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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Journal of Philosophy of Education
- Sprache: Englisch
POETICS OF ALTERITY Education today is commonly oriented towards citizenship and skills for life, with aims of happiness and wellbeing. But this benign image harbours surreptitious forms of control, which ultimately undermine the goods it professes to safeguard and stifle education's very purpose. What release can there be from these constrictions? Release is to be found, as Soyoung Lee eloquently shows, by attending to elements of experience that seem to escape our grip, from challenging aspects of our moral lives to struggles over practicalities of curriculum content. The more robust, more outward-turning orientation she demonstrates emphasises engagement with subject-matter, with problems and forms of narrative, that defy pre-determined formulations and categories. This requires turning towards objects worthy of attention and towards people and their claims on us. The arts and the humanities have special importance as spaces where alterity presents and expresses itself. Lee's dialogue with Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida, and Celan shows how acknowledgement of the other must condition not only practices of teaching and learning but practicalities of our social and political lives. Attending to anxieties inherent in teaching and learning, in school and the wider world, the book's powerful rationale for the curriculum provides nothing less than a new grounding for the humanities.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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Table of Contents
Cover
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
List of Figures
Foreword
Introduction
1 Poetics of the Encyclopaedia: Knowledge, Pedagogy, and Research Today
‘WE MURDER TO DISSECT’: THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA AND THE PROGRESS OF REASON
THE POETICS OF THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA
THE SYNOPTIC AND THE SYSTEMATIC IN NEW FORMS
A HAPPY FIT: HANDBOOKS – THE DISCOURSE OF RESEARCH METHODS – FUNDING APPLICATIONS
FROM THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA TO PEDAGOGY
2 Thinking in Nearness: Seven Steps on the Way to a Heideggerian Approach to Education
SEVEN STEPS ON THE WAY
THE CAVEAT
3 From Heidegger to Translation and the Address of the Other
THE PROBLEM OF TRANSLATION
STORIES OF HOME: FROM LANGUAGE TO LANGUAGES
ROOTED IN THE AIR
TRANSLATION AND THE ADDRESS OF THE OTHER
4 ‘Ethics is an Optics’: Ethical Practicality and the Exposure of Teaching
ETHICS AS AN ETHICAL SYSTEM?
BEYOND THE EMPIRICAL AND THE TRANSCENDENTAL: THE FACE THAT SPEAKS, THE EYES THAT LISTEN
ETHICS WITHOUT RETURN: NON‐RECIPROCITY AS THE CONDITION FOR RECIPROCITY
ETHICS AND EDUCATION
5 Covering the Wound: Education and the Work of Mourning
NORMAL MOURNING AND MELANCHOLIA
‘THE WORLD IS GONE, I MUST CARRY YOU’
STILL WALKING
THE OPEN WOUND
ADDRESSING THE WOUND
6 Problems of Knowledge: Reading a Poem, Reading the Immemorial
READING A POEM (1): ‘TODESFUGE’
THE IMMEMORIAL
THE PRICE OF READABILITY
READING A POEM (2): ‘MID‐TERM BREAK’
PROBLEMS OF KNOWLEDGE: WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO KNOW A POEM?
GETTING THE GRAIN: THE TEACHING OF TWO POEMS RECONSIDERED
7 Wandering Words, Words in Faith: Speak You Too
THE TENSION: WHERE ARE WE NOW?
SAYING NO TO SAY YES: WORDS IN FAITH
YES BEFORE YES: THE ORIENTATION
WAYS TO YES: AT THE CROSSROADS
SPEAK YOU TOO
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1 Still from the film
Still Walking
(1)
Figure 5.2 Still from the film
Still Walking
(2)
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1 Screenshot from a video lecture on the poem ‘Mid‐Term Break’
Guide
Cover Page
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
List of Figures
Foreword
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
References
Index
WILEY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT
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The Journal of Philosophy of Education Book Series
The Journal of Philosophy of Education Book Series publishes titles that represent a wide variety of philosophical traditions. They vary from examination of fundamental philosophical issues in their connection with education, to detailed critical engagement with current educational practice or policy from a philosophical point of view. Books in this series promote rigorous thinking on educational matters and identify and criticise the ideological forces shaping education.
