When the Light Goes Out: Ignorance and Multiplicity in Teaching and Learning

Abstract

Purpose

If education is the movement from dark to light, what does it mean for the light to go out? Following this question, this paper examines how conceptions of ignorance inform and are embedded in ideas of learning and pedagogy.

Design/Approach/Methods

Through historical and contemporary examples, I ask how an understanding of ignorance as absence frames some forms of teaching and learning, how ignorance might be understood differently, and how a different formulation of ignorance creates possibilities for imagining teaching and learning otherwise.

Findings

The framing of ignorance as absence articulates a distance between knowing and not knowing that defines what I call explicatory spacetime. This arrangement positions ignorance as a social problem and schooling as a solution aimed at closing the gap. I point to ways this framing persists today in research and practices that posit the acquisition of positive knowledge and the eradication of negative ignorance as a foremost educational responsibility.

Originality/Value

Engaging work across science and technology studies, psychoanalysis, and the philosophy of education, I argue that alternative conceptions of ignorance often maintain associations with absence. Building from this scholarship, I ask how reframing ignorance through multiplicity, that is, within a field of possibility out of which a thing called knowledge can cohere, offers a different framework and pedagogical arrangements. Finally, I explore how reframing ignorance in a spacetime of multiplicity opens possibilities for understanding and enacting pedagogical encounters.

Introduction

I sawe well that knowledge recedeth as farre from ignorance as light doth from darkenesse, and that the wise mans eyes keepe watch in his head, whereas the foole roundeth about in darkenesse. (Bacon, 1605, f. 5 [B2])

Education is the movement from darkness to light. ¹ (Bloom, 1987, p. 265)

For centuries, writers have described education as an interplay between light and dark. This imagery transcends the classroom and pervades daily turns of phrase. To be ‘enlightened’ is to understand; ‘lightbulbs’ denote revelations; perception changes ‘in light of’ new evidence; and to ‘illuminate’ or ‘shed light’ on a topic is to reveal something that aids in comprehension. In each case, light affords sight, and, as the phrases suggest, to see is to know. Conversely, to be ‘in the dark’—whether one is left or kept there, shooting or groping around in it—to be ‘in the dark’ is not to see and not to know. And so, it follows that people whose sight extends far beyond others are labeled ‘bright’ or ‘brilliant’ while those who see less are called ‘dim.’

These colloquial expressions of light and dark provide more than concrete imagery to describe abstract ideas. They also convey a particular framework of knowledge. Idioms like ‘shedding light’ invoke an absence against which the presence of knowledge takes shape. This absence is commonly, and often philosophically, referred to as ignorance. When learning and education are defined in relation to knowledge—its acquisition or transmission, say—and when knowledge is framed as a presence against an absence called ignorance, then ignorance is a defining element in learning and education. In such a framework, where education is a movement from dark to light, from ignorance to knowledge, what does it mean for the light to go out?

This paper approaches the question by examining how conceptions of ignorance inform and are embedded in ideas of learning and pedagogy. Proceeding in four parts, I ask how an understanding of ignorance as absence frames some forms of teaching and learning, how ignorance might be understood differently, and how a different formulation of ignorance opens possibilities for imagining teaching and learning otherwise.

In the first section, I explore historical examples of light/dark imagery in relation to different notions of knowledge and ignorance. Specifically, I trace distinctions between a European scholastic framework of ignorance as the darkness of human limitation and an Enlightenment framework of ignorance as the dark side or absence of knowledge. In the second section, I argue that ignorance as absence articulates a distance between knowing and not knowing that defines what I call explicatory spacetime. This arrangement positions ignorance as a social problem and schooling as a solution aimed at closing the gap of not knowing. Moreover, I point to ways this framing persists today in practices and research that posit the acquisition of positive knowledge and the eradication of negative ignorance as a foremost educational responsibility.

I then attend to important examples, such as epistemologies of ignorance and positive ignorance, that challenge this logic by rethinking ignorance as active and productive in its own right. However, I argue that these alternative frameworks maintain associations with absence. Building from this scholarship, I ask how reframing ignorance through multiplicity, that is, within a field of possibility out of which a thing called knowledge can cohere, offers a different framework and pedagogical arrangement. Finally, I explore how reframing ignorance in a spacetime of multiplicity creates possibilities for understanding and enacting pedagogical encounters.

