We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn.
Mary Catherine Bateson.
Peripheral Visions.
Abstract
Here I craft a case for recognizing the roots and patterns that ground the possibility of contemporary com-posting—as outlined in Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble—by New Materialists and critical pragmatists, especially those who are affected by the social injustices and ill-advised practices of today’s formal education. I explore both Spinozan Ethics and American pragmatism (and the ways each seems to be and mean more in their juxtaposition and interaction) in order to fashion a pattern that affects educational thought and action. That pattern of affect/affecting is one Haraway calls “attunement” (via Vinciane Despret), a state of co-relation that makes “unexpected feats possible.” My goal is to encourage those educational theorists who dwell in a critical pragmatist archive and those who dwell in a New Materialist archive to “make kin,” to learn to play string figures with a companion species, as they com-post educational possibility in a world(view) where agency is both more limited and more widely-distributed.
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Notes
For example, Braidotti understands agency as a practice of “transmuting negative passions into productive and sustainable praxis” (Braidotti 2012, p. 122). Karen Barad (2003) on the other hand understands agency as an ethics of accountability, being accountable for what is excluded and what is included in our discursive practices.
These are as various as theorists of literacy and new media practices in educational settings (see for example, Leander, K., & Sheehy, M. 2014. Spatializing literacy research and practice. New York: Peter Lang. and those pursuing affect theory in every domain (see Gregg, M. & Seigworth, G. (Eds). 2010. The affect theory reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press).
The literature is large and growing as theorists both learn from and critique Foucault. Consider for example Dolphijn, R. & van der Tuin, I. 2013. New materialism: Interviews and cartographies. Open Humanities Press. Available at http://openhumanitiespress.org/books/download/Dolphijn-van-der-Tuin_2013_New-Materialism.pdf; or Lemke, T. 2015. New materialisms: Foucault and the ‘government of things.’ Theory, Culture and Society 32,4: 3–25. See also Olssen, M. (2006). Michel Foucault: Materialism and education. Herndon, VA: Paradigm Publishers.
My thanks to an early, anonymous reader of this essay who explicitly pointed this out to me.
The Camille Stories represent a set of Haraway’s own imaginings (or what she calls an “invitation to a collective speculative fabulation”) of possible futures, of what it might look like to live and die as “children of compost.” The stories trace human children (all Camilles) born a generation after one another and always in sympoetic relation to monarch butterflies and other critters. In these Camille Communities, humans and critters together nurture capacities to respond to the world that make their own survival and flourishing more likely. The result—the desired goal—is “multi-species environmental justice.” Because it matters what ideas we think with, the capacity to tell speculative stories of promise and possibility is critical to the practice of response-ability.
Matthew Stewart, in The Courtier and the Heretic (2006), notes that Spinoza struggled with “how to be moral in a secular society and how to seek wisdom where nothing is certain (p. 310). He also says, “Historians have called [the 17th century] “the century of genius”; but informed opinion at the time generally held that it was an age of exceptional wickedness. If there is a single thread that runs through the rich and confusing tapestry of seventeenth-century life, it is that this was an age of transition – the time in which the theocratic order of the medieval era ceded to the secular order of modernity” (p. 15).
Spinoza notes in Section I, Proposition 29 of Ethics that “in Nature, there is nothing contingent: all things have been caused by the necessity of the divine nature to exist and produce an effect in a certain way.” He references all “things”, not all persons.
Note that he does not rule out affects in non-human bodies.
In the Appendix to Part I, Spinoza considers why general opinion rejects his view of Nature’s God as the necessary cause of all that exists and occurs. He notes that “(1) all men are ignorant of the cause of things, and (2) all men want to seek their advantage and are conscious of wanting this.” We think ourselves free to act in line with conscious goals and labor under the illusion that our efforts are the direct cause of our effects. This is, he suggests, never actually the case.
See, for instance, the work of Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
It is also Dewey’s (1922) contention that every instance of an emotion such as fear is “never twice the same” because the emotion is a function of transaction that involves distinctive elements of persons and context.
I would argue that among classical pragmatists, those who were female (e.g. Addams, Gilman, Follett and Cooper) and those who were not white (e.g. DuBois, Locke and again, Cooper) also understood that the world did not work for all the way it worked for those who were white, male and ostensibly Christian.
Materialism as a metaphysical stance can go much further to suggest that all experience can—and can only—be parsed in terms of matter and its interactions and properties. This view is not Haraway’s, nor is it the materialism of the pragmatist.
Lovejoy (1922) cites Boyd Bode, a pragmatist philosopher of education: “We do not find body and object and consciousness, but only body and object. …The process of intelligence is some- thing that goes on, not in our mind, but in things. … Even abstract ideas do not compel the adoption of a peculiarly " spiritual " or " psychic " existence, in the form of unanalyzable meanings”.
Note that Dewey does not privilege action over thought or vice versa but understands the interplay of action and thought as productive.
I use the term “truly educational” in distinction from “merely educational” analogous to Galway Kinnell’s distinction between the truly and merely personal. The latter is individualistic and determined; the former is interactional, situated, particular and indeterminate.
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Stengel, B.S. Com-Posting Experimental Futures: Pragmatists Making (Odd)Kin with New Materialists. Stud Philos Educ 38, 7–29 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-018-9627-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-018-9627-2