Abstract
In this article, after delineating a Deweyan framework that reclaims the autonomy of education against any instrumentalization, while not curtly writing off the vocabulary of instrumentalism, I will address the question of the “what and what for” of education in reference to schooling and, more particularly, to an emerging emphasis on the fact that new technology should result in an overhaul (if not a demise) of the “scholastic” project. By taking my cue from some ideas of Michel Serres, I will espouse a longue durée perspective and will show how the contemporary discourse on a de-schooling via technology is actually the radicalization of the modern gesture of Descartes. At the same time, though, I aim at deconstructing this conceptual device and at showing how a thinking-through-penmanship is operative there so that we can state that the cogito is predicated upon the gesture of handwriting and, therefore, requires schooling as its pre-condition. In this sense, while bringing to a close the most obsolete forms of modern schooling can represent a horizon for educational theory and practice, it would be calamitous to let the “scholastic” project itself come to a conclusion.
Introduction: The ontology (and organology) of the school as skholé
In this article, the issue of the ontology and instrumentality of education will be addressed with reference to a specific educational “realm,” the school, which over the last decade, in different cultural settings, has become “a philosophical question,” as Denis Kambouchner (2013) has aptly noted. By “philosophical” it should be understood that the reflection on the school does not confine itself to focusing on restricted re-arrangements of the school device itself but rather implies a radical investigation of its meaning, its structural features (Kennedy, 2017; Masschelein and Simons, 2012) and/or its fateful and possibly imminent disappearance (Enguita, 2016; Waks, 2014; McClintock, 2012).
In the camp of progressive education, the death knell is being sounded for the modern project of compulsory schooling, whether spelled out as “the industrial paradigm,” which should give way to “open networked learning centers” (Waks, 2014), or as the embodiment, in the field of education, of the mindset typical of the modern “era of enclosure,” building up closed and mutually separate domains which should allow one to formulate predictions and to establish causal relations (McClintock, 2012: 43). This is a mindset—it is argued—of which we should take leave in order for “an alternative system of education […] to emerge, [which] would provide persons of all ages with sophisticated resources to support the self-organization of human capacities taking place in their lives” (McClintock, 2012: 159).
Educational theoreticians like Waks and McClintock have been strongly contributing to the creation of new conceptual tools to move on from the crossroads at which contemporary education is stuck (Enguita, 2016). However, one may wonder whether, in their welcome endeavors, they risk throwing the baby (the “scholastic project”’) out with the bathwater of its modern-industrial inflection.
By the phrase “scholastic project” I refer to Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons’s (2012) influential investigations on the ontology of the school and their undertaking to explore what constitutes its eidos, viz. its essential characteristics. In this perspective, their inquiry addresses not so much the school understood as a societal institution (and the functions that it performs within society) but rather its very “essence” (in a non-metaphysical but phenomenological acceptation of the word), which is identified by recourse to the etymology of the word: the Greek skholé, free time. [T]he school is a historical invention, and can therefore disappear. But this also means that the school can be reinvented, and that is precisely what we see as our challenge and […] our responsibility today. […] [W]hat the school did was to establish a time and space that was in a sense detached from the time and space of both society (Greek: polis) and the household (Greek: oikos). It was also an egalitarian time and therefore the invention of the school can be described as the democratisation of free time. (Masschelein and Simons, 2012: 10 and 28)
As a matter of fact, it is in this perspective that a considerable part of the contemporary (public and not exclusively scholarly) debate on education makes what may be an illegitimate (or overhasty) leap in the argumentation: from the down-to-earth observation of the pervasiveness of new technology the conclusion is drawn that we need to take leave of the scholastic form or, more accurately, to realize such a radical revamping of the school that it would lose some of its characterizing features. The thesis here advanced, instead, is that we should not abandon the scholastic project and its specific and “long-lived” technologies—which continue to work as a hidden presupposition also for those who most eloquently (have) invoked its demise (see below, especially section 3).