Historical frameworks: Knowledge/ignorance as light/dark

An entire volume could be devoted to light/dark imagery in the history of philosophy. ² One might begin as Parmenides is escorted by the “daughters of the Sun […] after leaving the house of Night for the light” (Curd & McKirahan, 1996, p. 44, lines 5–10) and arrive, by way of Plato's cave, ³ at Aristotle's Metaphysics, where Truth is as difficult to behold as daylight is to eyes accustomed to the dark. ⁴ One might discuss the Biblical counterpoint of light and dark or trace Augustine's theory of divine illumination as it was debated in medieval monasteries and universities (e.g., Noone, 2009; Schumacher, 2011). Alternatively, one might document the origins, rise, and spread of illuminationism across the Arabic and Persian worlds before traveling to Europe (e.g., Ziai, 1996). In Chinese philosophy, one could follow centuries of thought around the notions of yin and yang and the alternating interplay between perceived opposites (e.g., Tiwald & Van Norden, 2014).

Indeed, such light/dark imagery is so widespread, both historically and colloquially, that some scholars refer to it as “archetypal” and claim that it derives from fundamental human experiences, such as night and day, which structure thinking itself (Osborn, 2009). The images conjured by these turns of phrase give form to the thinking they express and offer access to the frameworks that organize thought. ⁵ In this sense, one can investigate the imagery for the logic it expresses and upon which its coherence relies (e.g., Blumenberg, 1957/2020; Houser, 1990). Regardless of interpretation, the prevalence of these images in the history of philosophy and epistemology cannot be denied. However, while light/dark imageries have persisted, the logics they express has changed, and by comparing different frameworks, one can better make sense of the epistemic foundations underlying thinking today.

Divine light/human dark

Written near the end of the European scholastic tradition, Nicolas de Cusa's 1440 treatise, De docta ignorantia, articulates an epistemology that starkly contrasts with frameworks of absence that follow in subsequent centuries. In this sense, de Cusa's text stands as a comparison against which the workings of a presence/absence logic become apparent. Moreover, to the extent that this comparison is situated within a Christian and European context, it invites possibilities for thinking otherwise without completely shifting cultural foundations.

In De docta ignorantia, human knowledge is innately and insurmountably limited. “It so far surpasses human reason,” de Cusa writes, “to know the precision of the combinations in material things […] in the presence of such difficulty we may be compared to owls trying to look at the sun” (1440/1954, p. 8). ⁶ Just as Aristotle's nocturnal creatures cannot see in daylight, human nature is incapable of fully beholding the vastness of the universe. For de Cusa, the physical universe approaches, but never actually equals, the infinity that is the divine. And so, if the vast permutations of existence cannot be understood, then God, being ever greater, “is as incomprehensible to creatures as infinite light is to darkness” (de Cusa, 1440/1954, p. 61).

It is this relation to the ineffable that defines innate incapacity as ignorance. However, de Cusa's thinking is not based on an oppositional divide between divine presence and human absence: “He who is worshipped as Light Inaccessible, is not light that is material, the opposite of which is darkness, but light absolutely simple and infinite in which darkness is infinite light; that He who is infinite light itself shines always in the darkness of our ignorance, but the darkness cannot comprehend the Light” (1440/1954, p. 59). Since divine light suffuses all, it also shines through the darkness of human ignorance, and so an interaction with the divine and the absolute knowledge it encompasses begins with the recognition of one's mortal limitations. Awareness of these limits, and reminiscent of Socrates, is what de Cusa refers to as docta ignorantia, or learned ignorance.

