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Errant Learning for a Foam World: Glissant, Sloterdijk, and the Foam of Pedagogy

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Abstract

Through an educational reading of Édouard Glissant and Peter Sloterdijk, this article draws out and develops latent pedagogical philosophies that bear distinct relationships to colonialism and struggles against and beyond colonialism. In particular, it identifies two related educational philosophies that propel colonization and, in turn, proposes a theory of errant learning that might undergird decolonization. It focuses on Glissant’s minor remarks about different conceptions of understanding in order to identify the grasping drive (and its relationship to opacity and transparency) as the educational foundation of the colonizing apparatus. After articulating the other form of understanding he offers, giving-on-and-with (which turns away from enclosures and opens into Relation), I point to a potential contradiction in this division as it relates to his overall project. By freeing grasping from the grasping drive, I reconfigure the relationship between grasping and giving-on-and-with in a way that allows for certain kinds of enclosures. This introduces the question of pedagogical form, a question explored in Sloterdijk’s sphereological investigations. Reading the colonizing phase of globalization through Sloterdijk’s notion of lordly imagining—which I link with the grasping drive—the article draws out how different educational processes produce different kinds of spheres. Finally, it articulates errant learning as a pneumatic process of grasping and giving-on-and-with that values opacity over transparency to produce foam formations with attention to the history of inequality and injury through immune deprivation.

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Notes

  1. “Grasping” and “giving-on-and-with” are Betsy Wing’s translations (see Wing 1997, p. xiv).

  2. For more on Glissant and his reworking or “bypassing” of Hegelian dialectics, see Leupin (2013).

  3. For more on this, see Ford and Lewis (2018).

  4. For the classroom as a bubble, see Ford and Zhao (2018).

  5. It’s worth (foot)noting that for Sloterdijk (1999/2014) this lordly imagining and the resulting spheric expansion only developed in full in China, India, and Greece (p. 159).

  6. Hopefully the present article demonstrates the progressive potential of Sloterdijk’s sphereology. Detloff and Bernico (2017) provide another example in their article about the Flint water crisis.

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Ford, D.R. Errant Learning for a Foam World: Glissant, Sloterdijk, and the Foam of Pedagogy. Stud Philos Educ 39, 245–256 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-020-09719-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-020-09719-8

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