The following argumentation will be structured in two parts, organized in three sections: in the first part (section 1), I will broach the discussion of the ontology and instrumentality theme through a Deweyan matrix. The US-American philosopher may appear as an unlikely ally for an endeavor, like the present one, sustained by a concept such as that of skholé, as he is often presented as the exponent of an instrumentalist approach to education. I will not tackle all the facets of the Deweyan theory but I will insist, on the one hand, on how powerfully he vindicated the autonomy of education (and, thereby, a non-instrumentalized view of it) and, on the other, on his idea of the school as a special environment dedicated to the learning of written symbols and the transmission of the knowledge conveyed by them. In this way, I will associate Dewey and Bernard Stiegler’s conception of the history of the school as the history of the hypomnemata (the supports for memory, viz. the set of technologies that make the transmission of a symbolic knowledge possible) and I will delineate in broad strokes a Deweyan-Stieglerian conception of the school as the domain of the cultivation of writing.
Against this backdrop, in the second part of the article (sections 2 and 3), I will, first, introduce what is one of the most ambitious and fascinating appeals to an abandonment of the scholastic project (as it is here understood) that of Michel Serres—and I will suggest construing it as a contemporary outcome of the radical and inaugural gesture of Descartes, culminating in a de-schooled cogito (see section 2); subsequently, I will deconstruct the Cartesian view, by showing how—for all its aspirations to do away with the school as the realm of the learning of writing—a thinking-through-penmanship is operative in Descartes’s cogito so that we can state that the latter (along with its Serresian heir) is predicated upon the gesture of handwriting and, therefore, requires the school (in the Deweyan-Stieglerian understanding delineated in section 1) as its precondition.
The discussion of the Cartesian-Serresian constellation and the problematization of the demise of the scholastic project will thus serve to (v)indicate what the school is for, that is, its end qua raison d’être as opposed to its end qua termination. Indeed, while bringing to a close the most obsolete forms of modern schooling can represent a promising horizon for educational theory and practice, it would be calamitous to let the movement of skholé from which the school originated come to a conclusion. 1
1. Education between instrumentality and autonomy and the therapy of writing
In one of his most important—and most neglected—works on education, John Dewey resolutely objected to “the belief that social conditions determine educational objectives” (Dewey, 1984: 38); he defined this as “a fallacy” and argued that “[e]ducation is autonomous and should be free to determine its own ends, its own objectives” (Dewey, 1984: 38).
Albeit not explicitly mentioned, his targets were the theoreticians of social efficiency, who assigned ultimately to sociological surveys—moreover understood in a fairly functionalistic way—the task of setting ends and values and to educators merely the mission of implementing them. In their view, education was thoroughly for social efficiency and they thus framed an argumentative pattern that, despite undeniable evolutions, still dominates the public discourse and characterizes “the current hegemonic onslaught of a narrowly conceived corporate–capitalist model of education—‘data-driven’ and measurement-obsessed” (Kennedy, 2017: 275).
Dewey was adamant in countering this view, which instrumentalized education by establishing “a fixed and final set of objectives” (Dewey, 1984: 38-39) prior to the educative process itself. Indeed, for him, “[t]o look to some outside source to provide aims is to fail to know what education is as an ongoing process. What a society is, it is, by and large, as a product of education, as far as its animating spirit and purpose are concerned. Hence it does not furnish a standard to which education is to conform” (Dewey, 1984: 38).
In this reading, the Deweyan stance could be situated within the third circle of instrumentality depicted in the introduction to this special issue rather than being interpreted, as is often the case, as a representative—however progressive—of an instrumental view of education. Dewey would, however, warn against an unqualified suspicion towards the vocabulary of ‘instrumentality’. In his view, the problem lies exclusively in a narrow-minded concept of instrumentalization—such as that of the theoreticians of social efficiency and of their contemporary descendants—that Dewey would deem to be ultimately metaphysical (despite the allegedly neutral and scientific garb in which it is presented). Indeed, for Dewey metaphysics is that stance which sharply separates means and ends, by making the latter the object of some higher-level knowledge and/or of a theory detached from practice and by derogating the former as lower and merely subsidiary, whereas he insisted on the means-ends continuum and highlighted “that ends are only means brought to full interaction and integration” (Dewey, 1984: 30).
Against this Deweyan backdrop, which, on the one hand, reclaims the autonomy and freedom of education—along the aforementioned lines—and, on the other, invites us not to recoil from the vocabulary of instrumentality but only to learn to inhabit it in a different way, I would like to situate the contemporary suggestion that the very affirmation of new technology is conducive to an epoch-making re-definition of what education is for.