In de Cusa's epistemics, the distance between human capacity and divine understanding is so wide and uncrossable as to exemplify what Sylvia Wynter calls a general “epistemological resignation” (1992, p. 26). Since the European scholastic world and the rules that governed it were seen as divine creation, Wynter argues, people had as much access to these rules as they had direct access to the sun. In this sense, the ignorance conveyed by de Cusa was part of a wider boundedness that extended beyond epistemology to entangle the physical and social fabric of the world. In this context, knowledge-making practices and the educational structures that perpetuated them focused more on received and authoritative wisdom than, say, what one today might think of as ‘discovery,’ let alone ‘research and development.’ However, throughout the succeeding centuries, epistemologies began to shift (often slowly and unevenly), as did the light/dark imagery that expressed them. ⁷

Full light/empty dark

This dread and darkness of the mind therefore need not the rays of the sun, the bright darts of day; only knowledge of nature's forms dispels them. (Gay, 1966, p. 101)

The motif of light dispelling darkness, which repeats throughout Lucretius’ De rerum natura, was taken up and employed across Western Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Indeed, this motif pervades the name invoked by authors and is attributed to this period: The Enlightenment. While it may be tempting to read Lucretius as a response to scholastic logics like that of de Cusa, Lucretius wrote more than a millennium prior. However, this did not stop so-called Enlightenment thinkers (e.g., Pope, Diderot, Voltaire, to name a few) from reading and employing his imagery as the triumph of reason over superstitious thinking. ⁸ As such, Lucretius provides an oft-used example of this epistemological shift and its expression.

For Lucretius, darkness does not convey human limitation but rather a lack of familiarity with natural forms and phenomena. Importantly, this darkness is not an inherent and insurmountable condition in relation to the ineffable. Instead, it can be actively dispelled not by the divine as represented by the sun but by a different kind of light, one emanating from an understanding of nature. In this formulation, darkness is dispelled by increasing knowledge.

If you take a little trouble, you will attain to a thorough understanding of these truths. For one thing will be illumined by another, and eyeless night will not rob you of your road till you have looked into the heart of nature's darkest mysteries. ⁹ So surely will facts throw light upon facts. (Lucretius, 1st century BCE/1951, Book I, lines 1114–1117)

In this excerpt, darkness does not immediately dissipate. Instead, understanding is conceptualized as a progressive movement from dark to light through facts that illumine one another. As more light causes less darkness, this development frames an increase in positive knowledge as a diminishment of its absence. It is this notion of absence and its expression as darkness that some seventeenth-century thinkers explicitly formalize as ignorance.

John Locke, in his 1689 Essay concerning human understanding, systematically lays out a progressive epistemic movement from dark to light. Arguing against innate faculties as the source of knowledge, Locke sets out to demonstrate that sensory experience and reflection form the substrate upon which understanding is built. “[E]xternal and internal sensation […] are the windows by which light is let into this dark room. For, methinks, the understanding is not much unlike a closet wholly shut from light, with only some little openings left, to let in external visible resemblances, or ideas of things without” (1996, p. 65, II.11.17, original emphasis). For Locke, understanding is a space that can be, to various degrees, dark or illuminated, empty or full, through the accumulation of sensations and ideas, which combine to structure more complex knowledge. Unlike de Cusa's imagery, the light that slips into Locke's closet is material. Without the luminous ideas built from sensory experience, the room—and understanding—remains in the dark. In other words, darkness as a lack of light expresses an absence of experience and, therefore, an absence of understanding.

Importantly, Locke formulates this absence in specific terms: namely, ignorance. “Our knowledge being so narrow, as I have showed, it will, perhaps, give us some light into the present state of our minds, if we look a little into the dark side, and take a view of our ignorance” (1996, p. 245, IV.3.22). For Locke, ignorance has three causes: lack of ideas, lack of connections between ideas, or lack of reflection on ideas. In each case, ignorance is defined by lack, and because, for Locke, connections between ideas constitute knowledge, ignorance is conceived as the absence or dark side of knowledge.

Ignorance as absence: Social problem and educational solution

Locke's notions of knowledge and ignorance employ a conception of mind as tabula rasa onto which sensory experiences can be inscribed: “let us suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas” (1996, p. 33, II.1.1). The blankness of this nascent state is defined by an absence of experience and, therefore, an absence of knowledge. In Locke's formulation, human existence begins in ignorance. Robert Proctor, in his work on the manufacture and production of ignorance, calls this “native ignorance” because it refers to an “infantile absence” (2008, p. 5). ¹⁰

A conception of the mind as a blank slate inscribed upon by experience carries connotations for notions of childhood. Miriam Ticktin (2017) argues that the category of ‘child’ has been and continues to be defined by such blankness or infantile absence. However, ignorance is not the only word used to index such a lack and may even seem inappropriate when applied to a child. ‘Ignorant,’ ‘naïve,’ and ‘innocent’ all describe a similar absence, although the judgments associated with each diminish as expectations of experience or knowledge decrease. Ticktin notes an historical shift from conceptions of the child as inherently sinful to a blank slate onto which the norms of society can be inscribed (2017, p. 579). Following a logic of original sin, children were for centuries understood as imperfect inheritors of evil in need of correction. ¹¹ In the eighteenth century, original sin was replaced by original absence. Following a logic of infantile absence, the child was increasingly understood as naturally inexperienced and, therefore, in need of teaching.

