Abstract
In this article, the author problematizes two well-known positions on the relationship between means and ends in education. On the one side, there are those who problematize the means of education without necessarily redefining its ends, and on the other hand, there are those who challenge the purported ends of education while maintaining certain means. These two positions can take any number of progressive and conservative forms. While there are virtues to these projects, this article argues that both take for granted an underlying sense of education as a means to an end, and thus lend themselves to some version of instrumentality. Proposing a radically different formulation, this article turns to Giorgio Agamben and his notions of the impotential act, pure means, and use. The author suggests that the current challenge to think education beyond instrumentality ought to conceptualize education not as a means to an end or an end in itself but as a pure means. The article then offers three versions of education as a pure means: allowing, preferring not to, and contemplating. Each of these examples proposes a specific kind of inoperative, non-instrumental form of educational life for teachers and studiers, respectively.
Introduction
One of the major challenges facing educators concerned with the larger implications of what can be called the “learning society” is the question of instrumentalization. Contemporary practices and discourses of learning emphasize how education is a means to an end beyond itself—an instrument for attaining personal, social, political, and economic growth, development, and/or progress. While there might very well be important distinctions to highlight between learning for the purposes of economic socialization vs. personal subjectification, the question of ends in relation to means underlies both logics. Thus, the logic of instrumentalization haunts not only more or less standardized approaches to learning found in schools today but also the alternatives, which seem to unproblematically accept the means-end equation that generated the problem of the learning society in the first place. Take for instance the instrumentalization of education for political ends (even if they are indeed democratic). Many on the left fail to see how their wholesale adoption of the means-end logic underlying learning might in fact be part of the problem rather than a solution.
Indeed, it would seem that these educators on the left can be divided into two camps. Some have concentrated their efforts on redefining the ends of learning (shifting from passive socialization to active revolution, for instance). On this view, the ends are to be problematized as part of a political struggle, while the means remains largely unchallenged. Thus, as Elizabeth Ellsworth so aptly argues (1989), the methods (means) of critical pedagogy might be struggling for empowerment and emancipation but do not feel very empowering or emancipatory! What to think feels predetermined, and thus forced upon students (even while purporting to be dialogic). Focusing on redefining ends (what to think), opens critical pedagogues to the charge of indoctrination.
Others have focused more on redefining means rather than ends. I am thinking here of “progressive” approaches such as philosophy for children. In order to sidestep the issue of indoctrination (which presupposes certain ends in advance of the educational moment), Matthew Lipman (2003) concentrates on the means divorced from prescribed ends. His emphasis is on creating a new style of education—community of inquiry—that offers a radically different experience of learning: one focused on how to think rather than on what to think. Where the dialogue is heading is not as important as how it is undertaken. Thus, on the surface, ends seem to be bracketed out, leaving it up to participants to formulate their own judgments. Yet ends are presupposed in Lipman’s insistence on reasonability as the benchmark for defining what counts as a “successful” community of inquiry. Indeed, Lipman argues that philosophy for children’s experiment with means is supposed to culminate in training for reasonable, democratic citizenship. Walter Kohan (1995) refers to this as the “sacralization of democracy” (26) in philosophy for children that prematurely forecloses on the radical potential of philosophical questioning to lead in unforeseen directions. As such, it would appear that ends are smuggled back in to Lipman’s model, even if it insists that it is not deciding in advance the direction of any given dialogue.
While the means and the ends differ in these cases, what I want to highlight is a unanimous consensus that education is a means (via learning) for an end (a political, social, or economic destination outside of itself). As such, education is instrumentalized, transformed into a tool for achieving some measure of growth, development, and/or progress toward x. Education is an instrument of personal, social, political, or economic change, but this seems to sacrifice education as such, or at least submit it to some further actualization that is more important than itself.