On the assumption that “the history of education [is] the history of writing” Norm Friesen (2017: pos. 429) has persuasively drawn our attention to the need to “examine the stability and longevity of actual, persistent settings and methods, rather than hypothetical or desired ones that only might someday occur” (Friesen, 2017: pos. 217). While I would qualify the first statement and rather speak of the history of the school as co-extensive with the history of writing, 2 I am sympathetic with Friesen’s stance and his endeavor to take on a longue durée perspective to look at what has characterized the scholastic form. Accordingly, I would tend to argue that, whenever this deep-rooted aim of the school is either sidelined or frankly ruled out in the name of new digital competences required by the new societal scenarios, we risk “go[ing] outside the educational function and borrow[ing] objectives from an external source,” thus “surrender[ing] the educational cause,” to draw upon the Deweyan (1984: 38) vocabulary introduced earlier.
Two specifications are in order: first, I am not advocating a backward-looking view that invokes the rejection of new technology in educational settings. As the young Hegel annotated in his journal, we will not be better than our times but we can only be our times in the better way (see Rosenzweig, 1920: 103). Dreaming of educational settings uncontaminated by digital technology would be the reactionary evasion of our historical condition. On the other hand, turning the cultivation of digital competences into the very aim of the scholastic undertaking risks consigning us to what Bernard Stiegler has forcefully called the “mis-learning” (désapprentissage) and “proletarianization of minds” (Kambouchner et al., 2012: 52 ff.), in that minds are put at the service of technological devices and human subjects are turned into mere consumers of knowledge instead of being its producers.
In this sense, reclaiming the “traditional” educational function of promoting the acquisition of non-digital writing is here understood not as a misoneist gesture but rather as the attempt to appropriate a seemingly “conservative” idea in a progressive vein. It is, accordingly, the effort to find (or to recover) educational strategies in order “to be our times in the better way.”
Secondly, it could be plausibly objected that this line of argument is fairly un-Deweyan. I am ready to recognize that some of the best contemporary Deweyan scholarship has been engaged in showing how new technology could be integrated within a Deweyan understanding of education or, even, be instrumental in furthering the latter. Despite differences of accent, I do not consider, however, the position here advocated as completely at cross-purposes with this endeavor but as complementary to it.
In Democracy and Education the role of the school as a “special environment” is clearly stated in reference to writing: “Roughly speaking, [schools] come into existence when social traditions are so complex that a considerable part of the social store is committed to writing and transmitted through written symbols. Written symbols are even more artificial or conventional than spoken; they cannot be picked up in accidental intercourse with others” (Dewey, 1980: 23. Emphasis added). It is on this theme of written symbols that the present article focuses through a Deweyan-Stieglerian line of argument (see also Oliverio, 2015).
In reference to the Western birth of the school, which he situates in Plato’s Academy, Bernard Stiegler has insisted that the “scholastic project” emerges when writing started imposing itself as a new hypomnema, that is, a new “support” which organizes and makes memory transmissible and, thereby, opens up a new horizon of what sharing a tradition means. However, in his reading, from its very inception the school project has consisted not only in granting “an access to a knowledge of writing” but in creating a place for a “therapy of writing” (Kambouchner et al., 2012: 20); by the latter phrase Stiegler refers to the need to deploy writing as an opportunity for the rational enablement of subjects, preventing it from turning, instead, into an instrument of regression, and it is along these lines that he interprets Plato’s fight against the Sophists.
In the epoch of new hypomnemata (as those represented by new technologies) this “therapeutic mission” re-affirms itself as all the more urgent, unless we want to capitulate to the regressive identifications to which “industrial populism,” “telecracy” and the related instinct-oriented politics (Stiegler, 2008) risk condemning us. Accordingly, it is not by chance that the school, as the institution of the therapy of writing, is the place under attack on the part of the agencies which want to further regressive identifications. In this perspective, answering the question of the “what and what for” of schooling amounts to re-attaining the sense of the school as the domain for “alphabetization” and “grammatization” and, contextually, a therapy of writing. 3
I would suggest construing this position through the lens of the aforementioned appeal of Dewey to preserve education from the distorting sway of alien (and, often, inimical) discourse and practice. Although the target is ultimately the way in which what Stiegler (2006) calls “cognitive capitalism” and “industrial populism” 4 jeopardize the scholastic project (see also Kambouchner et al., 2012), the argumentation that I am going to develop in the rest of this article will unfold in an indirect way and will take its cue from positions emerging within educational progressivism that see the affirmation of new technologies as the opportunity to disengage education from schooling. While it would be unfair to lump together the neo-liberal attack on the school as obsolete and the progressive renewed critique of traditional schooling, they end up paradoxically converging on the claim that the school as a privileged form of pedagogical life should be overcome by embracing the possibilities granted by new technology. Does the evident crisis of modern schooling imply also the very dismantling of the scholastic project, as here sketched in reference to Stiegler and Friesen? Is the school as skholé (Masschelein and Simons, 2012), an “archetype” of a specific form of intergenerational gathering (Kennedy, 2017) and a special environment destined to the cultivation of (a therapy of) writing merely “shining with a glow similar to that of constellations which astronomers tell us are long since dead,” to adopt a marvelous image of Michel Serres (2012: 24)?