The opposition between absence and presence, articulated through expressions of darkness and light, invokes a distance between a state of ignorance and a state of knowing. When a society relies on social norms and conventions, and when knowledge of them is naturally absent from children, the distance between ignorance and knowledge is both an individual and social problem. The formulation of ignorance as a problem simultaneously introduces a solution: “to principle children well, […] instill into the unwary, and, as yet, unprejudiced understanding, (for white paper receives any characters) those doctrines they would have them retain and profess” (Locke & Winkler, 1996, p. 22, I.3.22). To develop ignorant youths into adults capable of participating in and contributing to society, children's original absence can (or perhaps should) be filled with proper experiences and, through proper experiences, proper knowledge. The problem of ignorance, then, can be solved through proper education.

Locke's idea of the mind as tabula rasa was by no means unequivocally accepted. However, his sensualist philosophy, which posited all knowledge as derivative of sensory experience, and the presence/absence framing upon which it relied, was adopted and expanded across Western Europe and the U.S. In eighteenth-century France, for example, sensualist ideas were conceived to explain, in addition to knowledge, the roots of morality and social cohesion (Riskin, 2002). The connection between sensible experience and morals was integral in the organization of schools for the blind as well as treatments for those afflicted with so-called “idiocy” (e.g., Itard, 1802). ¹² In nineteenth-century England, its colonies, and the U.S., sensualism grounded widespread curricular innovations such as object lessons that aimed to impart scientific and moral knowledge through interaction with physical materials (Carter, 2018). In these cases, the social stakes stand in stark relief, for the functioning of the body politic depends on its citizens accumulating the proper experiences that fill them with the proper ideas and behaviors.

Explicatory spacetime

More fundamental than any system of schooling, Jacques Rancière (2016) argues that pedagogy itself is defined by a spatiotemporal distance between the ignorance of students and the knowledge of teachers. This relationship between epistemically empty students and full teachers takes its most concentrated form in explication, where one who knows attempts to fill the lack of another through explanation. We might call such a configuration explicatory spacetime and locate its major axis between the poles of knowing and not knowing.

The topography of explicatory spacetime presupposes a distance between the absence and presence of knowledge and thus makes possible measurements to describe the distance. One such measurement is the academic mark or grade. Hoskin and Macve (1986) demonstrate how the mark was a new technology to eighteenth-century schooling and derived from accounting practices, such as bookkeeping. While examinations date at least as far back as twelfth-century universities, the quantified mark was an evaluative and disciplinary novelty that unified previously distinct systems. In prior systems, rewards were given for some actions and punishment for others, but the mark consolidates merit and demerit into a single standardized and hierarchical range (Hoskin & Macve, 1986, pp. 125–129). As students accrue proper experiences in the proper order, marks serve to measure and demarcate those whose knowledge accumulates in sufficient quantities.

The mark thus normalizes measured quantities of knowledge against which individual actions and actors are evaluated and compared (Foucault, 1995). These comparisons establish the limits of a standardized or expected knowledge base and, therefore, define measurements that fall outside that range as abnormal. By simultaneously measuring the presence and absence of knowledge, academic marks establish thresholds that position persistent ignorance as out-of-the-ordinary or ‘behind the curve.’ Thus, while framed to fill ignorance and alleviate its existence as a social ill, graduated curricula and evaluative measures reinscribe ignorance as a problem (e.g., inhibiting social cohesion or, more recently, international competitiveness) and justify the premise for their very existence.

