Abstract
In this contribution to the Special Issue on the instrumentalisation of education, we focus on the relation between politics and education, as today there is a dominant discourse on rendering education subservient to the realisation of political aims. Rather than analysing the many ways in which such instrumentalisation takes place, we propose to develop an ontological account that articulates the basic attitude that a political and an educational engagement respectively demand. Our main source of inspiration was Arendt’s claim that education should be conceived of as an autonomous and separate sphere, that is, as being meaningful in and of itself, and without any need for an external justification (e.g. in political terms). Taking this standpoint further we will argue that the unique logic of education can be conceived of in terms of unconditional love for the present world. This affirmative attitude is precisely what makes education educational. Conversely, this calls for a redefinition of the logic that -- following Schmitt -- characterises the political, which we will show to be predicated upon a dialectical relation with the world that consists of an attitude of hate towards the present, in view of an ever deferred hoped-for ideal future. This leads us to reconsider the relation that education as an autonomous sphere of human life enters with politics. In order to theorise this kind relation we refer to the idea of pure means, introduced by Agamben.
In this article, we want to address the topic of this Special Issue by dealing with how the fields of the political and the educational relate to one another. This is a recurrent theme in the philosophy of education and has become a vital and still contested point of discussion due to schools of thought in educational theory that can be labelled ‘critical’ (e.g. Freire, 2005; Giroux, 2011; Mollenhauer, 1968). It is not our objective to give an overview of the complex and nuanced ways critical pedagogues have taken a position with regards to this issue; we merely want to draw out a basic orientation that is typical of this strand of thinking, so as to make a clear opposition to the particular position we defend in this paper, viz. a precise definition of education and politics, and how both connect. 1
What seems essential to all critical approaches to education is the recognition of the inevitable political dimension of it. This has two complementary sides. First, upon deeper analysis, it could be argued, for example, that we (as educators) often do not realise that education has a political function, for instance because we adhere to a traditional idea of liberal education or unwittingly teach in a very traditional (e.g. teacher-centred) style. Even if we have the best of intentions (after all, we want to cultivate and elevate our pupils and want them to become well-informed and autonomously thinking human beings), it appears we do not understand that we actually contribute to an oppressive status quo and a fundamentally unjust society. Teacher-centredness turns students into robots that are adapted for a society in need of a mindless labour force. The ideal of liberal education conveys the implicit message that the worldview and habitus of the higher and upper-middle class are desirable, if not superior. The project of educating for autonomy can be, therefore, exposed as the imposition of a white, masculine, heteronormative and colonial mindset, and so on and so forth. According to this analysis, education is political, as it turns out to be a means of ensuring an oppressive societal order.
Second, in view of the analysis just discussed, it follows that well-meaning educators, once they are enlightened – that is, informed about their complicity in maintaining the status quo – should respond by turning education into a force for true emancipation. On the basis of a critical insight into hidden power structures, and the oppressive role education has played, one should conceive of a more adequate model of education that actually contributes to a better society. This project is driven by a deep sense of indignation, by the unwillingness to accept any form of oppression. Hence, it sets high stakes for education. For the first time in history we have the chance to transform education into an instrument for real social emancipation. This relates to a collaborative, dialogical, student-centred, problem-driven education, which explicitly addresses issues of power, exclusion and oppression. It is clear that this account of education is political through and through, as the whole raison d’être of this endeavour is the creation of a more humane, free and just world.
In our contribution, we do not want to hone this political–educational project. Rather, we want to point to some inherent problems that arise from this critical way of thinking. However, we do not want to just criticise this paradigm, as then we would be vulnerable to the same line of critique we develop ourselves. Rather, what we suggest is to develop another, altogether different approach towards education. This will help to reconceive the relation between education and politics.