2. The “beheaded” cogito and the end of the school
To answer these questions, I will take my cue precisely from some tenets of Serres which will allow us to take a step forward, insofar as he seems to assume a radical stance, not confining himself to announcing the end of modern schooling but attacking the very root of the scholastic project.
His starting point is that “[a]s pedagogy was invented by the Greeks (paideia) at the moment of the invention and propagation of writing; as it got transformed when printing emerged, during the Renaissance, so pedagogy changes completely with new technologies” (Serres, 2012: 22). I am not interested in his—relatively obvious—remark about the impact that writing and printing have had in shaping our civilization but in the way in which he phrases this by now commonplace truth, namely by emphasizing the pivotal role of the space of the page: “[T]he page dominates and leads us. And the screen reproduces it. […] Here is the space unit of perception, action, thinking, project, here is the multi-millennial format” (Serres, 2012: 33–34). As long as we remain attached to the “transhistorical format of the page” (Serres, 2012: 34) we remain in the culture inaugurated by writing and consolidated by printing that has marked the organization of spaces, relations and knowledge typical of Western educational settings, which in turn have set the model of many other institutions (Serres, 2012: 41).
However, Serres sees the contemporary youth as the avant-garde of the liberation from this all-encompassing format and, by marshalling the legend of Saint Denis 5 and establishing an astounding simile, Serres portrays the new generations as “beheaded,” in that they have displaced knowledge into their devices, maintaining in the place of the head the void where their “inventive intelligence” and “authentic cognitive subjectivity” (Serres, 2012: 31) will flourish, unburdened by a cultural heritage, happily downloaded elsewhere, outside of them: “Cogito: my thinking distinguishes itself from the process of knowledge—memory, imagination, deductive reason, finesse and geometry externalized […] into the lap-top. Better: I think, I invent if I take a distance from this knowledge and this learning, if I depart from them. I convert myself to this void, to this impalpable air, to this soul, a word which translates this wind” (Serres, 2012: 36).
Thus, Serres implicitly refers to Descartes and seems to update his gesture: thanks to new technologies we will finally find out that the cogito is not in any sense whatever a “res,” but only a void, “an immaterial absence, a transparent light […] [a] nothing” (Serres, 2012: 36), and precisely for this reason it represents the potentiality of “inventive intelligence” that is “measure[d] according to its distance from knowledge” (Serres, 2012: 37).