In this sense, interventions focused on closing gaps are articulated using the same logic that makes the gaps legible in the first place: presence and absence. Recent constructs, such as content knowledge, subject knowledge, prior knowledge, and knowledge items, all index the persistence or filling up of absence and define its disappearance as growth or achievement. While Locke's tabula rasa may read today as an historical anachronism, its conception of light as knowledge and darkness as ignorance still frames much research that seeks to describe, inform, and improve educational projects. The resulting interventions, recommendations, and policy decisions may then reinscribe the presence/absence logic of explicatory spacetime in classroom practices and frameworks designed to account for student success. The visions of educational research, teaching, and learning remain, in many cases, haunted by the afterglow of an Enlightenment project built upon a conception of ignorance as an absence. Moreover, its underlying logic still shines through the daily turns of phrase connecting light with knowledge and darkness with ignorance.

Alternative frameworks: A plurality of ignorances

In a framework where light denotes the presence of knowledge and darkness denotes its absence, the pedagogical journey presents a progressive and linear movement away from ignorance. Recent scholarship across disciplines like science and technology studies, psychoanalysis, and the philosophy of education has challenged the notion of ignorance as passively derivative and oppositional to knowledge. However, even as thinkers depart from these logics in important ways, ignorance often remains tethered to an idea of absence or lack.

Arguing against a single rationality, feminist science scholars (e.g., Haraway, 1988; Harding, 1992) have pointed to the importance of affirming a plurality of knowledges in which myriad embodied and partial perspectives offer a more realistic understanding of the world. Versions of this position have been echoed by philosophers theorizing the success of scientific communities (e.g., Longino, 2002), scholars of education advocating alternative epistemologies (e.g., Bang & Medin, 2010), and policymakers calling for global educational change (e.g., UNESCO, 2022). In line with this thinking, others have pointed out that multiple knowledges also necessitate the need to theorize multiple ignorances (de Sousa Santos, 2009, p. 116; Sedgwick, 1990, p. 8). While these projects have been crucial in upending an idea of knowledge as a privileged space from which to label outsiders as ignorant (and therefore infantile, if not deviant), this plurality of ignorances still maintains a presence/absence framework, albeit de-centered and epistemologically situated.

Plurality also invites conceptions of ignorance as corresponding to, or even produced by, particular knowledges and their circulation. This work calls important attention to what gets defined or maintained as known or unknown and who enacts the defining. In analyzing the social roles and power relations that produce ignorance, Nancy Tuana (2004) and Robert Proctor (1996) have challenged the passive characterization of unknowing. Thinking across cases like female orgasms and the tobacco industry, they invoke epistemologies of ignorance to describe the complex social and political practices involved in the active manufacture of widespread not knowing. While complicating the notion of ignorance as natural or passive, epistemologies of ignorance preserve a logic of absence, however purposefully constructed.

Ignorance has also been theorized as actively involved in the process of scientific investigation, where the unknown drives discovery, which creates more unknown, and so on (Firestein, 2012). Reminiscent of Pascal's ever-expanding circumference, absence persists, although it now leads and refuses to be filled. Tangential to the role of the unknown is the role of the unknowable. Scholars have traced the history of considering that which cannot be articulated or even apprehended (e.g., Franke, 2015), which often complicates the straightforward opposition between presence and absence. Nicolas de Cusa provides a familiar example, in which absence is conceived as brimming with divine presence. Though even when the presence/absence binary is challenged, lack is still experienced as an inability to grasp. Finally, psychoanalytic frameworks distinguish between conscious and unconscious knowing. In this vein, scholars have theorized ignorance as an active imperative to not remember, a performative “desire to ignore” (Felman, 1982, pp. 29–31), and a “defensive refusal to know” (Logue, 2019, p. 106). In these cases, absence manifests as willful negation in a space between awareness and unawareness.

The important work represented by even these few examples disrupts the derivative relationship of ignorance to knowledge by positing ignorance as productive in its own right. A strong version of this disruption draws on Barbara Johnson's (1982) idea of positive ignorance to argue that received knowledge should be questioned to discern and resist the prejudices that come along with it (Bojesen, 2019). In this sense, ignorance is normatively pursued as a pedagogical force for epistemological resistance. However, even when theorized as positive, ignorance maintains its conceptual linkages to lack: a plural and situated lack, an active lack, an insurmountable, unconscious, desired, or defensive lack, but a lack nonetheless. Even conceptions like positive ignorance, which invert the supposed divide between positive knowledge and negative ignorance, “rely on a confidence in finding more and better knowledge” (Bojesen, 2022, p. 602). In other words, positive ignorance leverages absence to achieve a fuller—or perhaps brighter—presence.