The only option that seems to be offered as a point of departure from means-end logic is viewing education as a pure end. This would amount to a retreat into scholasticism, a sealing in of education on itself, a closing down of education from the outside of itself. Such is the case with the conservative position that wants to maintain a strict separation between education and society. The conservative wants to protect the canon of great works while also introducing students to perennial, timeless, and universal ideas defining the human condition. Here, the problem of elitism raises its ugly head. Isn’t it the sign of real privilege to simply engage in education as an end in itself, as if contemporary problems do not merit the attention? But for me, there is another issue at stake here. Could we not argue that by focusing on education as an end in itself, education becomes an instrument of and for itself? In other words, it is not clear to me that education as a pure end actually resolves the problem of instrumentalization. It appears that focusing on an end always already necessitates an instrumentalization of an action, even if that action is instrumentalized for its own sake. Thus, in the conservative attempt to undo the problems of instrumentalization found on the left, it ends up absolutizing instrumentalization. To safeguard itself against attacks, education must protect and conserve its canon of great texts, must battle external forces to preserve the sanctity of its institutions, and must become evangelical about its intrinsic worth.
So it would seem we have no options left, that we are condemned to an instrumental view of education. And as such, education will always be given over to learning. The learning society has, in short, won the day.
But this is not the case. We have neglected one other option. This option is perhaps the most obscure, and the most under-appreciated in educational theory and practice: education as a pure means. This would be an education that renders inoperative all ends. Instead of transforming education into a learning instrument in the name of an end, it would be education as a means without ends in view.
In this article, I will outline three ways in which we can conceptualize the enigmatic nature of means without ends. To do so, I will turn to the work of Giorgio Agamben and his reflections on this topic. Agamben is now established as a key philosopher of potentiality in the field of education (Ford, 2016; Jasinski, 2018; Lewis, 2013, 2017; Murphy 2020; Vlieghe, 2016; Waghid, 2015). This literature has focused on how Agamben enables us to problematize certain assumptions concerning the relationship between potentiality and actuality, means and ends in educational discourse and practice. Indeed, Agamben forces us to confront pure potentiality (1999) or pure means (2000; see also Vlieghe and Zamojski in this issue), thus pushing the envelope of how we conceptualize taken-for-granted educational concepts that are output driven and assessment oriented. In this article, I will add to this body of literature by further refining the ways in which pure means might manifest themselves in Agamben’s work in relation to educational problematics. Although Agamben himself does not make clear distinctions between different ways in which means express themselves without recourse to ends, a careful reading reveals different kinds of tactics for suspending ends. In particular, I want to highlight the following: allowing, preferring not to, and contemplating. All three are expressions of the inoperativity of ends and the releasing of pure means. In fact, I would go further and argue that the three can be viewed as increasingly more comprehensive expressions of inoperativity. Further, I will pair each with a particular educational example such as the passionate teacher (Vlieghe and Zamojski, 2019), the silent teacher (Jasinski, 2015), and the studier (Lewis, 2013, 2017). In all cases, education is released from its purported ends, and therefore redeemed from the risk of instrumentalization.
Agamben on potentiality
Before we begin it is important to start with Agamben’s theory of potentiality. This is the ontology that underlies his understanding of pure means. According to Agamben, the modern world is still living in the wake of Aristotle’s ancient theory of potentiality. Rightly, Aristotle pinpointed an unusual feature of potentiality. For something to be in potential it must, simultaneously, be impotential. Without this impotential dimension, there would be no way to differentiate potentiality from actuality. Think here of architects who are not building. In this moment, they are equally capable of building and not building something. Thus, they have within themselves the ability to and the ability not to do their craft. Their faculty for building is a way of preserving their ability, but only in so far as the ability is also an ability not to build.
The question arises: What happens to this impotentiality when potentiality is put to work? On the typical reading of Aristotle, potentiality is put in the service of an action, and in so doing, impotentiality must be sacrificed. It is this translation of potentiality into an action that is the ontological foundations of instrumentalization, which always rests on a means-end equation. Allowing impotentiality to pass into actualization would render inoperative every work and every act. But Agamben finds in Aristotle another course that does not merely subject impotentiality to sacrifice. Agamben wants to read Aristotle anew in order to think through an act of impotentiality, or an act that does not sacrifice impotentiality but rather exhibits it. Agamben (1999: 183) writes, If a potentiality to not-be originally belongs to all potentiality, then there is truly potentiality only where the potentiality to not-be does not lag behind actuality but passes fully into it as such. This does not mean that it disappears in actuality; on the contrary, it preserves itself as such in actuality. What is truly potential is thus what has exhausted all its impotentiality in bringing it wholly into the act as such.