The never-ending work of critique, the eternal deferral of the good, and the inevitability of inequality
We would like to start by pointing out a first set of interrelated problems inherent in the critical paradigm. In a secularised version of the Christian idea of the Fall (even those who believe they are without sin are, in fact, overconfident and therefore sinful anyway), the critical attitude is one of a never-ending project of self-critique. As Elizabeth Ellsworth (1989) shows, critical work in education is doomed to fail, as the educator will inevitably re-enact everything she intentionally seeks to avoid: she is still a teacher and reinstalls authority, she belongs to a particular ethnic, social and cultural group and hence inadvertently reinforces power relations; even the most open dialogue might actually exclude the most vulnerable parties from giving voice to their concerns, and so on.
Or, referring to Adorno (2004) negative utopianism, every positive and substantial account of a just society, even if we have the best reasons to believe in it, must be treated with suspicion. This is because we might not realise yet why it is oppressive. And so, ‘If thinking is to be true – if it is to be true today, in any case – it must also be a thinking against itself’ (Adorno, 2004: 365). In post-Auschwitz times, there is no point for the work of conscientisation and critique to stop – it has to be truly relentless and radical. We should never be satisfied, believing we are fully conscious of our own conditions (that oppress us or make us complicit in the oppression of others). There is always and by definition some form of oppression to be discovered and revealed that we were not conscious of. Evil is our inevitable fate. This is probably all the more true for the so called post-truth world we live in. The consequence of such a view is what we call the secondary naturalisation of the world (Vlieghe and Zamojski, 2020). Contrary to the intentions of critical theory (Horkheimer, 2004), that is, instead of unsettling the currently dominant and socially fixed beliefs on the nature of things (on how the world works), relentless radical critique ends up with a view of the world as essentially evil. If we are to believe in an ideal, it should be eternally deferred. Pushing this view to its limits, and rephrasing Weil (2002), one might argue that the true opium of the people is not religion, or revolution, it is hope itself. Just sharing the notion that the future might bring a world that is less evil is the very source of evil itself.
From a more logical point of view, one could add to this line of criticism that the critical view is self-defeating. As Rancière, (1991) has argued, the very idea that we, as educators, first need to enlighten the oppressed other about her oppressive conditions, installs a regime of inequality we can never escape from. Even though the critical enlightener does her work out of the best of intentions – there is no doubt that she wants the oppressed other to be as free as she is herself – the initial gesture here is that the other is positioned as someone who lacks the necessary resources to emancipate herself. She needs to make herself dependent upon the already enlightened teacher to be really emancipated. Otherwise, the oppressed might think she is free without really being so – as are the prisoners in Plato’s cave. It is therefore required that there is an external instance (Plato’s philosopher) who can verify the truth of one’s proclaimed emancipation. 2 However, this entails one remaining dependent upon a more powerful other, and never being able to escape this relation of subordination. Inequality is inevitable. The very word emancipation, taking into account its etymological roots (cf. Lewis, 2015), testifies to this: one first needs to be a slave in order to become a free citizen (See Vlieghe and Zamojski, 2019).
Education for an old or for a new world?
As already indicated, the line of criticism just pursued cannot be the last word on this matter, as we would in such a case play the game of critique ourselves. Hence, what we propose is to take a different approach (see Hodgson et al., 2017), more specifically to disentangle, in the remaining part of this contribution, the political and the educational. Following an idea developed by Arendt (1961b) in the 1950s, it could be argued that education and politics are two separate spheres, each with their own logic, and that it might be very dangerous when the logic of politics comes to decide what should happen within the sphere of education. More precisely we want to draw attention to an opposition Arendt introduces in her famous essay The Crisis in Education: preparing the new generation for a new world as opposed to preparing them for an old world (Arendt, 1961b: 177).
For Arendt, education is the response the existing generation gives (or is invited to give) to the advent of newcomers in an existing world. More precisely, education is all about relating to the capacity of newness that comes about with every birth (‘natality’) in a properly humane way, that is, giving the newcomers the possibility to begin anew with this world – and not in the way animals react to the newly born, by merely training them to become a part of their unchangeable way of living. Lions have always lived as lions do, whereas human ways of life are to change, sometimes profoundly, with every change of generations.
