3). pp. 570-585.
Turner, S. (1980). Sociological explanation as translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Weber, T. (2016). Metaphysics of the common world: Whitehead, Latour, and the Modes of Existence. Journal of Speculative Philosophy 30(4), 515-533.
|