In the remaining part of this section, I want to dwell upon this Cartesian-Serresian constellation, which criticizes the scholastic project and, therefore, is opposed to the Deweyan-Stieglerian view outlined in section 1. In particular, I will address a theme (mostly left unexplored by the scholarship, to my knowledge) which runs through Descartes’s reflection and, indeed, is propaedeutic to the path leading up to the cogito. Indeed, the I-as-cogito is a de-schooled subject, not in the sense that it has never gone to school but in that it must actively remove the debris that the school culture has left in it, in order for it to establish itself as the domain of the pure evidence on which the very project of an absolutely certain knowledge relies. In the Discourse on Method this stance is stated in an autobiographical confession: From my childhood they fed me books [lettres in the original French. S.O.], and because people convinced me that these could give me clear and certain knowledge of everything useful in life, I was extremely eager to learn them. But no sooner had I completed the whole course of study that normally takes one straight into the ranks of the ‘learned’ than I completely changed my mind about what this education could do for me. For I found myself tangled in so many doubts and errors that I came to think that my attempts to become educated had done me no good except to give me a steadily widening view of my ignorance. (Descartes, 1908a: 4)
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That is why, as soon as I was old enough to emerge from the control of my teachers, I entirely abandoned scholarship [l’étude des lettres, the “study of letters” in the original French S.O.]. Resolving to seek no knowledge except what I could find in myself or read in the great book of the world, I spent the rest of my youth travelling […] (Descartes, 1908a: 9. Emphasis added)
This section of the Discourse may be read as a polemics against the typical curriculum of the 17th century European school and in favor of a curriculum directed to the kind of knowledge inaugurated by modern science. However, I would rather draw attention to the French phrasing: the school is the domain of the study of letters. There is a first and most obvious level of interpretation, according to which “letters” stands here for “literary culture,” but I would like to insinuate that Descartes stumbles upon the very “function” of the school and eschews it: the school is that space-time in which one is introduced into the realm of written symbols through a study which is itself a process of “formation” of “grammatized bodies,” as Stiegler would put it: “The schooling of bodies is not merely about staying seated for one or two hours, it is about staying seated and tracing [signs] (graphein, which is the origin of the word gramma, the letter): it is about leaving traces behind, and thereby applying oneself” (Stiegler, 2008: 174–175). By elaborating on these ideas of Stiegler, Joris Vlieghe (2016: 450–451) has insightfully argued that the “formalistic” character of the school exercise of tracing letters (and not merely typing them on a tablet, for example) is instrumental in promoting a productive and not merely consumerist stance in reference to knowledge.
It is this really essential function of the school that Descartes omits to take into consideration in its fundamental role also in the process of the “self-formation” that he wants to develop (see below, section 3) and he seems to underrate the study of letters by depicting it as something to be abandoned in order to pursue real knowledge.
This train of argument leads us to the second aspect of the Cartesian view, as I have been reconstructing it qua the anticipation of some contemporary educational motifs: the school ceases to be skholé and is construed as at most a pre-emptive and precautionary institution. In a revealing page of the Rules for the direction of the mind, Descartes (1908c: 364) presents scholastic training essentially as a containment strategy that may allow the youth to avoid the pitfalls of fatal errors, when they are still unable to pursue the way of truth. The school is not the agency that lays the basis for further epistemic endeavors but merely prevents the youth from lapsing into some abyss and, at best, can operate as a kind of stimulus that keeps the spirit alert but in no way equips young people with what can be serviceable for real knowledge (Descartes, 1908c: 363–364).
Secondly, it is noteworthy that this disparaging of the school goes hand in hand with the denial of its character as skholé. In the page of the Rules to which I am referring, Descartes invokes a “maxim which forbids us to abuse our leisure [otio]” (Descartes, 1908c: 364): he adopts the Latin word otium (corresponding to the Greek skholé), that is, a free time to dedicate to study, and it is clear that otium may occur only after leaving the school not within it, where we are subjected to our masters. This stance appears also at the very beginning of Descartes’s Meditations where otium—necessary for the work of the reconstruction of knowledge—is indicated as something to be obtained by withdrawing from human intercourse and seeking solitude (Descartes, 1908b: 18). In short, in contrast with any etymology, for Descartes otium, skholé, is not a matter for the school. Accordingly, not only is the cogito a de-schooled subject but it needs to be so because the school is thought of as an un-schooled school, a school deprived of its “essence” (= skholé) and reduced to a domain of control for literally pre-mature individuals.
It is against this backdrop that I suggest reading Serres’ (2012: 36) reference to the “immaterial absence [and] transparent light” that the (beheaded) youth experience, once they take a distance from knowledge, downloaded into the technical devices, and operate in the “impalpable air” (Serres, 2012: 36) of their “inventive intelligence” (Serres, 2012: 31). This is, in the interpretation here proposed, a radicalization of the Cartesian move, consisting in the abandonment of any school training and in the undertaking of a search for true knowledge through a process of “self-formation” (culminating in the cogito), which is a process of disengaging from any bodily experience including what Stiegler nicely calls “the schooling of bodies.”
While in Descartes the school still maintains a mission, if only to control the prematurity of the youth, Serres takes a step further: not only is the compulsory school (in whatever acceptation—whether the usual or the “Cartesian”) to be consigned to a past light years away, but the very scholastic project loses any sense and dissolves in the air (to stick to Serres’ metaphorical field). Despite Serres’ best intentions, a stance such as his risks being accomplice with those tendencies that, while pretending to liberate education from the shackles of schooling, subjugate the former to alien values and aims by writing off the latter.