Titles in the series include:
Poetics of Alterity: Education, Art, PoliticsSoyoung Lee
Interpreting Kant for Education: Dissolving Dualisms and Embodying MindSheila Webb
Educational Explanations: Philosophy in Empirical Educational ResearchChristopher Winch
Education and ExpertiseEdited by Mark Addis and Christopher Winch
Teachers’ Know‐How: A Philosophical InvestigationChristopher Winch
Citizenship for the Learning Society: Europe, Subjectivity, and Educational ResearchNaomi Hodgson
Philosophy East/West: Exploring Intersections between Educational and Contemplative PracticesEdited by Oren Ergas and Sharon Todd
The Ways We Think: From the Straits of Reason to the Possibilities of ThoughtEmma Williams
Philosophical Perspectives on Teacher EducationEdited by Ruth Heilbronn and LorraineForeman‐Peck
Re‐Imagining Relationships in Education: Ethics, Politics and PracticesEdited by Morwenna Griffiths, Marit HonerodHoveid, Sharon Todd and Christine Winter
Vygotsky: Philosophy and EducationJan Derry
Education and the Growth of Knowledge: Perspectives from Social and Virtue EpistemologyEdited by Ben Kotzee
Education Policy: Philosophical CritiqueEdited by Richard Smith
Levinas, Subjectivity, Education: Towards an Ethics of Radical ResponsibilityAnna Strhan
Philosophy for Children in Transition: Problems and ProspectsEdited by Nancy Vansieleghem and DavidKennedy
The Good Life of Teaching: An Ethics of Professional PracticeChris Higgins
Reading R. S. Peters Today: Analysis, Ethics, and the Aims of EducationEdited by Stefaan E. Cuypers and ChristopherMartin
The Formation of ReasonDavid Bakhurst
What Do Philosophers of Education Do?: (And How Do They Do It?)Edited by Claudia Ruitenberg
Evidence‐Based Education Policy: What Evidence? What Basis? Whose Policy?Edited by David Bridges, Paul Smeyers andRichard Smith
New Philosophies of LearningEdited by Ruth Cigman and Andrew Davis
The Common School and the Comprehensive Ideal: A Defence by Richard Pring with Complementary EssaysEdited by Mark Halstead and Graham Haydon
Philosophy, Methodology and Educational ResearchEdited by David Bridges and Richard D. Smith
Philosophy of the TeacherNigel Tubbs
Conformism and Critique in Liberal SocietyEdited by Frieda Heyting and Christopher Winch
Retrieving Nature: Education for a Post‐Humanist AgeMichael Bonnett
Education and Practice: Upholding the Integrity of Teaching and LearningEdited by Joseph Dunne and Padraig Hogan
Educating Humanity: Bildung in PostmodernityEdited by Lars Lovlie, Klaus Peter Mortensen and Sven Erik Nordenbo
The Ethics of Educational ResearchEdited by Michael McNamee and David Bridges
In Defence of High CultureJohn Gingell and Ed Brandon
Enquiries at the Interface: Philosophical Problems of On‐Line EducationEdited by Paul Standish and Nigel Blake
The Limits of Educational AssessmentAndrew Davis
Illusory Freedoms: Liberalism, Education and the MarketEdited by Ruth Jonathan
Quality and EducationChristopher Winch
Poetics of Alterity
Education, Art, Politics
Soyoung Lee
This edition first published 2023© 2023 Soyoung Lee; Editorial organisation © Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain
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List of Figures
Figure 5.1 Still from the film Still Walking (1)
Figure 5.2 Still from the film Still Walking (2)
Figure 6.1 Screenshot from a video lecture on the poem ‘Mid‐Term Break’
Foreword
The central insight that guides Soyoung Lee’s Poetics of Alterity is the importance, for education and for human life as a whole, of the production of meaning. Her book traverses a variety of terrain, and different philosophical voices are heard on the way. Through these, she considers the production of meaning in texts, from textbooks to works of art. Readings of film and literature in particular vivify her reflections, and some poems figure strongly in what she has to say. But the ‘poetics’ in her title points to something broader and more fundamental – that is, to poiesis (to production in broader terms). It is poetics in this sense that points, in her subtitle, to the interconnections of education, art, politics.
It is a signature feature of her writing that these three seem naturally to converge in the practical questions of the curriculum. This is the curriculum understood not just as an array of subjects to be contested but as the course of learning, as a path – and perhaps a variety of paths – that must be travelled. Such paths extend from the small child’s coming into language and culture, through the enigma of repetition and originality, through the development of memory and recollection, through the work of mourning, and, if all goes well, somehow through these to the finding of voice. The fact that things may not go well is shown by Lee’s uncompromising acknowledgement of the detrimental aspects of policy and practice that would shy away from or simply obscure the responsibilities of the teacher. She shows also the ways that children, students themselves, can be schooled into various forms of evasion of the learning that matters. The lure of technical ways of thinking and of received forms of judgement is that they displace our ordinary responsibility in what we say and do, shifting its weight, and releasing us from the burden of making ourselves known. In the process Lee is showing, in effect, something of how the training of teachers might truly become an education. And in the process she leads the reader to an appreciation of the ways that these responsibilities, extending down through the ordinary fabric of our lives together, are constitutive of what we can hope from the politics and prospects of our world.
We are grateful to Soyoung Lee for her contribution to this series. She has produced a fine text, and it deserves to be read.
Paul StandishSeries Editor
Introduction
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
(Wittgenstein, 1981 , p. 7)
What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written.
(Derrida, 1987 , p. 194)
My idea for this book began with an incident in South Korea, which has haunted me ever since. In April 2014, on the southwest coast of South Korea, the passenger ferry Sewol sank. It was carrying 476 people, 304 of whom died, including 250 high school students who were on a field trip. This single incident revealed, on the one hand, the corrupt state of the government and industry, laying the way for the impeachment of the president and the advent of a new government. On the other, it revealed a societal inability in terms of comprehending the suffering of others. There is no doubt that the government tried to silence the victims’ families to cover up its own faults; the mainstream media were antagonistic to the families, for example by describing them as seeking excessive amounts of compensation, as politically motivated by far‐left agitators, as misguided and misinformed. It is also true that the media soon simply ignored the subject, even perhaps going so far as to engineer apathy towards it through the encouragement of ‘Sewol fatigue’. This happened at the very time when the families were still struggling to establish the truth: some were on hunger strike and were asking the government for a fairer judgement and response. And what they had to confront was not only the government itself but also the people who ignored them or even mocked them – in what was an extreme case, one group organised an ‘excessive eating protest’, gleefully eating takeaway pizzas right next to the hunger‐striking families. It was the political conservatism of the government and the media that created the conditions for such hateful forms of behaviour to grow. The families and survivors were very soon told they should ‘move on from the past’, even while the government blocked and delayed the raising of the ferry from the shallow waters where it had sunk: it took in fact almost three years for that to happen, and it was possible only after the presidential impeachment and the advent of a newly elected government. Questions about the lack of sympathy or empathy were certainly raised. But were these questions enough?
