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The Malaise of the Soul at Work: The Drive for Creativity, Self-Actualization, and Curiosity in Education

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Abstract

Franco “Bifo” Berardi tells us that the current transformation of every domain of social life into economy has led to “the subjugation of the soul to work processes.” There is a newfound love of work and, consequently, writes Berardi, “no desire, no vitality seems to exist anymore outside of the economic enterprise.” Concerned as it once was with “fostering the soul,” and concerned as it now (almost exclusively) is with preparing students for the job market, what role might education have in Berardi’s musings? Can “creativity,” “self-actualization” and “curiosity,” which are so valued in education, still speak and help foster a sense of the soul that exceeds economy and work? In this paper, I explore these questions by providing an account of what is at stake in Berardi’s conception of the soul and its subjugation to work. I draw on his ideas to critically appraise the seemingly-benign aspirations of the “creative class,” a term coined to signal a new era for human flourishing afforded by shifts towards personal creativity in the digital economy. I then move to consider how, in particular, the ubiquitous promotion of “creativity” and “curiosity” in education tends to replicate a form of learning that puts the soul to work, as it were, promoting a narrow, self-enterprising subject with a frantic instrumental orientation towards the world. I conclude with a discussion on how demands on learners, to be always curious, innovative, nimble and open to discovery lead to panic, collapse and depression: the diseases of the soul.

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Notes

  1. Berardi, F. B. The Soul at Work: From alienation to autonomy, Preface Jason E, Los Angeles and Cambridge, Mass.: Semiotext(e)/MIT, 2009, p. 24.

  2. Ibid., pp. 44–45.

  3. Boyles, D. “Neuroscience, neuropragmatism, and commercialism.” In Neuroscience and Education: A philosophical appraisal, Ed. C.W. Joldersma, pp. 72–90. Routledge, 2016, p. 72.

  4. Williams, E. and Standish, P. “Out of our minds: Hacker and Heidegger contra neuroscience.” In Neuroscience and Education: A philosophical appraisal, Ed. C.W. Joldersma, pp. 15–33. Routledge, 2016, p. 15.

  5. Biesta, G. “Philosophy of education for the public good: Five challenges and an agenda.” Educational Philosophy and Theory 44, no. 6 (2012): 581–593, p. 589.

  6. Lewis, T. E. “Exploding brains: Beyond the spontaneous philosophy of brain-based learning.” Neuroscience and Education: A philosophical appraisal, Ed. C.W. Joldersma, pp. 144–156. Routledge, 2016, p. 146.

  7. Joldersma, C. W. “Neoliberalism and the neuronal self: A critical perspective on neuroscience’s application to education.” In Neuroscience and Education: A philosophical appraisal, Ed. C.W. Joldersma, pp. 91–107. Routledge, 2016, p. 99.

  8. Biesta, G. “Philosophy of education for the public good,” p. 589.

  9. Ibid.

  10. Ibid.

  11. Berardi, F. B. The Soul at Work, p. 21.

  12. Ibid., p. 21. Berardi is here referencing Spinoza. In a 2017 interview conducted during Berardi’s visit to London, Ontario, he told his interviewers: “I am not speaking about the soul in the spiritual sense as something disembodied. On the contrary, when I say the ‘soul’ I mean the body in a sense, I mean the animated body.… What is interesting for me is the existential dimension in which the physical consistency, the narrow physiological consistency of the body, gets a soul and becomes capable of emotional interaction and also of rational thought. So, you see, the body is in this sense indissociable from the soul. And in this sense, I cannot…if you wanted to speak of the body in the narrow physiological dimension, I needed to explicitly signal this dimension. If I say body, I mean the animated body which implies an existential dimension, which also implies the complex of consciousness and the unconscious” (pp. 108–109). Berardi, Franco Bifo, Dillon Douglas, and Thomas Szwedska. “Warming the Algorithm and Possibilities for the Future.” Chiasma: A Site For Thought 4, no. 1 (2017): 105–124.

  13. See: van Weelden, W. “Erotic Uprising of the Schooling of the Body: An interview with Franco Berardi,” Rotterdam: Nai Publishers, (2012): npag. This text was downloaded on November 30, 2018 from Open! Platform for Art, Culture & the Public Domainwww.onlineopen.org/erotic-uprising-or-the-schooling-of-the-body.

