Abstract
This article explores the uses of Agamben’s philosophy for understanding the educational meaning of practices that typically take/took place at school, such as the collective rehearsal of the alphabet or the multiplication tables. More precisely, I propose that these forms of ‘practising’ show what schooling, as a particular and historically contingent institution, is all about. Instead of immediately assessing the ‘practice of practising’ in terms of learning outcomes, I turn to Bollnow’s attempt to analyze this phenomenon in a substantially educational way, which for him essentially consists in opposing practising and learning. I show that his analysis is superficial and that we need Agamben’s notion of ‘potentiality’ in order to come to grips with the sense of this phenomenon. This will allow to see that practising concerns an uncommon way to relate to a subject matter that makes possible a transformation of individual and collective existence. The main objective of this investigation is not to hold a plea for reintroducing obsolete pedagogical methods, but to rethink the very meaning of education.
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Notes
This idea is very much in line with Heidegger’s ontology, because precisely the consciousness of death and profound boredom, i.e. experiences that pose a limit to the project of self-realization, figure in this ontology as a call to take seriously our own potentiality-for-Being (Cf. Agamben 2002, pp. 49–70).
This idea is of course an elaboration of the Heideggerian train-of-thought which I discussed earlier (footnote 1), viz. that the experience that we are creatures of possibility is related to situations that at first sight put an end to the very possibility of self-actualisation (death, boredom). However, after carefull analysis, Heidegger also claims that this experience of impossibility is in the end a question of possibility, for instance when he defines our relationship to our own mortality (‘Sein-zum-Tode’) as our most proper possibility (see Heidegger 1962, p. 265). Furthermore, Agamben is indebted to the distinction Aristotle makes between potentiality and actuality. Nonetheless (and not unlike Heidegger), his aim is to counter the legacy this distinction has left for western metaphysical tradition (see Murray and Whyte 2011, pp. 26–28). Agamben attempts to do this by an unorthodox reading of Aristotle, who next to ‘generic potential’, also conceptualized a form of ‘effective potential’ which conserves its very potential nature and never fully passes into actuality (see Agamben 2005, p. 136). As Lewis (2011b) comments: ‘By conserving itself, potential remains (im)potential’ (p. 588). But, this form of (im)potentiality ‘is not simply impotence, [though] an active capacity for not-doing or not-being’ (Ibid.).
It is important to stress here that what is at stake is that we relate in a way to the world that is out of the ordinary. In that sense practising is to be differentiated from another range of behavior that at first sight seems to be related, especially in view of Agamben’s affinity with Heidegger’s thought. I refer, more specifically, to the everyday mode of behavior that Herbert Dreyfus (1991), in his commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, calls ‘skillful coping’. This concerns a state of being which we experience when we perform our daily habits (‘dressing, working, getting around, talking, eating, etc.’) and during which there is ‘awareness but no self-awareness, [nor any] self-referential experience of acting’ (Ibid., p. 67). This is to say that for the greater part of our lives, we are so immersed in that what we are doing (we are literally just ‘being-in-the-world’), that the intentional subject is not present. However, ‘the practice of practising’ is still something different. It doesn’t constitute a distinct category because it concerns awareness without self-awareness, but because it suspends the meaning and functionality our behavior normally possesses (whether there is or there is not self-awareness).