I was working as a teacher in a primary school at the time. I was probably teaching a class when the ferry started to sink. My recollection is vague, partly because I did not initially pay close attention to the news since I had heard that all the passengers were safely rescued – the government announcement that turned out to be terrifyingly false. Along with the rest of the nation, I had to watch the ship gradually sinking with almost three hundred people on board and then, for several days after it had sunk, to cling on to the real possibility that there might be survivors alive in air pockets, even though no rescue attempt was taking place. This tragedy, brought about not so much by natural as by human causes, certainly created a disturbance in me. It was something I could not expect to be resolved but rather something I needed to live with. Speaking of the incident was difficult, but so too was being silent. But, then, how do we even begin to address this tragedy? The sinking was seemingly the result of various intertwined problems – the overloading of unsecured cargo, the illegal redesign of the ship, and the acquiescence of responsible bodies in the relaxing or ignoring of regulations, the explanation of which all comes down to economic and political interests. Yet, even more striking is a series of irresponsible judgements made at different levels that denied the possibility of rescue. The instruction to passengers to ‘Stay put’ inside their cabins issued while the captain and some crew were abandoning ship was not simply faulty, it was criminally negligent. The regularly repeated instructions to ‘Stay put, put on a life‐vest, and don’t come out’ were followed by most students and teachers, resulting in a high number of casualties.
Although the disaster remains under investigation, all evidence points to the negligence of the government and the National Coast Guard. What we hear from the records is merely the language of bureaucracy, shored up against responsibility. What was absent in this was any real sense of those who had died or those who were in mourning as real flesh‐and‐blood people, each with their unique individual lives, the individual stories, cares, anxieties, hopes and fears. There was only impersonal neutralised language and sterile thought. In the autumn that year, I left Korea to study in London, for a year, on a Masters in Philosophy of Education. The incident was something that kept pressing on me as if demanding my response, though I did not have the courage directly to face up to it. I wrote an essay on it that I never used. Martin Heidegger, on whom I was focusing then, provided me with some resources to think about it, but not sufficient.
In April 2017 I returned to London to do a PhD. This time I wanted to explore more directly the question I had: what is it that blocks our response to the other? Soon after, on 14 June that year, Grenfell Tower, a 24‐storey residential block in West London, burned down as a result of inappropriate renovation, which used flammable exterior cladding that did not comply with building regulations. Seventy‐two people died. A report in October 2019 said that more could have been saved if the instruction to evacuate had been provided earlier. The instruction given by the fire brigade was to ‘Stay put’. The Leader of the House of Commons publicly stated to a radio phone‐in host, ‘I think if either of us were in a fire, whatever the fire brigade said, we would leave the burning building. It just seems the common‐sense thing to do.’1 While this is a different context to the Sewol incident, what is the same is that such insensitive words are blind to those they are addressing. And I am compelled again to ask myself: what would I do if I were there? Would I not trust the instruction? I think I would. Then is it ultimately good management or ‘good control’ – the phrase that was used repeatedly – that we need here? Since the Sewol disaster, in South Korea, there have been discussions about good control or management; the need for safety education and about putting swimming on the curriculum; as well as the cultivation of the capacity to doubt and to question authority developed through such activities as debating, all of which, although important, do not seem to be the fundamental issue. What we are facing is not something that can be solved by adding some extra component to the curriculum. We need rather to question ways of thinking to which we become accustomed through education and through the culture we live in, and to think about what we have learned to deny. Moreover, I do not think that such measures as systems of good control can be established just once and last forever; they will require constant review and revision; and ultimately the time for decision‐making comes at any moment unexpectedly. Any rule or system soon begins to seem irresponsible when it is fixed, closed and unchallengeable: it ceases to be answerable to human others.2 And, if we need to learn to question what is given, it will not suffice to learn a set of debating skills or arguments with which, in our confidence, we may easily fall into the trap of abstract thinking. It is precisely such abstract thought, as shall be seen, that gives rise to irresponsibility.
What is at stake is rather ‘control’ itself, which at best seems to give an illusion of order or to encourage an inappropriate craving for order. Societies that encourage the desire to be secure and settled (or, in its bourgeois equivalent in the life, that encourage the emergence of the Last Man, as described by Nietzsche) should be called into question. This is not restricted to South Korea or the UK. The commitment to control is seemingly justified in an achievement‐driven society particularly under the influence of bureaucracy inflamed by performativity and capitalism. What the culture of control reveals is the prevalent way that we think, where thinking itself is understood as control. Thinking serves to clarify and classify things in the name of efficiency – that is, as a means to master things. Yet, to think of what is radically other to myself, it is important that the other must remain as other, as non‐reducible to classification. It requires an escape from what Emmanuel Levinas calls a totalising of thought. Such thinking, he claims, has arisen with a ‘philosophy of the neuter’, which he finds to be the characteristic of traditional Western philosophy with its primary concern with ontology – a philosophical orientation that reaches its most explicit expression in Heidegger’s thought (Levinas, 1969 , p. 298).3 This is related to his critical view of totalising ways of thinking, and hence of totalitarianism – surely not unrelated to Heidegger’s commitment to Nazism. For Levinas, thinking as totalising fails to recognise the irreducible alterity of the other (l’autrui).4 It cannot acknowledge the other who cannot be contained in my idea of the other and always exceeds it, in a relation to what Levinas terms ‘face’ (Levinas, 1969 , p. 50). Thinking that only incorporates the other when it confronts this otherness is incapable of perceiving and receiving the wholly other. It fails to recognise and respond to the call of the face of the other (le visage d’autrui). Lacking this ethical dimension, thinking then generates, encourages and legitimates neutralised, impersonalised vocabularies and impassive modes of thought. Hence ‘impersonal reason’ (Levinas 1969 , p. 59). It does not do justice to things that do not fall within its terms of explanation or beyond accustomed ways of understanding, or outside its imposed categories; it is rationalism of a kind, and this excludes what cannot be explained in its own terms, shoring itself up in the face of what is other than itself. Such thinking renders the world and the other mere objects at its disposal: it becomes narrow, stubborn, and ossified, oblivious to the alterity on which it necessarily depends. It anaesthetises the disturbance that our sense of mortality provides, and the relation to the other becomes merely abstract and contingent, be it by contract, law or choice.