How might one imagine ignorance differently? In what ways might doing so redistribute the matrix of explicatory spacetime and reframe pedagogy? These questions do not arise from a normative desire to champion a set of epistemic virtues (cf. Smith, 2016), although they inevitably invoke their own. Rather, these questions stem from the conviction that practices and ways of being are both productive of and produced by logics expressed through fundamental categories such as knowledge and ignorance, light and dark. In what ways, then, might thinking and learning be reconceived through a notion of ignorance not as absence but, for instance, as an abundance of presence?

Presence without absence: Ignorance through multiplicity

It is rare that an idea, phenomenon, or piece of information is ever so well understood as to close the possibility for further investigation. Much more prevalent than total understanding is understanding in degrees amid open inquiry and persistent uncertainty. In his opening to Genesis, Michel Serres writes that “when [information is] total or null, then unity appears, then comes a concept or a black box, evidence or ignorance, unreason or reason” (1995, p. 5). This is the Enlightenment sense of knowledge and ignorance: light and dark, presence and absence. In Serres’ formulation, the unification of a concept makes ignorance as absence possible.

But what is this process of unification that renders information complete? Serres’ invocation of a black box suggests that it is the coherence of fact out of conflict, uncertainty, and connections between actors that renders a concept intelligible (Latour, 1987, pp. 1–17, 131). As a concept stabilizes, as fewer people argue against it and more people use it to describe the world, the entangled webs of relations recede, leaving presentations of self-evident solidity. In contrast to this self-evidence, a concept can be known or unknown in relation to the framework that gives it coherence. Wherever a concept is unified and stands in for webs of interaction and relation, so too there is absence, so too there is ignorance as such.

Prior to unification, Serres describes multiplicity as noise. “Noise is the basic element of the software of all our logic, or it is to the logos what matter used to be to form” (Serres, 1995, p. 7). If light makes an object or concept known by illuminating its edges, then noise, or multiplicity, is the indeterminacy out of which the concept coheres and against which it appears as solid and separate. Whereas light and form are contemporaneous, noise precedes the unification of boundaries. In this sense, noise is not pluralism and not a relativistic ‘anything goes.’ Noise is prior to either of these constructions, a field of possibility from which one or another framework emerges in the first place. It is, in the Aristotelian sense of matter, the eternal that gives to form, or in this case to concept, its ability to take shapes, cohere, and change.

Vision is not well suited for thinking multiplicity because vision is about differentiation, hence a shift to the auditory to convey his thinking. But Serres tacks back and forth between noise (bruit) and noise, an archaic French word known today through chercher noise, to ‘kick up a fuss’ or ‘look for a fight.’ While it is similar to auditory noise and the noise of information theory, noise also denotes “ado, strife, contention” (1995, p. 141). Even here the presumed unity of noise as an auditory analog slips through the fingers. In other words, noise is but one manifestation to approach multiplicity, but not a stabilized concept through which to know or not know it.

Importantly, noise, and the multiplicity it works to describe, is not absence. “Here on the smooth face is the capacity of the multiple that can be called the possible […] There is chaos by a superabundance of presence” (Serres, 1995, pp. 29–30). In exploring noise, Serres invokes the Greek sea god Proteus, who moves between shapes and coheres his watery substance into any form. In the Odyssey, it is Proteus whom Menelaus and his men grab and hold as the god transforms from lion to serpent, leopard to boar, flowing water to tree. It is from Proteus that English derives the word ‘protean,’ because the god is not any of the shapes he takes, but the possibility to cohere into any of them. For Serres, Proteus is a pure potential that exemplifies the multiple, and ignorance, I propose, can be thought of as being in the turbulent pre-coherence of a unity. Through a frame of multiplicity, to be ignorant is to be in the overabundant presence of sheer possibility.