I am not insinuating that education exists only in the school but that we should preserve what David Kennedy (2017: 278) has called “the movement of skholé.” Far from being a factor of conformation, the latter is revolutionary in that it operates “the interruption and disruption of cultural epistemologies and forms of life in the interest of an allegedly better future” (Kennedy, 2017: 278, fn. 14). And, in the Stieglerian view introduced above, the school realizes this precisely as the institution of the “study of letters” and as the domain where a therapy of writing takes place. 10 This is what education as skholé is (for).
3. The cogito and its “calamity”
The argument thus far developed can be captured in a formula: the school is education for “calamity”, by construing the word “calamity” in a specific and idiosyncratic sense that is poles apart from any “disastrous” acceptation. I take this word from Jean-Luc Nancy, whose reflections on Descartes will allow us to deconstruct the Cartesian (and, derivatively, Serresian) view illustrated above and to show how the question of writing is literally inscribed in and propaedeutic to the process of “self-formation” culminating in the cogito. I will only pinpoint some aspects of Nancy’s elaborate argumentation, which I will inflect (and often twist) towards the interests of the present reflection.
Nancy’s starting point is the following passage of Descartes’s Rules: While I am writing, I understand that at the very moment when individual letters are traced on the paper one after the other [singuli characteres], it is not only the lower part of the pen that is moving, but that there cannot be even the slightest movement in that lower part that is not simultaneously taking place in the whole pen [in toto calamo]. (Descartes, 1908c: 414)
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the paper of which does not close up on itself in the process of involution as it is the case with the volume, but offers the plane of its surface always ready in advance for writing as for reading. Its leaves are turned one after the other and can be numbered, making reading and writing easier in all respects […] The codex consists of sheets of wood joined at the back, and hence bound and articulated one upon the other. It is a writing machine suited for connecting all the monstrative and demonstrative principles of knowledge in the clearest, simplest, and most rigorous way. (Nancy, 2016: 21)
The same deconstructive movement is at work as far as the very act of writing is concerned. Commenting on the aforementioned passage from the Rules Nancy notes: It is not what I write that I understand while I am writing, but I understand, or rather I gather that I am writing. I collect myself in writing. Cogito, sum, as it will be written later; here I am writing, scribo, intelligo. […] I collect my writing: the movement of my pen. This movement takes place on occasion of the tracing of letters according to their outline. This tracing is successive and discrete, singuli, one by one the characters are inscribed. Even though I am writing by hand, with a joined-up script of the type that is normally called cursive, it is not the flow that interests me. It is the instant when a character singles itself out: My model is a typographical one, like that of a printer—I am a writing machine, typewriter. (Nancy, 2016: 23)
Moreover, not only does the movement of which Descartes speaks concern the whole pen but he specifies that “all these various movements are traced out in the air by the tip of the pen, even though I do not conceive of anything real passing from one end to the other. Who then would think that the connection between the parts of the human body is less close than between the parts of the pen?” (Descartes, 1908c: 414). By putting this portrait of the body as a pen in the spotlight, Nancy remarks: The human body, in its exteriors and its interior, in its multiplicity and its unity, holds itself like a pen, and no doubt more than a pen—formidable calamus […] Not only do I collect the gesture of my writing, not only do I see myself writing, not only do I take the figure of a writer, but I fantasize my whole body as a pen: my body—manipulated by myself, between my fingers, dactylographied body—moves with the same movement as the characters. (Nancy, 2016: 31–32)
Following his line of argumentation Nancy notes that, as in the Latin passage of Descartes the word for pen is calamus, what is at stake in this Cartesian text is the I as calamus and, therefore, the nature of calamus, the calamity. In the reading here proposed, the example of the writing I, of the movement of the pen and of the body turned into a pen, discloses a truth that the Cartesian-Serresian move tends to conceal or even to repress: the process of “self-formation” resulting in the cogito is predicated upon the “calamity” of the I, upon an I that in-habits the domain of written symbols by incorporating in structured bodily habits the gestures of writing, of making letters, which one acquires in that time for study that the school qua skholé is (and without the latter the otium that Descartes pursues in order to start his research would have no sense, in every meaning of this word).