Educational policy‐making and practice are not exceptions. Bureaucratic forms, in an unsteady liaison with the demands of the market, have led to educational discourse dominated by questionable notions of efficiency in attempts to override time. Educational policies and practices are imbued with impassive neutralised language and pseudo‐scientific methods. Research in the field of education contributes to such tendencies in its partnership with funding bodies. Schools themselves are preoccupied with apparent evidence and results. We rush students towards this Platonist perfect form – a perfect outcome, perfect result, perfect achievement. What is learned must be measured so that it can be ticked as learned. Even the idea of authenticity is understood in teleological terms – as if finding oneself were comparable with discovering one’s blood type. What is valued are things such as efficiency, accountability, performativity, clarity, transparency and quantifiability; these are the terms against which education is evaluated. Technology serves this goal by providing the means for accumulating such data. Yet, language of this kind closes off the possibility of developing relationships to others in better, more constructive ways, in a manner that does justice to human singularity and plurality. The discourse of input and output, means and end, is blind to anything beyond that closed circle. Thinking becomes algorithmic, not allowing for uncertainty beyond what can be accommodated in binary terms, even though uncertainty is the very nature of otherness. What is continually demanded of us in our learning in fact blocks us from encountering otherness. Against this, we must, on the one hand, be vigilant about, and indeed wary of, impersonal language in philosophy and education, and, on the other, have the courage to abandon such comfortable grids, to disarm ourselves in acceptance of a degree of anxiety rather than seeking complete security, and to expose our vulnerability by letting the other interrupt.
My aim in this book is to explore a line of thought that may help us to move from self‐oriented and self‐referential thoughts towards the outside, towards the other. I point towards why this is important for education and how its neglect will stifle education. Language will be a focal point to which I will continually return, to acknowledge the ethical dimensions in language and thought. The language in which we speak and live not only shows symptoms of the problem, but also is the key to understanding it. The intertwined relationship between language, thinking, and subjectivity as it emerges in education will be examined. This is to find the ‘I’ by way of the other, and it is also therefore to find the other within myself – not as something that I can then recognise but precisely as an otherness, beyond recognition, that constitutes subjectivity. The development of an alternative, more robust understanding of teaching and learning can be built upon the acknowledgement of this exteriority, what is beyond my control as precisely what conditions whatever it is I do and think and feel. It will be largely by way of an alternative understanding of the nature of language that we will come to see our relation to otherness in a fundamental sense. We will come to understand better how language reminds us of our condition as human beings who speak; and of our relation to the other person, the fact that language already presupposes human beings who address one another and are addressed. It will be a journey towards thinking that is more hospitable to otherness; it will be a journey from the self to the other with no expectation of return to the same self. And, as will be seen, it is through acknowledgement of things that escape our grip and fall outside our control that I can affirm not only the words of the other but also my own. That is, where saying is also acting – the producing of something new and the realising of the world in a certain way, as a way of being responsible.
What I will be looking at closely is also the nature of subject‐matter or experience that cannot be contained in terms of conceptual categories or purely propositional knowledge, which raises questions about the untranslatable and the unspeakable. Such subject‐matter requires one not to rush into putting thoughts into words. Rather one is called upon to hold back from hasty judgements, from the giving of opinions and recourse to analysis, diagnosis and even the finding of solutions. Works of art such as film or poetry can be seen as providing occasions for the disturbance and disruption of our habitual ways of thinking and for the acknowledgement of the alterity that resides in such works. This quality of aesthetic appreciation will help us to re‐think curriculum matters and especially to reappraise the importance of art and the humanities as providing sites where we experience and respond to what is other to ourselves. What it means to know something will be discussed and reconceptualised in this light – that is, to know something while preserving its alterity. Ludwig Wittgenstein finishes the Tractatus Logico‐Philosophicus with: ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’5 He thought, according to the traditional reading of his work, that when things cannot be captured in ‘pictures’, one should remain silent. He is basically saying that we cannot speak meaningfully of what is outside of logic and the propositions of science, thus excluding all expressions of value from the category of the meaningful, regarding them as non‐sense (or nonsense!). They are beyond the limits of language. I cannot pretend to do justice to the complexity of what Wittgenstein is saying here. It does, however, seem true that we often need to learn to be silent before putting ourselves and our words forward; for example, in facing the suffering of the other. Yet I think it is equally important to offer our words, and to make ourselves present in these words. It is to mark and re‐mark history and to pass it on to the next generation, a practice inherent in the idea of education. Jacques Derrida, who, in his own ways, attempts to understand the limits of language, echoes Wittgenstein but radically alters the import of Wittgenstein’s aphorism: ‘What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written’ (Derrida, 1987 , p. 194). His allusion to Wittgenstein becomes clearer given what he says elsewhere: ‘I am profoundly convinced, against Wittgenstein, whose words you no doubt know, that “what we cannot speak about we must (not) pass over in silence”’ (Peeters, 2014 , p. 162). Derrida inserts ‘(not)’ in the phrase of Wittgenstein, a kind of affirmation of the impossible task. It is the place for this affirmation, despite the impossibility of, for example, fully understanding the suffering of the other, or recovering the past, that I am searching for in this book. I do this by exploring such matters as the question of translation, mourning and remembrance, and through a reading of poetry – approaches that may appear at variance yet that all come down to questions of alterity. In the end it will be seen more clearly that thinking differently is not only an ethical matter but also a political one. To set foot on the way, we will need to dispel many presuppositions underpinning our conceptions of human beings, language and thought.