If education can be defined as a response to newness, this can happen in two ways. One is that we start from disappointment with how the world is and cherish a dream about how the world should be. Hence the adult generation projects this utopia upon the new generation. This is what Arendt calls preparing them for a new world. However, this comes down to appropriating newness for our own political purposes. The ‘new’ is not appreciated for what it is, but only seen as a resource to be put at work for realising a more prosperous future. Well intended as it might sound, Arendt identifies this strategy as the seed of totalitarianism (Arendt, 1961b). Put differently, such a politicisation of education is always at risk of a complete appropriation of the new in view of an ideal that fully kills off the new.
At this point it is important to note that Arendt here refers to a completely different understanding of politics than the one she develops in The Human Condition (Arendt, 1958). In regard to this, we have elsewhere (Vlieghe and Zamojski, 2019) made the case for a differentiation between the strong and the wrong sense of politics in Arendt’s thinking. Politics in the strong sense – to which we give more attention later in this article – always refers to action (as distinguished from labour and work). Action denotes the activity of those who leave the private sphere behind, in order to gather on the agora, to speak and discuss, and so to perform deeds through which a new beginning can be introduced to our common world. Politics in the strong sense is therefore a practice of establishing the common.
When education gets politicised, we refer to what we called a wrong sense of politics, which is precisely the sense in which Arendt refers to politics in her educational writings (Arendt, 1961b). Politics in this wrong sense means that education is conceived of in terms of the preparation of newcomers to a new, imagined world, that is, when the educational is reduced to a mere means of realising a political dream. A dream that exploits and sacrifices the newness of the new generation in order to fulfil the political phantasy of a new, not yet existing, perfect society.
Over against this – and this is the way to respond to the newness that Arendt (1961b) advocates – we can welcome the new generation into the world we share with them, an existing world – the old world – and respect their natality. That is, pass on the world as it is (or things in this world: disciplines, subject matters), rendering newcomers attentive to it, and showing them why it is worth being concerned with it. At the same time, what makes this transaction properly humane and educational is that this gift should be passed on in such a way that the new generation can actually take up this world in ways we, the adults, did not and could not have foreseen. Paradoxically, properly responding to natality involves an education for the old world.
This entails the sphere of education remaining firmly separate from that of politics. Hence, this raises the important question of how exactly to define these two spheres and their respective logics. We take our cue here, again, from Arendt, who concludes her essay on the crisis in education with the assertion that education essentially consists of displaying love for the world, which suggests (although Arendt proposed an alternative argument when developing the strong sense of politics in her political writings, e.g. Arendt, 1958) that politics is predicated on hate for the world. 3 In the next section we try to substantiate this bold claim.
Love and hate for the world
To be clear, this claim only makes sense when love and hate are conceived of ontologically: not as ontic phenomena (e.g. particular feelings or states of mind), but as the two mutually exclusive attitudes one can adopt towards the world, that is, ways of relating to the world through which it unfolds in a particular way. We are inspired here by Max Scheler (1973) who analysed love and hate as two fundamental modes of world disclosure, where love is a way of relating to the world that allows the world to open up (and hence to be affirmed as worthwhile), which invites us to explore and study it, and to pass it on to the next generations. Hate, on the contrary, is a way of relating that narrows down the world (which is, phenomenologically speaking, a precise description of the manner in which the world appears to a political activist: there is something in the world that is so wrong that one simply needs to correct this wrong rather than putting one’s energy into anything else).
To disentangle with greater precision the specific logic of education and politics, we turn now to Carl Schmitt’s (2007) ontological understanding of politics in terms of enmity. After all, Schmitt famously notes that the ‘distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy’ (Schmitt, 2007: 26). The political enemy is ‘the other, the stranger’, being ‘in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him [sic] are possible’ (Schmitt, 2007: 27). This is because the adversary can ‘negate his [sic] opponent’s way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one’s own form of existence’ (Schmitt, 2007: 27). According to Schmitt the enemy is ‘not the private adversary whom one hates’ as the political existence of an enemy refers to a situation when ‘one fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity’ (Schmitt, 2007: 28).