Instead of a work, an impotential act is always in use—use without end. This redefinition of “work” is summarized as follows: The work is not the result or achievement of a potential, which is realized and consumed in it: the work is that in which potential and habit are still present, still in use; it is the dwelling of habit, which does not stop appearing and, as it were, dancing in it, ceaselessly reopening it to new, possible use (Agamben, 2015: 62).
What then are examples of impotentiality being brought wholly into the act without sacrifice? What does it mean to actualize one’s ability not to do something? Actualizing one’s ability to do something seems easy to understand: the architect negates their ability to not do something so that they can build something.Yet what would it mean to suspend this negation of an impotentiality? What would it mean to be in use? Below I will outline three different manifestations of impotential acts. They can be summarized as follows:
Allowing: Activation of an impotentiality Preferring not to: Deactivation of an act Contemplating: Potentialization of an impotentiality as an act
These formulations are important as each uniquely undermines the sacrifice of impotentiality as potentiality passes into an act. This also means that the ontology underlying means-end, instrumental logic is severed, opening up the possibility for a non-instrumental conceptualization of education as use.
Allowing
The first example of an impotential act is what Agamben (1993) refers to as “allowing” (32). An example of allowing is, oddly enough, the creation of life by God. Here Agamben argues that evil is found in our inability to face our impotentiality. Evil, on this view, is our attempt to found our being on some power, on some ability, thus cleaving potentiality from impotentiality. “Creation,” argues Agamben (1993), “is not the victorious struggle of a power to be against a power to not-be; it is rather the impotence of God with respect to his own impotence, his allowing—being able to not not-be—a contingency to be” (32). Creation—or bringing into existence more generally—is not a power that triumphs over an impotence, but rather the full expression of an impotence—an impotence to not not-be—passing fully into an act. God allowed creation to happen. It was not a product of the will so much as a lack of will. God yielded to the impossibility not to create, and in that yielding, a yield (life) was born.
Allowing—a giving over of the self wholeheartedly to a power not to be or do—allows for creation, or as Agamben (1993) argues, “love” (32) to be possible. Love is a gesture of allowing one’s self to be passionately given over to something beyond the self. Passion in this sense is an affliction that is a surrendering of the self. We are vulnerable when we fall in love because love expresses our impotentiality (an inability to not not-do something). Thus love is radically weak (rather than strong), and radically precarious (rather than certain).
Another example of passionate love is the pianist Glenn Gould. Agamben (1993: 36) writes, Even though every pianist necessarily has the potential to play and the potential to not-play, Glenn Gould is, however, the only one who can not not-play, and, directing his potentiality not only to the act but to this own impotence, he plays, so to speak, with his potential to not-play. While his ability simply negates and abandons his potential to not-play, his mastery conserves and exercises in the act not his potential to play … but rather his potential to not-play.
We can sense the emergence of Gould’s impotentiality not through his talent but rather though his manner. Agamben (2017) writes, “In the face of ability, which simply negates and abandons its potentiality not to play, and talent, which can only play, mastery preserves and implements in the act not its potentiality to play but the potentiality not to play” (42). Manner is a strange tick or quirk in the playing that is not reducible to a learned skill or talent. Indeed, it cannot be something that is learned. Instead, it is something which the masterful player exhibits with abandon, without control, and without intention. It is a weakness that interrupts a talent, and in this sense, is the true signature of the musician. But because of this, it is most likely that the manner in which something is done will always appear strange or uncanny. It will be some unresolved detail in the work that somehow de-completes it. For this reason, manner is the “salvation of imperfection in a perfect form” (Agamben, 2017: 42). Manner slows down the thrust of talent to exhaust itself in an act of playing, interrupting a kind of false confidence that would guarantee the perfection of a form.