The chapters proceed as follows: In Chapter 1, I begin with Roland Barthes’s analysis of the Encyclopédie edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, which is representative of the spirit of the Age of Enlightenment in Europe in the eighteenth century and is an illustration of the impulse towards universal systematic knowledge and categorisation. My approach is to attend to the manner and purpose of what Barthes does with regard to this particular product, and to consider ways in which a parallel critique is pertinent today. Rather than providing a direct critique on the Enlightenment, I look at cultural products of today in the way Barthes looks at those of his time. This is to examine how a particular culture paves the way for a certain kind of cultural product and makes use of it. This lays the way for consideration of the culture of educational research in general and of how knowledge is produced and conceived. I problematise encyclopaedic conceptions of language and thinking, and the ways that they have given shape to contemporary conceptions of knowledge and research culture. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari provide some means of insight by releasing us from the stifling constraints of such ways of thinking. Reasons to be unsettled and to acknowledge something out of our control will be explicated. This chapter will provide the ground for us to step forward and the basis for a reconceptualisation of knowledge, in a manner that can do justice to what cannot simply be put into encyclopaedic categories.
In Chapter 2, I explore the philosophy of Heidegger, particularly the concept of Gelassenheit (‘letting‐be’) as developed in his later thought. Gelassenheit illustrates a more responsive and receptive way of thinking, which for Heidegger stands in contrast to thinking under the sway of technology. This alternative understanding of thinking helps to overcome the dominance of representational thought, a kind of thinking that imposes barriers on understanding and restricts how the world can be – exemplified, that is, by the encyclopaedic way of thinking discussed in the previous chapter. By exploring Gelassenheit fully we will understand thinking as more attentive and receptive to what comes from outside. While Heidegger’s critique of technology will be found to resonate with Barthes’s critique of encyclopaedism, he provides us with further resources for considering reason and thinking themselves in a more concrete sense, closer to our experience rather than as logic. Towards the end, with some examples, I seek to show the relevance of this to aspects of education, especially to the ways that teaching can be enhanced in order to do better justice both to the learners and to what is studied. I develop this in seven steps, yet the underlying movement is as a way of thinking, rather than as a formulation of direct or technical answers to educational problems. In the end, I revisit and re‐examine aspects of Heidegger’s work about which I think there are reasons to be cautious. This is to encourage a degree of vigilance in relation to Heidegger’s thought, but in a way that does not deny its powerful insights.
This caveat is taken forward in Chapter 3. The chapter investigates more directly whether Heidegger’s philosophy is sufficient to guide us to the radical other. I attempt to demonstrate the limits of Heidegger in this respect by examining some of his remarks regarding being and language, particularly in relation to his attitude towards other languages. Through exploring this, I move from language to languages, and then to translation. In so doing I explore translation, beyond the technical understanding of it, as a site of diversity and plurality – that is, as a place that requires the responsibility of answering to the other. Heidegger’s longing for the origin, for home, for Heimlichkeit, will be revealed as problematic and in tension with his own thought of the Unheimlich (the uncanny) as fundamental to the human condition. To this end, I acknowledge the always already plural nature of language, of language sustained in and by that plurality. To understand language in this way is also to acknowledge the very condition of human being in its plurality, always already in relation to the other. For the discussion, I draw on thinkers such as Paul Celan, Hannah Arendt, and Barbara Cassin. Celan’s resistance to Heidegger’s accounts of language will be seen as what exposes the limits of Heidegger, which must be overcome if the journey is to go beyond myself and further towards the wholly other.
In Chapter 4, I attempt to explore the thought of Levinas in order to further clarify the idea, already glimpsed in earlier chapters, of the ethical dimension of language itself. As an astute critic of Heidegger, Levinas provides us with insights into the relation between language, the other, and ethics. Heidegger’s overcoming of subject and object dichotomies is, here once more, challenged by Levinas, who sees the very subject as constituted by the other. Derrida, whose philosophy is highly influenced by Levinas, also guides the lines of thought pursued here. Levinas and Derrida have taken up Heidegger’s thoughts in a way that both extends them and is highly critical, particularly in their exploration of the understanding of the other. The ethical approach towards the other will be seen as a form of thinking that is not totalised but always already open to what is outside and yet to come. I attempt to understand the practicality of ethics differently, beyond systematic approaches, and to illustrate an ethical dimension in teaching and learning beyond the narrow sense of moral reasoning or of attaining a set of virtues or skills. The ethical demand will be seen as what comes through the words of the other, calling upon my responsibility, a responsibility that can never be fulfilled. And this sense of impossibility will be a signpost for what I discuss in the later chapters. In due course, this chapter addresses some common misunderstandings regarding Levinas, in response to which ethics – specifically this fundamental relation to the other – will be seen as the very condition of education.