  14. Berardi, F. B. The Soul at Work, pp. 44–45.

  15. Ibid., p. 12.

  16. Ibid., p. 96.

  17. In his most recent book, Florida (2017) tempers his earlier optimistic intonations of the “creative class” and its ability to promote economic prosperity and human flourishing. See: Florida, Richard. The New Urban Crisis: Gentrification, housing bubbles, growing inequality, and what we can do about it. Oneworld Publications, 2017. In this recent book he acknowledges the entrenched poverty and devastation that gentrification has caused within the same urban spaces that he once viewed as economically thriving progressive enclaves showcasing the “creative class” at work. While he here takes a much more critically grounded approach and moves away from the earlier evangelical-like promotion of the good tidings and blessings to be bestowed by the “creative class,” it ultimately does little to quell the active force of the discourse of the “creative class” that he originally helped to set in motion. In other words, the “earlier” idea (or faith) and promotion of the “creative class” is a well-entrenched discourse that is still readily mobilized by interested parties, retaining its traction especially in urban politics and education. For example, see: Alan Ehrenhalt, “The Reality of Mayors’ Economic Promises,” Governing: The states and localities. November 2016, npag (online-magazine) http://www.governing.com/columns/assessments/gov-mayors-economic-development-promises.html.

  18. See: Howkins, J. The Creative Economy: How people make money from ideas, London: Penguin Books, 2001. A still influential work that underscores the economic driven dimension of “creativity” (the will to constantly learn and innovate), taking it to be a “substantial component of human capital.”

  19. Florida, R. The Rise of the Creative Class. Cambridge: Basic Books, 2002, p. 4. See also: Florida, R. The Rise of the Creative Class-Revisited: Revised and Expanded. New York: Basic Books (AZ), 2014. In the revised 2014 version Florida more explicitly hones-in and discusses the “creative class” as comprising a socioeconomic group, arguing that occupational clusters rather than educational qualifications provide a better way of understanding the pool of human talent. He makes this point in order to better define his theory against the theory of “human capital,” which tends to identify an individual’s talent and economic potential with their level of education.

  20. Florida, R. Cities and the Creative Class. New York–London: Routledge, 2005, p. 36.

  21. While in their leisure time the “creative class” might have “breaks” they have no true sense of “rest.” That is, they have no sense of otium (a restful lingering in which one takes time and gives time freely to others), which sharply stands apart from a hyper-sense of negotium (a ceaseless busyness and agitation with one’s precarious occupation, which demands that one become oneself by constantly broadcasting oneself). Even away on holidays a member of the creative-class feels prompted to show and prove his or her creativity, as they post and announce their “unique,” “intelligent,” “creative” manner of vacationing. As Byung-Chul Han points out, “a subject that is formed through or by work will not find a different perception of the world during times that are free from work.” Han, B.C. The Scent of Time: A philosophical essay on the art of lingering. Trans. Daniel Steuer, Medford MD: Polity Press, 2017, p. 100.

  22. Florida, R. The Rise of the Creative Class, p. 13.

  23. Berardi, F.B. The Soul at Work, p. 96.

  24. Ibid., p. 84.

  25. Ibid., 87.

  26. Ibid., 104.

  27. Han, B.C. In the Swarm: Digital prospects. Trans. E. Butler, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017, (italics in original) p. 35.

  28. Berardi, F.B. The Soul at Work, p. 101.

  29. Ibid.

  30. Not surprisingly, for proponents of the creative economy, education with its emphasis on teaching and its tethering to other “slow” pedagogical activities, is often critiqued as impeding the sense of curiosity that would allow us to adapt to the ever-changing needs of the twenty-first century economy. Educators and education itself are chastised for falling behind, not keeping up or not being nimble enough to properly prepare students for reaping the opportunities presented by the new economy. In this sense, proponents of the creative economy position education as always already behind the times, needing to catch up with the “new,” assuming as inevitable an economy driven by constant-frantic change that demands continuous adaptation and transformation as a rule, lest education becomes obsolete and irrelevant. As the foreword of an edited volume on Education and the Creative Economy reveals, “Curiosity is the motivating force for innovation, but it is often blunted by rigid educational systems that we have today.” Predictably, the author urges the field of education to adapt and address this impasse “through learning systems that are responsive to constant flux” (xi). See: Araya, D. and Peters, M. Education in the Creative Economy: Knowledge and learning in the age of innovation. New York: Peter Lang, 2010.

  31. See: Kashdan, et al., “Psychological flexibility as a fundamental aspect of health.” Clinical Psychology Review 30, no. 7 (2010): 865–878, p. 57. “[R]ecent years have seen a major growth of interest in both the neuroscience and psychology of curiosity.” See, Kidd, Celeste & Hayden, Benjamin. “The Psychology and Neuroscience of Curiosity.” Neuron. 88 (2015): 449–460.

  32. See: Von Stumm, Sophie, et al. “The Hungry Mind: Intellectual curiosity is the third pillar of academic performance.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 6, no. 6 (2011): 574–588.

  33. See: Reio, T.G., et al. (2006). “The Measurement and conceptualization of curiosity.” The Journal of Genetic Psychology, 167(2), 117–135.