Multiplicity is not mutually exclusive from the alternative conceptions of ignorance noted above. Indeed, it works with rather than against them. As the protean state preceding one or another unity, multiplicity offers a framework for the construction of a plurality of knowledges. Similarly, it can describe the purposeful obfuscation or repression of a particular knowledge, as well as the manufacture or distribution of another. From a psychoanalytic approach, one might consider the refusal to acknowledge a certain shape of knowing the self or the world and the impossibility of apprehending forms beyond human conception or beyond form itself. Situating ignorance in multiplicity follows these approaches in theorizing ignorance as a productive and active epistemological force as opposed to being derivative of knowledge. In addition, and without proceeding from a reactionary position, it offers a different logic and frame to understand the educational encounter. ¹³

When the light goes out

Tokusan once called on Ryutan to ask for instruction and stayed until night fell. Ryutan said, “It is getting late; you had better leave.” At last Tokusan said good-by, lifted up the door curtain, and went out. Noticing that it was dark, he turned back and said, “It is dark outside.” Ryutan thereupon lit a candle and handed it to him. Tokusan was about to take it when Ryutan blew it out. At this Tokusan was all of a sudden enlightened. (Shibayama, 1974, p. 201)

We can read Tokusan's request for instruction through the logic of absence and presence: Tokusan lacks a certain understanding that Rytuan has, and so Tokusan asks the teacher to help him fill that lack. Within this frame, the nighttime imagery renders Tokusan's ignorance concrete. It is as dark outside as it is inside Tokusan's mind, and it is the teacher's wisdom that can light a candle to produce sight and knowledge. Handing the candle to Tokusan, Ryutan passes his own ability to see, fulfilling the pedagogical act by leading the student toward enlightenment. So far, the logic is coherent. But how do we make sense of Ryutan blowing out the candle? What does it mean for the light to go out?

In a framework where darkness is absence and learning is measured as a progressive increase in knowledge, the light going out seems to signify a backslide. Moving away from the established norm of knowing more, one stagnates, or worse, backtracks toward the ignorance from which one began. Within this context of progress, we might call such a backslide ‘forgetting’ or ‘learning loss,’ or question whether one had truly learned in the first place. However, for Tokusan, the light going out seems to catalyze enlightenment. The logic of absence falters. The best it can offer is that Tokusan realizes that he is wrong. Indeed, after his evening with Ryutan, we learn that he burns the notes and commentaries to which he had devoted his entire scholarly career. Is this fire, then, a new light replacing his old system with that of Ryutan? If so, this light too is immediately extinguished, for as soon as Tokusan burns his life's work, we are told he leaves “with deep gratitude” (Shibayama, 1974, p. 205). Again, the logic of absence strains to apply. The encounter requires a different framework and a different relation between light and dark.

Engaging the imagery within a framework of multiplicity allows us to read the encounter not through Tokusan's desire to know but through Ryutan's lesson. Ryutan's practice is not aimed at filling an absence. In a single breath, he demonstrates the noise that Tokusan seeks to keep at bay with a request for instruction. Attending to this request and its presumption of lack, Ryutan offers a candle to fill the darkness, light a path, and guide its course. However, just as the apparent lesson is about to be received, just as a unity is about to cohere, Ryutan obliterates it, momentarily plunging the world back into possibility and revealing the candle as a concept, a way of knowing. Here, the teacher's lesson destroys the logic of the lesson. By extinguishing the guiding light that leads the way from unknown to known, Ryutan collapses the pedagogical distance between the teacher who knows and the student who does not—a gulf derived from the space between ignorance and knowledge.

Whereas a presence/absence logic frames learning as a progression from dark to light, multiplicity includes the movement from light to dark or, more aptly, from lights to darks. In this framework, ignorance takes on a different meaning. A light going out is not a backslide or loss of knowledge. Its spatiality does not adhere to a teleology or linear sense of progress. Instead, a light going out is the unsettling of a unity. For Tokusan, the unity in question is the notion of education itself. When he burns his notes and commentaries, he undoes the coherence of the conceptual apparatus on which his knowledge was built. And where a concept stands in for the complex webs of relations that make it possible, unsettling its unity involves foregrounding what recedes into the background. As the light goes out, it renders visible the very infrastructure of Tokusan's thinking. At this moment, where perceived coherence dissolves into a constellation of interrelations, where the chains binding his framework fly apart to reveal it as a way of knowing, one organization in a sea of possibility, Tokusan is ignorant.