The substance of Chapter 5 intersects with previous chapters. Having established a Levinasian understanding of human subjectivity, the chapter takes another path in order to advance a conception of subjectivity, our fundamental condition, as never enclosed. It does this through the consideration of some works of art in relation to the concept of mourning – to the impossibility of mourning, as this is understood by Derrida. There is a sense of relentless struggle in mourning, which is suggested by the paradoxical idea that for mourning to be successful, it must not be successful. In discussing the experience of loss, in extreme and lesser tragedies, I attempt to find something affirmative in understanding this negativity in our lives. In so doing I explore the struggle to find words, specifically as illustrated in the poems of Celan and Hirokazu Kore‐eda’s film Still Walking. I attempt to see how the acknowledgement these works enact can help us live with uncertainty, risking our own balance in a way that bears the weight of the other. This involves acknowledging the traces of negativity that constitute our presence, including that of death, the history of suffering, and exclusions of the other, who must not be consigned to oblivion. I explore how this thought becomes interwoven with our experiences of language, loss and remembrance. This will, I hope, illustrate the importance of staying in and with the negativity around us without attempting to arrive at any final resolution.
Chapter 6 revisits the problem with representation discussed previously, especially in Chapters 1 and 2. The discussion of Levinas in Chapter 4 also revealed the problematics of representation in ways still more pertinent to this book’s guiding theme: as soon as we represent someone we fall into the trap of determination and fixation of the other. This chapter attends to such aporia by examining some problems in the teaching of poetry – here that of Paul Celan and Seamus Heaney. While attending to Celan’s double desire – he seeks to bring things into words, to be understood, but at the same time desires not to be understood exhaustively – I seek to acknowledge the struggle with the resistance of alterity, or, say, of ‘the face’ that presents itself in the work of art. This leads back to problems of knowledge as brought up in Chapter 1: how can we teach something that goes beyond the acquisition of concepts or skills? How can we say we know something that resists our understanding? Yet, it is such subjects, as will become clear, that provide a focus for the development of ethical and, that is, political, sensibility. The space opened up by them will be hospitable to the unknown, will be a place of continual participation and engagement. In the light of this, the importance of language as poetics will be further examined. And the conditions upon which the consideration of the curriculum and its subject‐matter depend will be thought anew, far removed from encyclopaedic depictions.
Finally, Chapter 7 summarises how I have moved away from encyclopaedic ways of thinking in an attempt to do justice to the alterity of the other. Thoughts explored in previous chapters will be revisited and revealed to be interwoven. Taking responsibility under the weight of the other involves also a transformation of the self; in this way I return to the self but only as making another turn from myself. The tension and contradiction we live with will not be resolved, and teachers will be seen as those who embody such tensions on a daily basis. But, as I shall argue, what we need is not the zeal to cling steadfastly to the self and to secure its controlling grids of thought, but the courage to reside within the unknown. I revisit Derrida and Deleuze as authors who offer ways of releasing the self, but I do this without attempting to synthesise their differences – that is, their own distinctive ways of attending to and affirming the tensions. The difficulties in decision‐making demand our responsibility more than ever, and they are such that given rules or protocols cannot free us from them. In consideration of the need faithfully to speak in one’s own voice, I continue along the path to discuss language, where opening up and preserving the space for alterity will be revealed as the responsibility in language for others and for myself. This will bring us to a point where the language of art and the humanities, of education, and of philosophy find themselves again; where one finds oneself again, and again. That is how we transform ourselves and the world, by responding to the alterity that expresses itself in the language of poetics, where I am singled out in my response with my words and action, where I must act in faith. It is not only poets who poetise alterity in their words; it is also, and more to the point, the fact that alterity poetises – transforms and sensitises – us in this way.
Without going into detail now, it would nevertheless be appropriate to begin with a glimpse of the way that the language of poetics can be opposed to the language of definitions and conceptualisation. Derrida, in ‘Che Cos’è la Poesia?’ (‘What is Poetry’) writes that poetry is what resists the form of ‘what is’: it is irreducible to such ways of thinking, and it resists definition and categorisation. As he ventures to suggest,
The poetic, let us say it, would be that which you desire to learn, but from and of the other, thanks to the other and under diction, by heart. (Derrida, 1995a , p. 291)
The poetic is the language from and of the other. To learn the language of the other – accentuated in the enigma and mystery of the writing of some poets – I need to attend with humility, acknowledging that I am encountering something I cannot know by definition or systematic analysis. Hence, I would do better to come to know it by heart. Yet, it is in the venturing of this language of the other, its invention, its advent(ure), that we enter into and constitute our relation to the other person: the ethicality of language is already there. Language presupposes an addressee (a ‘who’ that it is addressed to), and the poetic exemplifies this: its enigma addresses me as singular, places me under diction, calls for my response. And I do not know where else to turn, on what else to rely. To acknowledge such characteristics of language, as will come to be seen more clearly, awakens us to our fundamental relation to the other and to sensitivity to irreducible difference. Hence the art of poetics is the art of inhabiting such language.
This book does not attempt to develop any tidy formulation of a comprehensive remedy for educational problems, or to provide a linear argument: it attempts to see the nature of teaching and learning in a different light. It certainly traverses various territories. It is as though I try out different paths, from different directions, and with different undulations, different gradients and depths.6 The themes and topics of the chapters cross one another, revealing interrelations of mutual support, and tensions at times. I hope they will serve in the end to provide a picture of the whole, as Deleuze might put it, as something like a patchwork.
Notes
1
Jacob Rees‐Mogg, the Leader of the House of Commons, was speaking on a radio phone‐in on the findings of the Grenfell inquiry report. South Korean conservative party politicians, comparing the
Sewol
disaster to a car accident, criticised the tax being spent on the investigation. (see, for example, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk‐england‐london‐50302573?intlink_from_url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/c342p7y878wt/jacob‐rees‐mogg&link_location=live‐reporting‐story; accessed on 10 November 2019).