In education, we find the notion of the passionate teacher in the recent work of Joris Vlieghe and Poitr Zamojski. For them, the master teacher gives him or herself over to love for something, and through this love, allows teaching to happen. In Vlieghe and Zamojski’s words (2019), “one cannot not share this dedication [to something] with others, be it in such a way that others can begin (radically) anew with it” (106). The masterful teacher is truly impotent in that they cannot not teach their love for something. Their impotentiality is not exhausted in the passage to the act of teaching, but rather the act itself is impotentialized. The act of teaching with passion is not about learning certain teacherly skills or talents, but about publicly performing one’s abandonment to something.
This is not teaching as a means to an end outside of itself. The masterful teacher does not justify his or her profession in relation to learning outcomes or even the interests of the students. Nor is the passionate teacher interested in political outcomes. As Vlieghe and Zamojski argue (2019), the passionate teacher is political insofar as he or she does not have political ends in mind! But it is also important to point out that the masterful teacher does not merely view teaching as an end in itself either. As one will recall from above, education as a pure end concerns its own preservation through the protection and safeguarding of a canon and an institution. Yet the masterful teacher, at least on my reading of Vlieghe and Zamojski, is open rather than closed to various contaminations. The teacher has no proper location where to teach. Indeed, the passion for something would mean the teacher cannot stop teaching in the most inappropriate places and times (not unlike Socrates wandering the streets of Athens, speaking with everyone, even if they resist him).Likewise, the teacher has no specific content that he or she must “convince” students of. Instead, it is the passion itself that drives the use of teaching. Here impotentiality—the in-ability to teach appropriate things at the appropriate times—frees education up to be a pure means without recourse to an end.
Beyond technical training in certain skills and competencies, the masterful teacher displays certain mannerisms that are unique to him or herself. Here Vlieghe and Zamojski’s reference to Leonard Bernstein as a public pedagogue is important to note. For the authors, Bernstein is an example of masterful teaching refuting the concept of the teacher as someone who has “absolute knowledge” or is in “a position of maximal control” (Vlieghe and Zamojski, 2019: 108) because of the proper training and correct skills, talents, and competencies. Instead, Bernstein is a master because of his manner. At this point I have to expand my analysis beyond that provided by Vlieghe and Zamojski. They highlight certain pedagogical maxims and verbal and bodily features that seem to bring into focus Bernstein as a teacher. Performing an educational reduction on Bernstein enables the authors to extract certain essential maxims for being a teacher. Yet, manner is precisely what escapes this analysis. It is what is most singular, but for this reason, what animates Bernstein as a teacher. Indeed, manner is a kind of trembling (as Agamben might say) within the deployment of the maxims. Stated differently, manner is found in the ticks of the verbal and bodily gestures Bernstein uses that make impersonal maxims personal expressions of his passion. He cannot not speak with certain intensity/drama, he cannot not overexaggerate certain bodily gestures, he cannot not orchestrate his movements with a certain frenetic rhythm. This is indeed Bernstein’s use of himself, of his impersonal habits. Whereas the maxims listed by Vlieghe and Zamojski might be Bernstein’s strength as a passionate, masterful teacher, his manner (which escapes this more or less structural analysis) is his weakness or his impotentiality expressing itself through the act of teaching (his maximum loss of control). This impotentiality is the noninstrumental passion through which the teacher abandons him/herself to an act of teaching.