A practice of ignorance

In such a moment of ignorance, as the distance between knowing and not knowing collapses, explicatory spacetime is disrupted. A progressive curriculum is structured in units of homogenous time that can be chronologically ordered and incrementally filled with predetermined amounts of experience leading to measurable quantities of learning. However, the spacetime of multiplicity is uneven. It stretches across lifetimes and condenses into moments (Benjamin, 1986). For this reason, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to institutionalize, and it is disruptive to systems predicated on metered and chronological arrangements. Schooling, for instance.

In recent years, there have been repeated invocations of art as a field or counter-method capable of disrupting such arrangements (e.g., Baldacchino, 2019; Rancière, 2016). Indeed, there are many examples of such artistic disruptions. Shklovsky (1965, pp. 3–24), for instance, uses the term defamiliarization (остранение) to distinguish poetic language from everyday talk. According to Shklovsky, the purpose of art is to make the familiar strange, which it accomplishes by inviting, forcing, or tricking its audience into looking too long, that is, by transforming the typical experience of time. Where Shklovsky disturbs time, Brecht (1964, pp. 179–205) unsettles space, inducing defamiliarization through his Verfremdungseffekt, his ‘alienation’ or ‘distancing effect.’ Through a felt experience of distance, or so his thinking goes, the unity of ‘the way things are’ can be challenged by alternative potentials on stage, and the audience can be cast as participants in the reproduction of the former and the creation of the latter. With this slight shift, one might ask, “What else might I choose or create?”

While examples of thinking otherwise are crucial, and while the domain of art abounds in examples, the idea that pedagogy is inextricably mired within a spacetime configured by a presence/absence logic is too rigid. Art need not navigate a spacetime of possibility alone. Although a curriculum, let alone a school or university, may never be built from the noise of multiplicity, there exists within the space structured by absence and presence the potential for collapse, however momentary, in which the light goes out and Proteus slips back into possibility. If not a pedagogy, then perhaps a practice, one consisting of moves that, as in music or dance, both respond to and create fluctuations in time, space, and the movements of others. ¹⁴ When such moves are cultivated as part of a practice, and when one seeks openings for them within explicatory spacetime, then one's pedagogy contains within it the potential for its own disruption.

We might think of such a practice as creating an event, as inducing a breach of self-evidence and a rediscovery of the connections and forces that make possible the self-evidence in the first place (Burchell et al., 1991, pp. 76–78). By de-naturalizing and tracking the webs of relations that unify a concept, its apparent self-evidence may blur, thereby making visible its conditionality and potential to be otherwise. And if ignorance can describe the experience of overabundant possibility before the coherence of a concept, then a practice that creates an event in which the lights may go out can be thought of as a practice of ignorance.

In a practice of ignorance, the topology built along an axis mundus between the poles of knowing and not knowing collapses. This collapse is neither permanent nor total. No new homogenous time is offered to replace the old. Rather, the moves and the events they aim to induce contract into moments that shoot through the order of explicatory spacetime. In such a moment, as the knowing/not knowing divide loses meaning, a teacher no longer guides students to foregone conclusions or greater understandings of a whole. Indeed, the very roles of teacher and student, as well as the institutions that support them, are called into question. This calls for a disposition of prepared unpreparedness (Harouni, 2021), a readiness to stand before the superabundant presence of possibility and engage whatever forms that thinking may take without clamping one down as the answer.

This potential to interrupt explicatory spacetime can be perceived as tensions that ripple out from multiplicity and manifest as possibilities collide. Such tensions appear as interference between different flows of time and configurations of space. Tokusan felt them as his expectations of the roles played by the one who knows and the one who learns collided with those enacted by Ryutan. In schools, they can be felt every time a bell rings to end class, surprising a group and pulling them out of a heated discussion or activity, or anytime a question distracts from ‘the task at hand.’ These tensions exist at the outset of a project of epistemological resistance, when ‘the way things are’ is hauled out to center stage for questioning, though not at the end, when the questioning closes around an answer. These tensions are instructive. They point to moments when the otherwise are present and, fleeting though they may be, glimpseable in the darkness when the light manages to go out.