2
That would be, as Levinas puts it and as will become clearer in
Chapter 4
, only ‘impersonal justice', which can only be cruel if it does not attend to all human beings (Levinas, 1969, p. 300).
3
What Levinas points out is that Heidegger's ontology – along with the concern of ontology in the Western philosophical tradition – does not open up space for the absolute other. And without this ethical dimension, ontology is ‘faceless', unable to answer to the question of justice (Levinas, 1969, p. 46). Although, as he acknowledges, Levinas was deeply inspired by the philosophy of Heidegger, his own project is in large part a break with Heidegger. It is with and from Heidegger that Levinas makes a departure. On the one hand, he says that Heidegger's
Being and Time
is one of the most important philosophical works, while, on the other, he speaks of the importance of leaving ‘the climate of Heidegger's philosophy, but not to go back to pre‐Heideggerian philosophising, but go beyond' (Levinas, 1978, p. 19). Levinas conceives of ethics as more fundamental than ontology. It is worth noting that what Levinas calls ontology is closer to what Heidegger and Derrida call metaphysics.
4
While the French term ‘
autre
' means one other among many others (relatively to one another), ‘
l'autrui
' refers to the absolute other, which is beyond any categorisation. Levinas uses
l'autrui
in reference to the human other with this in mind. This is often translated with the capitalisation of ‘the Other', and this inevitably sacrifices Levinas's use of ‘
l'Autrui
' (see translator's note in
Totality and Infinity
pp. 24–25). Levinas uses ‘
l'Autrui
', for example, as what is opposed to
le Même
(the Same) and in the same realm with ‘
l'infini
' (infinity) or ‘
la métaphysique
' (metaphysics) (see, for example, Levinas, 1990, p. 180). It can be said that the relation to the other person (
l'autrui
) is the relation to the other (
l'Autrui
). Dino Galetti writes that Derrida thinks of
l'Autrui
in terms of something like, or as having a similar status to, Ideas (Galetti, 2015, p. 200). For a further discussion in relation particularly to English translations of Levinas, see Galetti (2015, p. 200). I use the lower case ‘the other' for ‘
l'autrui
' as I find that the context is normally clear enough to convey what is intended. This is partly to avoid unnecessary awkwardness and to accord better with ordinary English usage.
5
This is the translation by Ogden (1981). Pears and McGuinness's translation (2001) reads ‘What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.' According to a traditional reading of Wittgenstein, the early Wittgenstein deals with the relation between world and language as one of correspondence. This reflects the idea of the truth as correspondence and thinking as representation, which are discussed in
Chapters 1
and
2
. The systematic structure of the
Tractatus
contrasts with that of his later anti‐systematic writings and, in particular, with the style and approach of the
Philosophical Investigations
. Stanley Cavell (1999) and Gordon Bearn (1997), for example, provide readings of Wittgenstein that take his fundamental concern to be with the existential human condition.
6
In his Preface of
Philosophical Investigations
, Wittgenstein puts this much better than I do here! His being unable to force his thoughts into a single direction was due to ‘the very nature of the investigation'. The investigation ‘compels us to travel over a wide field of thought criss‐cross in every direction'. This makes the remarks in the book ‘a number of sketches of landscapes' that together give the reader ‘a picture of the landscape' (Wittgenstein, 1973. p. vii).
1Poetics of the Encyclopaedia: Knowledge, Pedagogy, and Research Today
This chapter explores ways in which Roland Barthes’s discussion of the encyclopaedia provides resources for thinking about education and research practice today. What Barthes addresses in his essay ‘The Plates of the Encyclopedia’ is a particular encyclopaedia, the Encyclopédie produced by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, which was published in France between 1751 and 1772. This is commonly referred as the first of a form that we recognise as the encyclopaedia today. I begin with Barthes’s analysis and critique of the Encyclopédie. Barthes, writing in 1964, engages with the Encyclopédie as an iconic product of its time, seeing it as conditioned by and, in effect, reinforcing a particular way of experiencing the world. Next, I consider ways in which a parallel critique is pertinent today. I explore some current examples of encyclopaedic form in relation to education and educational research. The purpose of this is to examine the interplay between particular cultural products and their society, in which not only certain types of knowledge but also a certain conception knowledge are produced and reinforced. So, it will not be the purpose of this chapter to provide direct analysis or critique of the Enlightenment, or to provide a historical account of knowledge. Rather, what I am interested in is problematising a particular understanding of language and knowledge that arises through these cultural products, particularly with regard to educational inquiry. This lays the way for thoughts expressed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in What is Philosophy?, which, as I shall try to show, are of help in furthering the analysis of the dominant research culture’s use of such products and in imagining the task of education and research differently.
‘WE MURDER TO DISSECT’: THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA AND THE PROGRESS OF REASON
The Encyclopédie, as Barthes writes, is the book that for the first time in history deals only with objects. The very principle of the Encyclopédie is to encompass all knowledge in one book, to have a comprehensive knowledge of the world. It sets things in order so that the reader will be able to ‘perceive the elements without confusion’, as Barthes appropriates Diderot’s phrase (Barthes, 2010 , p. 33). It categorises human knowledge so that it can serve the purpose of clear thinking; it conforms to Descartes’s commitment to establishing ‘clear and distinct ideas’; and it is a highpoint in the expression of the spirit of the eighteenth century, the age of Enlightenment. Barthes provides an analysis of how this particular book illustrates a way of thinking and reasoning at that time.
