Session Information
Symposium
Contribution
The purpose of this interactive symposium is to present a sampler of projects that both show and tell, inform and perform the contributions of nonrepresentational theory for philosophy of education. Nonrepresentational theories [NRT] have been developed since the 1990s by geographers in the U.K. Calling for "a more democratic relationship between conceptual and empirical work," Patchett (2010) characterizes NRT as having "a heightened sensitivity to the fleshy realities of the human body." NRT is conceptually, discursively, and stylistically connected with recent trends in New Materialisms (see, e.g., Coole & Frost, 2010). Our symposium offers interactive engagements that forfeit neither intellect nor affect in the experience. Because NRT is creative and experimental--attending to imagination and cognition, affect and logic, rational and material--participants have designed "both/and" presentations that include traditional philosophical language together with performance, media, and poetry.
Papers in this symposium engage core concepts of NRT: affect and experience (see, e.g., Gregg & Siegworth, 2010). Within NRT, affect is different from emotion. Experience in NRT is best understood in French as expérience, which combines experience and experiment. This symposium brings affect and expérience into relation with equality, materiality, and judgment as a critical approach to philosophy of education.
NRT is a branch of cultural geography that does not represent the world, but rather presents experience in spatiotemporal proximity. Theoretically, NRT seems to have done away with the last vestiges of structuralism in social theory. NRT also dissolves Wittgensteinian distinctions between the speakable and the unspeakable by erasing distinctions among pictures, models, displays or depictions, and reality (Smeyers & Fendler, 2015; Fendler & Smeyers, 2015). Expanding the parameters of difference, NRT allows the greatest possible diversity of entities to be included on the material plane, including:
beliefs, atmospheres, sensations, ideas, toys, music, ghosts, dance therapies, footpaths, pained bodies, trance music, reindeer, plants, boredom, fat, anxieties, vampires, cars, enchantment, nanotechnologies, water voles, GM Foods, landscapes, drugs, money, racialised bodies, political demonstrations. (Anderson & Harrison, 2010, p. 14)
New Materialist theories have been critical of Cartesian objectivism for some time. However, NRT is making a different sort of argument that critiques Cartesianism without replacing objectivity with another kind of epistemological privilege or taxonomy in the process. NRT does not replace mind with body. One epistemological effect of NRT has been to deregulate, to allow for inclusion of the widest possible diversity of phenomena as potential material constituents of expérience. NRT invites the presence of the infinite and the finite, the objective and the subjective, the generalizable and the unique. In NRT, epistemology is recognized as ideological, discursive, historical, affective, serendipitous, experiential, and performative. This epistemological deregulation has implications for what is (im)possible to think in educational philosophy.
NRT allows all things equal access to the same plane of immanence, but it is not the case that anything goes. Value judgments must still be made, but NRT warrants for those judgments are not restricted to what is currently conceivable. Value judgments may be grounded in ideologies and/or epistemological traditions; and they may also be grounded in experimentation, aesthetics, ethics, pragmatics, phenomenology and/or play. Because NRT expands the questions that can be asked, the language of NRT offers potential for inclusion of a wider scope of diversity in how it is possible to think about the world; alternative criteria for judgments can be imagined as educational. This symposium presents four examples of such performative engagements and a critical response.
References
Coole, D. & Frost, S. (Eds)(2010). New materialisms: Ontology, agency, and politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fendler, L. & Smeyers, P. (2015). Perspectives on representational and non-representational language-games for educational history and theory. Part 2: Focusing on presentation instead of representation. Paedagogica Historica,51(6): 691-701. Gregg, M. & Siegworth, G.J. (2010). The affect theory reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Patchett, M. (2010). A rough guide to non-representational theory. Experimental geography in practice. Available: http://merlepatchett.wordpress.com/2010/11/12/a-rough-guide-to-non-representational-theory/. Smeyers, P. & Fendler, L. (2015). Perspectives on representational and non-representational language-games for educational history and theory. Part 1: Revisiting the Wittgensteinian legacy. Paedagogica Historica,51(6): 674-690. Thrift, N. (2008). Non-representational theory: Space/politics/affect. London: Routledge.
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