It is clear that Schmitt understands that hate and love on an ontic level (i.e. as purely private feelings) should not be used when conceptualising politics on an ontological level (i.e. as the political). However, it is striking to see that when defining the political, Schmitt regards the existence of the enemy as constitutive of the emergence of the stake over which one collectivity will confront the other. On a purely ontological level, this means that the political requires a point of reference (a way of life represented by an enemy) against which political struggle is undertaken. Within such a view, politics is always performed as a reaction against particular features of our world that an enemy represents, and against a vision of the world that an enemy therefore embraces. If this is correct, political action – taken on an ontological plane – narrows the world down to what it stands against, and only in relation to this a positive vision (of what is fought for) is established. The emergence of a friend in the political sense is predicated on the existence of an enemy (cf. Schmitt, 2007: 51–53).
Although, Schmitt has rendered this primacy of the enemy very accurately, our point here is not to defend Schmitt’s ideas as such. To begin with, his understanding of the political is in our view insufficient as he underestimates the role ideas play in the political processes, and reduces these to antagonistic reactions of one collective to the sheer existence of another collective, endorsing ‘another way of life’. Obviously, political action also presupposes an attachment, sometimes very fervent, if not zealous, to an ideal that does not yet exist in the present world. In that sense love is certainly also a dimension of politics, conceived of in the strong sense. 4 However – with the important lesson that we take from Schmitt’s analysis – this love is always predicated upon an attitude of hate. Political love is not pure, so to speak, but dialectically dependent upon a deep dislike for how things are, to the extent that we should never stop uncovering all that is wrong with the world, that is, the critical attitude we described above with Adorno (2004) and Weil (2002).
To be clear, the aim is not to depreciate the value and necessity of engaging in political action. If we want a better world, political action is required. What we are attempting to do here with Schmitt, is articulating the essential difference between politics and education. What Schmitt helps us see is the dialectical intertwinement of love and hate in politics, and the primacy of the latter: the condition of enmity is constitutive of the emergence of friendship.
This detour with Schmitt, allows us now to articulate with greater precision what the logic of education consists of: unconditional affirmation of the present. As opposed to the logic of politics, the driving force here is love. And moreover: this love is not dialectically dependent upon hate. From this it becomes clear that the critical paradigm, which we discussed at the beginning of this article, falls short of coming to terms with what education is essentially about. In this sense, the approach we defend is post-critical (Hodgson et al., 2017), or in more adequate (as we do not want to give into the game of criticism ourselves) and more positive terms: a fully affirmative and immanent approach (see Vlieghe and Zamojski, 2019). To this view, educating the new generation is about ‘saying yes’ to the present world, the here and now, and to what is good in it, rather than deferring the good for eternity, out of hate for what is wrong with the present. It is about loving something to such a degree that one has no choice but to profess about it, to show how beautiful it is, why it is important and worth being studied, and to give it as a free gift to the new generation – which, for us, is a very precise ontological account of teaching (Vlieghe and Zamojski, 2019).
At this point, one might object that the argument we have developed so far confuses affirmation of the world with identifying this world, or at least particular things in it, as good. Although, for instance, it makes sense to say that a biology teacher can be fascinated by the reproductive capacities of viruses and hence in love with this subject matter, it seems awkward to conclude that viruses are ‘good’. Obviously, this is not what we claim in this article. From the perspective of our collective health, the rapid extermination of a pandemic-causing virus constitutes the desirable destruction of something evil. However, from the perspective of a teacher or a student, the same virus can appear as an object of enthralment, something one wants to know everything about, and hence even as an object of care, to which one wants to draw the attention of the next generation. But, this requires that we overcome a negative attitude towards it: if we are solely or predominantly driven by the (legitimate) hate for viruses, it will be impossible to educate people about them.