Preferring not to
In The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans (2005), Agamben highlights the peculiar features of the Pauline notion of messianic redemption. In particular, he points out how the messianic moment is not a future-oriented event that is pending. Rather, it is immanent to the present in the form of a suspension. In other words, messianic time “revokes the factical condition and undermines it without altering its form” (Agamben, 2005: 24). Stated differently, the functionality of roles, institutions, and norms are rendered inoperative without negation or destruction. The experience of messianic time is thus a form of an as not: weeping as not weeping, learning as not learning, and so forth. The structure of the as not interrupts all attempts by the law to institute clear divisions within a people—divisions such as friend and enemy. As not produces a remnant that undermines these kinds of binaries. Take for instance the fundamental division of the law between the Jew and the non-Jew which is clearly demarked by a cut (circumcised/foreskin). Yet Paul’s messianic suspension interrupts this division by introducing a third possibility that cannot be accounted for within existing distinctions. According to Agamben, this third option is the introduction of the Jew who is not a Jew (or the Jew of the flesh alone) and the Jew of the breath (or the hidden Jew who does not bear the mark of the flesh). The Jew as not a Jew is a Jew who is neither a Jew nor not a Jew. This ambiguous figure is not within the order of the law nor fully outside it either. The the Jew as not a Jew offers a moment wherein the law is displaced ever so slightly to allow for a new use to appear: a new way of living an identity that escapes capture by the law. In de-creating the law or dismantling its operation to divide life against itself, a form-of-life emerges that cannot be appropriated, classified, or managed.
Another key figure here is Herman Melville’s character Bartleby the Scrivener who famously informs his impatient employer that he would prefer not to continue to copy even though he had been hired to do so. Bartleby does not work, yet does not leave his office space either. This creates a paradoxical situation that interrupts the expected flow of work in the office, disrupting the status quo. He is an employee (one who works) as not an employee (one who does not work), disrupting dichotomies of inclusion and exclusion, inside and outside. Agamben (1993) summarizes, “Bartleby, a scribe who does not simply cease writing but ‘prefers not to,’ is the extreme image of this angel that writes nothing but its potentiality to not write” (37). It is important to note that in doing nothing, Bartleby is doing something: he is actively expressing his passivity, or passively expressing his activity by preferring not to. This is an impotential act, or an act that suspends its end (in the form of a writing, a work, or a poiesis). Bartleby is without will, work, and want—all of which are ends oriented. Instead, he is, for Agamben (1999), “capable only without wanting” (254). He is nothing but a potentiality to do (or be) and a potentiality to not do (or be) decoupled from becoming an instrument of a will or a want for a particular work.
Preferring not to opens up the possibility of a form-of-life that is beyond the buying and selling of labor power, of efficiency measurements, and of the very category of instrumentality. Bartleby is a life that has no functionality and therefore cannot be utilized as an instrument of the law of profit (as a want) for his employer (as a will). He is not a means to another end outside of himself. Instead, Bartleby is a pure means: an indeterminate existence neither inside nor outside the system, neither included nor fully excluded, neither acting nor not acting. And because of this paradoxical location, a new use for life beyond instrumentality shines through.
In educational discourse, Igor Jasinski (2015) has pursued this particular formulation of an impotential act. In Jasinski’s attempt to redeem philosophy for children from instrumentality, he proposes a new notion of the teacher as not a teacher. While traditional models of philosophy for children offer up an image of the teacher as a facilitator who maintains the directionality of the dialogue in the community of inquiry towards increasingly rational speech, Jasinski offers an alternative where the teacher prefers not to intervene in whatever the students are discussing. The teacher therefore prefers not to be a “teacher” in the sense found within the philosophy for children literature. The teacher could indeed step in and guide the students toward specific, predefined forms of speech, and in this sense help them learn critical thinking skills. Yet the teacher does not do what is expected. Instead, the teacher exhibits the work (of teaching) as non-work. Even more importantly, as Jasinski points out, within philosophy for children what is banned or prevented is precisely this expression of not-teaching (to not teach is to abnegate the responsibility of the teacher, abandoning children to irrationality). Thus, in preferring not to teach, the teacher as not a teacher renders inoperative this fundamental ban that underlies the means-end logic of philosophy for children.
But this is no simple negation. When the ban is suspended, the teacher becomes a paradigm of potentiality (as containing in itself the ability to do and not to do something). The teacher publicly performs this potentiality, displaying it to the students in the form of “preferring not to.” Not unlike Bartleby in relation to his work, the teacher is neither a teacher nor not a teacher but rather a paradoxical figure that does not abide by the rules or expectations of his or her profession as a facilitator of reasonable speech. The teacher is not an instrument of learning the skills and dispositions underlying the normative framework of philosophy for children. By this I mean that the teacher does not submit his or her use to a proper and external end (in learning according to rational laws/criteria). The teacher as not a teacher disrupts the instrumentalization of teaching by holding onto the use of his or her capacity or habit of teaching and presenting it as such.