In my analysis, the rhythmical characteristic of practising is essential, because it is related to a bodily experience that makes possible the suspension of intentional subjectivity and the experience of potentiality. This analysis might be refined by taking into account Tyson Lewis’s discussion of rhythm in the work of Whitehead and Agamben (Lewis 2011a): he has argued that the rhythmical characteristic of learning activities is essential, because it also opens the possibility of a different relation towards time. Arguing—with Agamben—that education is concerned with creating conditions for potentiality to come about, Lewis shows that we have to take into account the ‘aesthetic dimension of education’ (Ibid., p. 251). With this he refers to the temporal dimensions of education, which he disentangles by a close analysis of Agamben’s ideas on the function of rhythm in poetry—which, as I already indicated, literally means the very possibility to create. However, this ‘poetic’ moment should be well understood, viz. as disconnected from ‘a willful, volunteeristic subject who realizes the idea of the good through an action’ (Ibid.). To grasp what this means, we need to have a closer lookat the capacity rhythmical activities have for suspending the chronological and teleological logic that structures our everyday experience of time. This everyday experience of time is precisely connected to the very will to accumulate knowledge and skill in view of a clear end. This productive logic becomes inoperative when we find ourselves in ‘messianic time’, i.e. the time in which all possibility of actualization is suspended. And, this is precisely the sense of rhythmical activities, because they resist the forward progression of everyday time: they force us to continually come back to something that is already past and so time becomes cyclic or even ‘now-time’. On the basis of this analysis, Lewis defends a ‘rhythmic education’ (p. 254), i.e. ‘an education that resists subordinating potentiality to actuality’ (Ibid.) and that is concerned with ‘a loosening of the subject from the forward March of the will’ (Ibid.) to produce and make the world. I believe that Lewis’s attention for the temporal-aesthetic dimensions of learning certainly might complete the argument I make in this article. Perhaps there is still a difference, because it might be argued that what I analyse here is rather repetition than the kind of rhythm Lewis has in mind: what is at stake for me is in the first place the regular recurring of a certain gesture as such, whilst Lewis perhaps stresses more the dynamics of turning back and forth that allow for tiny displacements of the subject matter that is being repeated. Perhaps this also has to do with the fact that Lewis has other examples in mind than the ones discussed in this article (see also next footnote).
The sharp divide I introduced between learning and practising differs from Lewis’s Agamben-inspired analysis of educational practices (which I discussed in footnote 4). In a sense Lewis (2011b) analogously opposes ‘learning’ and ‘studying’, but his reflections depart in two ways from what I am doing in this article. First, developing further the most direct comment Agamben has made in regard with education—an aphorism concerning study (Agamben 1995, pp. 63–65)—Lewis stresses more than I do the state (or mood) of stupefaction we might find ourselves in: ‘[s]tudying makes us stupid, and preserves the state of stupidity without end’ (Lewis 2011b, p. 592). Again, this refers to a situation of powerlessness that is, at a deeper level, the very condition of (im)potentiality we should preserve. More positively, this concerns a situation of being radically ‘without destination’ (Ibid.). Second, and more importantly, the relation between learning and studying in Lewis’s work is rather one of internal than external opposition: studying is not contradictory to learning, but consists precisely in taking a certain stance towards the activity of learning that results in a transformation of the meaning of learning itself: when learning becomes studying, we are still involved with the same activity (‘learning’ a certain subject matter), but in such a way that the possibility of self-actualisation through learning is suspended. Or, as he states it: ‘studying is the nudity of learning’ (Ibid., p. 598). I find it difficult to respond to Lewis’s slightly different reading of Agamben on this point. I suppose Lewis has other examples of practices in mind that support his interpretation, but that are not made explicit in his text. As far as Agamben’s own aphorism is concerned, studying clearly refers to the solitary scholar (who, in the state of nude potentiality she finds herself in, is also susceptible to sadness and depression), whilst I am solely concerned here with a specific type of (repetitive) school-practice.
I fully realize that what I am defending here might seem outlandish at first sight, as it is not very common to conceptualize education beyond the confines of the foundational subject. In that sense it might not seem a desirable path to follow. Nevertheless it might also be argued that the experience of potentiality (as impotentiality) is in the end precisely about freedom, probably in a more profound sense than we are used to think about it. As Agamben argues: ‘Here it is possible to see how the root of freedom is to be found in the abyss of potentiality. To be free is not simply to have the power to do this or that thing, nor is it simply to have the power to refuse to do this or that thing. To be free is, in the sense we have seen, to be capable of one's own impotentiality, to be in relation to one's own privation. This is why freedom is freedom for both good and evil.’ (Agamben 1999a, pp. 182–183, Cf. Lewis 2011a, p. 254). As this quote also makes clear, it should be sustained that a state of pure potentiality is not in and of itself ‘good’ (although it might be in and of itself ‘educational’). Perhaps the (difficult) task of the teacher consists in transforming this state of potentiality (without ever destroying it completely) (see Lewis 2011b, p. 596).
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Vlieghe, J. Experiencing (Im)potentiality: Bollnow and Agamben on the Educational Meaning of School Practices. Stud Philos Educ 32, 189–203 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-012-9319-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-012-9319-2