In order to further disentangle education and politics, it is important to note that both have something to do with change – substantial and sometimes radical change in the way we live individually and together. However, the desire for political change is based on what Chesterton (1910)has identified as the question, What is wrong with the world? Valid as this question might be, it often makes us forget – Chesterton wittingly adds – what is right about the world? In order to recognize this, we must take an educational attitude – one of affirmation and immanence. The change that comes with this should be called transformation rather than emancipation. As explained, emancipation is a term that conceives of change for the better in relation to a negation of some evil, upon which it remains dependent. What we deal with in education is a change that is predicated not on enslavement, but on involvment in something, and instead of being focused on liberation, it refers to the potentiality of seing the world with new eyes, and of living one's life in new ways.
To be clear, this is not about denying the evil of the contemporary world being rightly exposed by the critical tradition. It is rather about acknowledging that in spite of this evil, there is still good in the world that is worth studying and passing on to the next generation. If we only draw attention to the reprehensible aspects of our world, we can only become cynical and end up in an endless cycle of critique, as argued in the second section of this article. It is in view of the enormity of the evil in the here and now that the educator’s task consists in bringing into focus what is worthy of our care and attention.
The relation between politics and education
Arguing that politics is something different from education does not mean, however, that they do not relate to each other. We would like to unpack this relation by approaching the matter, first, by again following Arendt, viz. by considering education and politics as separate spheres of life. After this, we turn to the conceptual framework of Giorgio Agamben, to show how these spheres are closely related, albeit in an unexpected, paradoxical way.
In her book The Human Condition Arendt (1958) distinguishes three different dimensions of active life (i.e. labour, work and action) and investigates their political meaning. This is performed against the backdrop of the Ancient divide between two major spheres of human life: the private sphere (or the sphere of the household – oikos) and the public sphere (which stands for the domain of politics – polis). According to Arendt, the doings of people within the private sphere are focused on their biological survival (zoé), and hence consist of the daily labour of caring, cooking, cleaning, farming and so forth, as well as manufacturing the tools necessary to make these efforts effective. 5 However, oikos is the sphere of radical inequality, as it is ruled solely by the paterfamilias who decides about the life and death of all within the household, and hence, exercises power that is more perfect than the power of a tyrant (Arendt, 1958: 27). The public sphere emerges when the patresfamilias of different oikoi leave their dominium and meet as equals to discuss matters that go beyond the level of the oikoi: they gather at the market-place or agora to make decisions on matters of public concern. In this political sphere people come together to act – in the genuine meaning of this word: acting means initiating something new and unexpected with the use of words (Arendt, 1958: 176–177). As noted above, this is exactly what constitutes politics in the strong sense (cf. Vlieghe and Zamojski, 2019).
Arendt reconstructs the Ancient division between oikos and agora in great detail in order to gain an orientation amidst the messiness of our contemporary situation, which is, as we saw, one of crisis (see Arendt, 1961a; Korsgaard, 2019). Hence, the divide between the private sphere and the public sphere, apart from reintroducing the strong sense of politics, is meant to help us rediscover what she calls ‘the essence of education’. Moreover, making this sharp divide is also an inevitable operation for understanding the ongoing crisis in education (Arendt, 1961b).
Trying to answer the question of which sphere to situate education in, it might seem that education fits in within the sphere of the household. However, raising children, caring about them and protecting them from the outside world is something that Arendt does not regard as education per se. Instead, this would be better called socialisation (cf. Biesta, 2010). What is more, if the only sphere to exist were the household, there would be no education. Education only becomes possible owing to the emergence of polis, and the recognition that there is a common world. That is, the acknowledgement that the many scattered, separate, independent oikoi are, indeed, just the effect of privatising a more original common world. Education is precisely about preparing the young generation that lives spread over diverse private settings, and locked up within the private interests of the particular household they form a part of, to start relating to a common world, that is, to begin taking part in public life. However, this preparation does not entail a direct engagement of the new generation in politics. Rather, [i]nsofar as the child is not yet acquainted with the world, he [sic] must be gradually introduced to it; insofar as he is new, care must be taken that this new thing comes to fruition in relation to the world as it is (Arendt, 1961b: 189).