Passion is involved in this example of preferring not to, but unlike in Vlieghe and Zamojski’s theory, here the passion is for the students’ potentiality. Jasinski (2015) summarizes, “To allow students to experience their full potential (to learn and to not-learn), the teacher has to realize his or her potential (to teach and to not-teach)” (491) through a radically impotential act of preferring not to be a teacher. This, in turn, Should be seen as an expression of passion, of love for the students, because it is aimed at fulfilling their potential: To become aware of their freedom to learn and to not-learn while, at the same time, learning to love their facticity … (Jasinski, 2015: 491).
Another key difference from Vlieghe and Zamojski is that Jasinski’s teacher is without mannerism. One is a master teacher precisely by allowing personal mannerism to take place in the style of teaching. The other lacks mannerism, and is thus radically impersonal. What I want to emphasize here is that both are impotential acts, or ways in which potentiality appears within education as a use or means (rather than an instrument of an end). But what about educational forms of life that do not have a teacher present? What about the autodidact or studier who is alone with his or her books or found in small study groups with friends?
Contemplating
The final form of impotential action I will offer is contemplation. For Agamben, contemplation is thought thinking its own potentiality for thought. Thus, it is not merely thinking taking itself as its object of thought. Indeed, contemplation seems to completely subvert the dichotomy of subject versus object. Instead, we should understand contemplation as a potentiality that remains inoperative and free, thus able to think itself. Or, as Agamben (2017: 215) writes, Just as the geometer is a geometer because he is capable of not doing geometry, and just as the kithara player is a kithara player because he is capable of not playing the kithara, so thought exists as a potential not to think (the potential intellect of the medieval), as a writing tablet on which nothing is written.
In Idea of Prose, Agamben offers a description of the last diadoch of pagan philosophy, Damascius who, in this reading, is an example of contemplation. What is interesting here is how the Aristotelian metaphor of the mind as an empty tablet becomes a historically real example—the table of thought becomes concretized as a particular table of a particular philosopher. In AD 529 the emperor Justinian closed down the Athens school of philosophy. After struggling to overturn the decision, Damascius and his remaining students took what was left of their library and sought refuge at the court of the Persian king, Khosru Nushirvan. In a state of intolerable exile, lacking a formal school, Damascius began to study. He turned his attention to the aporias concerning first principles. In other words, he turns to the question of the signatures of all thought that enable thinking to take place. As Agamben (1995: 32) recounts, he labored on this work for 300 days, and in his text, we find many statements such as: “despite the slowness of our work, I have not, it seems, concluded anything,” or “may God do as he pleases with what I have just written!”, or again, “all that can be said in praise of my exposition is this: that it condemns itself through its recognition of its inability to see clearly, and its impotence to look at the light”.
After so much writing, Damascius suddenly lifted his head from the manuscript proper and gazed upon the writing tablet itself. He was then seized by an idea: the idea of potentiality as such. Agamben (1995: 34) writes, The uttermost limit thought can reach is not a being, not a place or thing, no matter how free of any quality, but rather, its own absolute potentiality, the pure potentiality of representation itself: the writing tablet! What he had until then been taking as the One, as the absolutely Other of thought, was instead only the material, only the potentiality of thought. And the entire, lengthy volume the hand of the scribe had crammed with characters was nothing other than the attempt to represent the perfectly bare writing tablet on which nothing had yet been written. This was why he was unable to carry his work through to completion: what could not cease from writing itself was the image of what never ceased from not writing itself … now he could break the tablet, stop writing. Or rather, now he could truly begin.