Descartes does not take this road and a few lines later in the same text gives his example a different spin, by highlighting that “the pen as a whole does not move in exactly the same way as its lower end; on the contrary, the upper part of the pen seems to have a quite different and opposite movement [plane diverso et contrario motu]” (Descartes, 1908c: 415. Emphasis added). Without following Descartes’s argument (referred to the faculty of “phantasy”) or Nancy’s ingenious reading in detail, I will gerrymander some of the latter’s conclusions and twist them towards a Stieglerian horizon: the reference to a different and opposite movement marks the place of “the transfiguration of bodies. There, figures instantly become ideas, they are pure and without bodies” (Nancy, 2016: 33). The transfiguration of bodies is the opposite of the Stieglerian “schooling of bodies” in that it aims at switching to a domain in which mind and body are sharply distinguished and, ultimately, to “the aerial place where no letter is traced, by means of a movement reverse to that of the characters on the narrow paper” (Nancy, 2016: 35). Within the horizon of this transfiguration, the theme of calamity takes on a radically different accent: the “calamus” is “a hollow structure” (Nancy, 2016: 37), where the “body has been spirited away” (Nancy, 2016: 34), thus anticipating the emergence of the cogito as a pure “res cogitans,” whereas within a Stieglerian view of the schooling of bodies by “calamity” we mean a set of structured embodied dispositions developed through the practice of writing.
Through the idiosyncratic and admittedly “gerrymandered” appropriation of the analyses of Nancy and their inflection towards the main thrust of the present reflection, we can come to recognize, therefore, that the Cartesian-Serresian cogito, which would aspire to take leave of the school experience as an encumbering ballast, cannot operate without a cultivation of the abilities of handwriting on a page, which is the very kernel of the school in the Deweyan-Stieglerian view outlined in section 1. The cogito as the inventive intelligence of which Serres speaks and which, according to him, could (and should) ultimately download any knowledge into the lap-top in order to deploy its full power of creativity, cannot perform its inventiveness if not against the backdrop of a “calamitous body” which it is essentially the mission of the school to give rise to. Granted that furthering an authentic cognitive subjectivity (to adopt Serres’ phrase) is the (new) end suitable for the contemporary “beheaded” youth growing up in unprecedented technological constellations, it seems that this will not be achieved by bringing to an end that schooling of bodies, consisting in tracing signs, viz. in developing “calamity” and putting it to work, which takes place in the school as skholé.
In conclusion, I would like to reply to two plausible objections which may be raised against the view here elaborated: indeed, one can counter that reading the movement of skholé in terms of education for “calamity” is, on the one hand, a highly “instrumentalist” view of education and, on the other, a dramatically limited understanding, at best adequate for the first levels of schooling.
As to the first critique, it stems from precisely that stance which Dewey invites us to abandon and which separates means and ends, whereas these both should be seen as a continuum and, indeed, ends are, as aforementioned, “only means brought to full interaction and integration” (Dewey, 1984: 30). In this perspective, the embodiment of a particular set of dispositions is not merely the preparation for a future flourishing of the cogito in its cognitive power, which would leave behind that work of incorporation and inaugurate a completely new domain: the latter, not understood as separate, is to be read as an emergent “quality” occurring thanks to the realized interpenetration and integration of what only for explanatory reasons we can construe as mere means (the process of “alphabetization” and “grammatization”). Moreover, while the aforementioned emphasis on the “formalistic” character of the school exercise of tracing letters may appear at variance with the lifelong fight of Dewey against any formalism in the school, I would suggest that we should not conflate his criticism of the theory of “formal discipline” (Dewey, 1980: 65 ff.) with a rejection of the Stieglerian stress upon the schooling of bodies and, instead, we should read the latter into (and as an articulation of) the structural couplement that Dewey establishes between the school as a special environment and the access to writing. 12
Concerning the second critique, it is to note that in a Stieglerian view “the scholastic project […] is something that has to do with the transmission of the rational, of an experience of the reason” (Kambouchner et al. 2012: 20) and this experience is intimately connected with an access to and a therapy of writing, so that all the school disciplines should be considered in some way as forms of (access to and therapy of) writing. In this perspective, the reflection here developed on education for “calamity,” in response to the Cartesian-Serresian challenge, should not be construed as referred only to the first grades of schooling but as an entry point for a reflection upon the very scholastic project as a whole.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the three anonymous reviewers who, with their insightful comments and valuable suggestions, have helped me to better develop my argument.
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.