Now, all this might suggest that this third sphere, between oikos and polis, is functional to the latter, that is, the ‘transition’ Arendt talks about should be rendered in terms of a means–goals relation. As stressed in the second section of this article, this is exactly something Arendt warns against. Conceiving of education as a mere means for a political purpose entails a double mistake. Firstly, this comes from a misconception of politics (which is turned into a direct imposition of will, i.e. dictatorship; (Arendt, 1961b: 176–177). Secondly, education is also misconceived, as – reiterating the point made above – it should be regarded as an autonomous sphere that has its own inherent logic, which is distinct from the private (economic) and political logic. Arendt makes this clear when arguing for particular arrangements as valid only within the sphere of education: We must decisively divorce the realm of education from the others, most of all from the realm of public, political life, in order to apply to it alone a concept of authority and an attitude toward the past which are appropriate to it but have no general validity and must not claim a general validity in the world of grown-ups (Arendt, 1961b: 195).
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The same concern speaks from Arendt’s famous claim that education is essentially conservative (Arendt, 1961b: 192). As discussed, for her, education consists of passing on the old world to newcomers: it is focused on what there is to be cherished and renewed. However, such a stance holds good only in the sphere of education: In politics this conservative attitude – which accepts the world as it is, striving only to preserve the status quo – can only lead to destruction, because the world, in gross and in detail, is irrevocably delivered up to the ruin of time unless human beings are determined to intervene, to alter, to create what is new (Arendt, 1961b: 192).
What is striking is that Arendt clearly suggests that taking such a stance is the effect of continuous exercises in radical critique: ‘modern man [sic] could find no clearer expression for his dissatisfaction with the world, for his disgust with things as they are, than by his refusal to assume, in respect to his children, responsibility for all this’ (Arendt, 1961b: 191). As we have argued in the first section of this article, such disgust with the order of things, together with the strong conviction that this status quo is inevitable, are the paradoxical consequences of relentless and radical critique. Indeed, such a critical attitude must simply lead to defining education as a means for political aims (cf. critical pedagogy) and the hope that our children will solve our problems.
To reiterate, when viewed from the traditional distinction that Arendt draws between the spheres of life, the relation between politics and education can only be thought of in two ways: either education loses its autonomy and becomes a means to an end, or education retains its autonomy and then it is for its own sake. However, we want to argue that it is possible and even desirable to defend the idea that education is for education’s sake and that politics and education are closely related in a way other than the two options just described. To do so, we have to set a step beyond this bifurcation. Hence, in the next section, we turn to Agamben, who considered the possibility that there is a particular category of human activity, pure means, which in our view captures very precisely what education is all about and how education, taken as such, has a unique relation with politics.
Autonomy and pure means
As mentioned before, in both the sphere of politics and of education there is a strong sense of the possible. If things cannot change profoundly, there simply is no reason to engage in either. In the following, we want to argue, first, that in order to be able to think and act politically one first needs to have experienced educational transformation. Imagining different worlds and intervening in the existing world depends on prior experiences of ability, which come with what happens in the sphere of education: gaining new insights and skills, where one would never have expected to do so; discovering an interest in a subject matter that changes one’s life and demands study, care and attention; starting to discern that one can begin anew and travel the world with new eyes. Second, education is a necessary condition for politics, but not a sufficient one. It is not because one has strong experiences of possibility at school that these will be translated into political thought and action. One can remain an apolitical scholar for the rest of one’s life (e.g. as a teacher in the Arendtian sense).
Precisely because education is for its own sake, it can go in many unforeseeable directions. Educating people can lead them to create nuclear weapons and organise genocides, as well as lead them to discover and create beauty, truth and goodness. And, obviously, education can serve many political goals, as the politicisation of education, so dominant today, clearly shows. But, rather than just criticising this ongoing politicisation, we want to draw out a more positive, albeit paradoxical conclusion: it is in the interest of a politics that truly wants to take up the possibility of transformation inherent in education, to respect education’s autonomy. Stated otherwise: education has a political meaning, but only in so far it remains apolitical.