The plates of the Encyclopédie comprise two different kinds of images, each with its own role. At the top of each page, as a general rule, one can see quite a large image, usually spanning the width of the page, while, at the bottom, there are several smaller images. The image at the top shows a particular scene where people are doing or making something, and it gives the reader a context or a situation for the practice under consideration. The image at the bottom provides an inventory of the objects that are used in the scene above, the diagrams depicting individual objects, which are suspended on the page and clearly separated from one another. In keeping with the purpose of the Encyclopédie, the plates display things in a systematic way, preventing any confusion and perhaps directing, if not harnessing, the imagination of the reader. Yet although this is a book of objects, Barthes writes that the plates of the Encyclopédie are ‘human’, and he gives two reasons for this. These reasons are not unrelated to one another.
First, and as is easily noticeable, human beings are represented on most pages, in the scenes at the top of each plate. If we randomly look at the upper part of any plate of the Encyclopédie, it will be apparent that most scenes are filled with people. Even the depiction of wild nature at the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland is not an exception. There are people in corners or in the middle of this vast natural scene, all playing their own roles. Several men seem to be examining the rocks – scientists or geologists. Others are pointing towards or looking at rocks, perhaps as a gesture of appreciation of the marvels of nature. The massive geometrical shapes of the basalt rocks, revealing the wild but extraordinary aspects of nature, are here shown to be understood and appreciated by human beings. It is indeed by way of this process of reasoning – systematic classification – that this has become a part of the world of the Encyclopédie. The world is no longer mysterious.
Second, and perhaps more surprisingly, the encyclopaedic image is human because ‘it constitutes a structure of information’ (p. 29). Echoing Ferdinand de Saussure, Barthes tries to show that the image works in the way the language system works. He describes the lower part of each plate as paradigmatic in style in that it represents an array of items and meanings, differentiated from one another. The upper part of the plate, by contrast, is said to be syntagmatic: its meaning is contained in narrative continuities and neighbouring relations, the images of objects being assembled and completed, shown to be in use by human beings, their meaning fundamentally ascribed and determined by human beings. And this is precisely how information in the Encyclopédie is constructed for human use. Things get their meanings via the compiler of the encyclopaedia who ‘mines all nature with human signs’ (p. 24). So, with the birth of the Encyclopédie, in this sense, ‘a mine is born’ (ibid.). It surely is significant that one of the plates does indeed depict the workings of a mine. We mine the world, preserving what is excavated in the form of information, and through this, we make it our own. The world is reduced to a resource, to be investigated, utilised, and exhausted. Even when the process in question is not to do with making anything, it is still envisioned as something to be used by us, by the very fact that we have seen it: classifying helps us gain a better grasp of the world. Knowledge is understood in a particular way – that is, as information – and this serves our desire to be in control. We become masters standing in the midst of the world, yet standing over against it, opposed to it.1
Yet, further clarification is needed to discuss how the Encyclopédie directs us towards a certain way of thinking. If we begin with the context and purpose of looking something up using an encyclopaedia, this can be seen to be a more self‐conscious act than where, say, we come to know that thing by acquaintance. Our purpose will not be to experience it but rather to seek the source of a particular kind of knowledge, of knowledge that can be classified. Encyclopaedic knowledge is made possible by converting the living experience of a thing into a source of information: this converts what we know into propositions, and thus changes and reforms in a certain way our relation to what we know. This is somewhat similar to the experience of the museum, when, for example, we examine the way that stuffed animals are displayed. There they are made still in order to show their essence more clearly – as if posed in their ideal position or stance. Thus, the albatross is displayed with its long wings wide open, and falcons are shown fixed in a moment of flight, captured in the instant of attacking their prey. These birds are, as it were, revealing their pure forms, not out there alive in the wild but in a museum. Things are supposedly understood better – more clearly – because of this decontextualisation and abstraction.
But something is lost in the process. Barthes writes that the language of the Encyclopédie, realised in this particular way, ‘deliberately loses in intelligibility what it gains in experience’ (p. 31). And this resonates with what William Wordsworth writes in ‘The Tables Turned’:
Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis‐shapes the beauteous forms of things: –
We murder to dissect.
(Coleridge and Wordsworth, 2008 , p. 136)
We examine things in order to understand them thoroughly; we fix and confine them to have them safely in our grip; we arrest them and take away their breath in order to stop their movement. And we kill them by taking away their dynamic life. ‘We murder to dissect’ is not a simple metaphor. Yet, we own our object of investigation only in a limited sense, only in that we have converted it into something we can understand, or rather into something utilisable.
In fact, words always cut and divide. The Encyclopédie shows this par excellence. The referential function of words is accentuated in the forms of taxonomy, of nomenclature. The Encyclopédie, Barthes writes, is ‘a huge ledger of ownership’ that
depends on a certain dividing up of things: to appropriate is to fragment the world, to divide it into finite objects subject to man in proportion to their very discontinuity: for we cannot separate without finally naming and classifying, and at that moment, property is born.
(Barthes, 2010 , p. 27)
As we name them, things become familiar and become possessions. The radical development of the taxonomical sciences in the eighteenth century partly reflects this desire for ownership. Language serves as an inventory of the world, as a basis for the ‘learning of appropriation’ (ibid.).
What is problematic is the fact that language of this kind and the thinking it affords are then deemed the hallmark of human reasoning. The idea of human reasoning as power is even more accentuated in the ‘trajectory images’. We see people gathering wheat, milling it, and adding yeast and water in order to make bread. We see paper or glass being produced, seemingly out of nothing. The whole process shows that human beings can turn nature into resources, out of which human ‘goods’ can be produced. Nature’s raw materials can be turned into something good! And, importantly, the image illustrates ‘not only the object or its trajectory but also the very mind which conceives it’ (p. 33). In reading a plate from top to bottom,