Contemplation becomes the most free and open of all acts in that it enables us to bear witness to the fact that “man is and remains a being of potentiality” (Agamben, 2017: 52) or a being without a specific, prescribed destiny in any work. It is therefore the most extreme and amplified form of inoperativity offered in Agamben’s many essays and books. Summarizing, Agamben (2017) writes, “The life that contemplates its own potentiality to act and not to act becomes inoperative in all its operations, lives only its livableness” (54). Importantly, Agamben highlights how contemplation is life that has become inoperative in all its operations. We can think here of Damascius sitting at his writing desk without writing anything. His contemplation is fully inoperative and thus beyond instrumentalization. Whereas a thought can always be transformed into an instrument oriented toward an end, thinking thought’s potentiality to think is a pure means that resists all ends. Contemplation, in other words, is the pure use of thought. Agamben (2015) argues, “Like use, contemplation does not have a subject, because in it the contemplator is completely lost and dissolved; like use, contemplation does not have an object, because in the work it contemplates only its (own) potential” (63). Damascius contemplates his potentiality for thought, and in this way, puts to use the habit of thought without thinking anything at all!
The educational logic underlying Damascius’s contemplative moment is studying (see Lewis, 2013). Turning to Talmudic study as an example, Agamben (1995) argues that while in Babylonian exile after the Temple was destroyed, Jews “entrusted the preservation of their identity to study rather than to worship” (63). Notice that study, as with Damascius above, begins in a state of exile when the places of sacred worship are destroyed and rituals of worship are inoperative. Study therefore has no specific place to occur. It always appears in a state of suspension when things are displaced. But for Agamben, this exile actually allowed the Jews to return to the original meaning of Torah as “teaching” rather than a set of rabbinical laws and to Mishnah whose meaning is to repeat. Thus, when the apparatuses of worship are abandoned, an origin emerges that was concealed within the elaborate workings of the Temple, returning the Jews to the possibility of studying.Paradoxically, Judaism is a “religion which does not engage in worship but makes it an object of study” (Agamben, 1995: 63). Judaism is saved by the scholar who reads texts repeatedly as a teaching rather than worshiping them as embodying laws.
But this act of study is marked by a field of tensions. Agamben (1995: 64) states, Study, in effect, is per se interminable. Those who are acquainted with long hours spent roaming among books, when every fragment, every codex, every initial encountered seems to open a new path, immediately left aside at the next encounter, who have experienced the labyrinthine allusiveness of that “law of good neighbors” whereby Warburg arranged his library, know that not only can study have no rightful end, but does not even desire one.
This experience of being struck leads to the “sadness of the scholar” (Agamben, 1995: 65) whose task appears infinite, an indeterminate dwelling in the potentiality for thought. The worry is that “the end of study may never come—and, in this case, the work is stuck forever in the fragmentary or note stage” (Agamben, 1995: 65). But at this saddest moment, there is a kind of reversal, as experienced by Damascius wherein despair becomes inspiration. Damascius’s gesture can be read as “that of a potential that does not precede but follow[s] its act, has left it behind forever” (Agamben, 1995: 65). At this point, Agamben (1995) highlights how study “shakes off the sadness that disfigured it and returns to its truest nature: not work, but inspiration, the self-nourishment of the soul” (65). Here we can think of the writing tablet, and how Damascius returned to it in order to find a new beginning for his inquiry into first principles. This is a potentiality of thought to think itself without work. Study, as the educational logic of contemplation, amounts to the abandonment of ends for an exploration of the pure means of thinking as such.
This is fundamentally different from learning. In learning, a student is exposed to new ideas or skills which he or she does not have. Something is, as Gert Biesta might argue (2014), imported into the educational situation by the teacher. Yet in study, there is no “teacher” and nothing is imported to be learned. There is actually a shocking confrontation with that which is so intimate and familiar that it is at the very edge of thinkability: potentiality as such. This is precisely what is presupposed by all theories of learning but is then quickly absorbed into the work of learning to the point where it disappears into a specific content. Thus the danger of instrumentalization in any educational theory that rests upon learning.