So, to capture the unique essence of education in its relation to the sphere of politics, education could be described as what Agamben, referring to Walter Benjamin, calls pure means (see also the contribution by Tyson Lewis in this issue). Agamben develops this concept against the background of his genealogical deconstruction of the ways of thinking that have kept our minds and lives captive since the origin of Western philosophy in Greek antiquity (Agamben, 2000). One of these schemes, or apparatuses as he calls them, is to explain the fact that we are creatures of possibility and not of necessity, in terms of an opposition between practices that count as a means to an end, and courses of action that figure as ends in themselves. This goes back to Aristotle’s classical opposition between poiesis and praxis. The issue with this apparatus is that it makes us experience life in an exclusively productive way: that what makes a practice meaningful rests on the realisation of something that serves as a goal (which can be outside of the practice, as in poiesis, or remain fully within the practice itself, as in praxis).
In order to escape from this scheme (i.e. to deactivate the apparatus) a particular operation is required. This operation may seem odd and paradoxical at first, a trick of mastery that asks us to experience the near impossible, viz. thinking human activities as ‘pure means’. This is, of course, a mind-bending category as, normally (i.e. within the parameters of the apparatus we are used to), means are never pure: they are exactly instrumental to something else, to an extrinsic end. And yet, Agamben holds that it is of the highest importance to conceive of human activity as pure means.
In order to better understand what he refers to, consider human movement as an example (see also Vlieghe, 2013). Normally we are inclined to categorise movement either as instrumental (e.g. walking with the aim of getting to one’s workplace or with a view to keeping healthy) or as autotelic (walking on a sunny day, just because one enjoys walking). However, there is a third category of movement that escapes the binary logic of a means to an end versus pure ends, and which upsets the whole apparatus. A good example of this category is mime play (Agamben, 2000) . The mime artist makes the exact same gestures as ones that could be described as instrumental or autotelic (e.g. walking or drinking a cup of tea), but she does this in such a way that they cannot possibly fall under either of these two categories. She performs movements, but these movements are completely purposeless. They are just movements. Her behaviour has become pure means: the means that could potentially be used for an end get radically disjointed from any end, internally or externally speaking. Movement is still acted or performed, but it never exhausts itself in any concrete actualisation of the possibilities inherent in the means in question. In cases of pure means, human activity remains fully in potentiality.
If we stick to the arguments we have developed in this article, the question of how we should categorise education remains. In view of the autonomy of education we have defended, it might be tempting to classify it in terms of an end in itself. The expression education for education’s sake suggests so. And yet, education is not exclusively an autotelic activity. This is because it also contains the potential for political transformation. However, to have this political efficacy, education must be allowed to be a proper, independent sphere of life that follows its own logic. The autonomy of education, so strongly defended by Arendt, refers to the requirement to keep education separate from the political sphere, and to refrain from subjecting educational practices to political objectives: study should be for the sake of study. However, because study comes with an experience and sense of potentiality, it also makes possible political thought and action. At the risk of making a truly paradoxical statement, one must first experience pure potentiality in the autonomous, separate sphere of education, to be able to intervene in the current order of things in politics. In that sense, education is not just an end in itself, but precisely a pure means: it could be instrumental for politics (which explains why it can be so easily instrumentalised), but it can only be of use on the condition that it remains fully in potentiality and that this political potential does not get actualised.
Hence, contradictory as it might sound, education must be completely devoid of political aims in order to be of use to politics (cf. the contribution by Szkudlarek and Carusi in this issue). Education can only have political meaning if there is a time and a place where study for the sake of study is fostered. This, eventually, comes with a particular requirement, addressed to the sphere of politics. Paraphrasing Jean-Luc Nancy (2008), a central task of politics is to ensure that not everything is political. The sphere of politics can easily seize education as an instrument for engendering its goals and hence wreck it; or politics can allow education in its purest form to take place. 8 But, this is a political not an educational decision.
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.