  34. See: Kashdan, et al. “Curiosity and pathways to well-being and meaning in life: Traits, states, and everyday behaviors.” Motivation and Emotion 31.3 (2007): 159–173.

  35. See: Jeraj, Mitja, and Bostjan Antoncic, “A Conceptualization of Entrepreneurial Curiosity and Construct Development: A Multi-Country Empirical Validation.” Creativity Research Journal 25, no. 4 (2013): 426–435. Jeraj, Mitja. “The Relationship Between Optimism, Pre-entrepreneurial Curiosity and Entrepreneurial Curiosity.” Organizacija 47, no. 3 (2014): 199–209. Prihatsanti, Unika, “The Relationship Between Entrepreneurial Self-Efficacy, Entrepreneurial Curiosity and Innovative Behavior on Entrepreneur Students.” In 3rd ASEAN Conference on Psychology, Counselling, and Humanities (ACPCH 2017). Atlantis Press, 2018. Curiosity is often conflated with creativity and promoted as a measure of successful teaching and learning in the education and entrepreneurship literature, see: Neck, Heidi M., Patricia G. Greene, and Candida G. Brush, eds. Teaching entrepreneurship: A practice-based approach. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2014.

  36. Heidegger, M. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson, New York: Harper & Row, 1962, p. 216.

  37. Ibid., pp. 216–217.

  38. Ibid., p. 398. Heidegger in his approach to “curiosity” and its frantic temporality is putting into relief another sense of time. As Han puts it, “Heidegger is on his way to another time, a time that is not the time of work, but the time of the enduring and slow, which makes lingering possible.” Han, B.C., The Scent of Time, p. 76.

  39. Florida discusses how the desire for new and exciting experiences “stimulates our creative faculties and enhance our creative capacities. This active, experiential lifestyle is spreading and becoming more prevalent in society as the structures and institutions of the Creative Economy spread” (p.136). Richard Florida, “Experiential Life,” in, Hartley, J. ed. Creative Industries, Blackwell, 2005, pp. 133–147.

  40. Brown, J.S. “Foreword,” Education in the creative economy: Knowledge and learning in the age of innovation, Araya, Daniel, Peter Lang, 2010, pp. xi–xii.

  41. Ibid., p. xii.

  42. Arnone, M. P., Small, R.V., Chauncey, S.A., McKenna, H.P. “Curiosity, Interest and Engagement in Technology-Pervasive Learning Environments: A new research agenda,” Education Tech Research Dev (2011) 59:181–198.

  43. Ibid., p. 196.

  44. See: Jeraj, M., et al., “A Conceptualization of Entrepreneurial Curiosity.”

  45. Ibid., p. 266.

  46. Arnone, M.P., et al, “Curiosity, Interest and Engagement,” p. 184.

  47. Berardi, F.B. The Soul at Work, p. 178.

  48. Ehrenberg, A. The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the history of depression in the contemporary age. Montreal: McGill-Queen's Press, 2016, p. 8.

  49. Berardi, F.B. The Soul at Work, pp. 100–101.

  50. Ibid., p. 98, p. 102.

  51. Ferrari, Alize J., et al. “Burden of depressive disorders by country, sex, age, and year: findings from the global burden of disease study 2010.” PLoS Med 10.11 (2013): e1001547.

  52. Berardi, F.B. The Soul at Work, p. 99.

  53. Ehrenberg, A. The Weariness of the Self (italics in original), p. 4, p. 9. Cited partly also in Barardi, The Soul at Work, p. 99. Ehrenberg goes on, “depression is particular since it marks the helplessness of existence, be it expressed though sadness, asthenia (fatigue), inhibition, or the inability to initiate action. The depressed individual, caught in a moment with no tomorrow, is left without drive, bogged down in a ‘nothing is possible.’ Tired and empty, restless and violent—in short, nervous—we feel the weight of our individual sovereignty” (p. 9).

  54. Leader, D. The New Black: Mourning, melancholia and depression. London: Penguin UK, 2008, pp. 12–13.

  55. Berardi, F.B. The Soul at Work, p. 134.

  56. Phillips, A. “On Being Bored,” On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic essays on the unexamined life. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993, pp. 66–78.

  57. Ibid., p 69.

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Correspondence to Mario Di Paolantonio.

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I had the opportunity to present previous drafts of this paper and want to thank Judith Suissa, Trevor Norris, Jim Garrison, Tatsuro Sakamoto and Maki Tsuruta for their insightful comments.

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Di Paolantonio, M. The Malaise of the Soul at Work: The Drive for Creativity, Self-Actualization, and Curiosity in Education. Stud Philos Educ 38, 601–617 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-019-09653-4

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