Indeed, I would offer that studying is the weakest and most impotential of all educational actions because, in a way, contemplation is equal parts allowing and preferring not to. The studier is passionate in the sense of being absorbed in the use of study. But this is not being absorbed in Vlieghe and Zamojski’s sense. For them, passion is about love of something. Yet, as Agamben argues, the studier is equal parts absorbed and astonished. This astonishment sends the studier off into the “labyrinthine allusiveness” of the archive, abandoning this or that for other, alternative ideas and connections. The passion here is being absorbed into the use of study itself, which has no end, only more and more connections and digressions leading beyond passion for some-one thing in particular. But what makes the studier get lost in the archive? It is the second part of Agamben’s formulation: astonishment. The shock of astonishment opens the studier up to whatever excesses would otherwise be excluded if one were merely absorbed in some-one thing. It is the shuttling rhythm between these opposites that gives study its endless rhythm.
The rhythm of study prefers not to end. It is not indifferent to potentiality, but rather to ends. Moving toward/forward through absorption is interrupted through astonishment, which returns the studier to the writing desk itself, to the place of thinkability as a pure means. Thus, the studier prefers not to publish, take exams, or graduate. They are perpetually inoperative from the perspective of the learner and of the learning society. Yet unlike Jasinski’s formulation of preferring not, this suspension is not predicated on the action of a teacher but is internal to the study process itself, as it recursively returns to the very place where thought takes place. Of course, one can study with friends, and as in Agamben’s example of Talmudic study, the community in exile is fundamental. Yet the “teacher” here is the text itself. Thus, the community, at a minimum, can consist of a studier and a text.
This radical potentiality to resist ends moves us from passion for something to passion for students to passion for the potentiality to think as such (contemplation). It is interesting to think of Agamben himself in this context. Perhaps he is best characterized not as a philosopher or a poet so much as a studier who constantly is absorbed in the process of study as it spills outward into multiple, seeming unconnected topics and ideas. Also of note is the amazing way Agamben engages his own texts, constantly returning to marginal elements in earlier writings in order to develop them further years later. A case in point is the concept of homo sacer that first appeared as a passing (and somewhat inconsequential) reference in his early book Language and Death only to return as a focal point years later in his massive Homo Sacer project. This project, in turn, took over 20 years to “complete” thus seeming to resist its own end, with each volume tracing lines off into new territories that seemed to be only tenuously connected to the arc of the project as a whole. The result is an omnibus that, while superficially “closed,” remains radically open to its own latent potentiality for further development by the studier who is equal parts absorbed in the texts (reading them over and over) and astonished at the possibilities for new uses found in the margins. Perhaps Agamben can at last put down his writing pen and gaze upon his own blank writing tablet … but only to once again enter into the rhythm of study with new inspiration.
Conclusion
In his reflections on creation, Agamben starts with an analysis of Deleuze’s famous lecture on the same theme. For Deleuze, any act of creation is an act of resistance against an external threat. By resisting external controls, an internal potentiality is freed up. While appreciating certain aspects of Deleuze’s argument, Agamben parts ways with Deleuze in one key respect. Agamben does not want to focus on creation as against something external to itself. Agamben (2017) summarizes his critique as follows: “Understanding resistance only as an opposition to an external force does not seem to me to be sufficient for a comprehension of the act of creation” (36). Shifting away from Deleuze, Agamben returns once again to Aristotle’s definition of potentiality to rethink resistance as a positive force (not) working within something in the form of its impotentiality. Impotentiality or the ability to not-be is the “power that withholds and stops potentiality in its movement toward the act” (Agamben, 2017: 40) thus providing an internal source of resistance.
I bring this up because Agamben’s criticism of Deleuze helps anchor many of the discussions framing education with respect to instrumentality in terms of an ontology of potentiality. For progressives and conservatives, education is always under threat from outside, and as such must be defended against perceived contaminants, obstacles, or forces other than itself. Some of these threats are undoubtedly real and urgent concerns, but such arguments always instrumentalize education either as a means to an end or as a pure end in overcoming these obstacles. Instead of foregrounding external threats and resistances as the focus of educational theory, I would propose a rerouting of energies toward education’s internal resistances and how these resistances open up positive notions of educational life beyond instrumentalization. Allowing, preferring not to, and contemplating all attempt to think impotentiality, or a potentiality to not be, within an educational setting (of teaching or of studying). And in so doing, offer up an education that is radically weak but also open to free use from the inside out (rather than from the outside in).
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
