radical pedagogy: toward a minor education exam reading list

Area 1: Articulating Critical Pedagogy

Henry Giroux, Theory and Resistance in Education: A Pedagogy for the Opposition (South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey, 1983).

———, “Literacy and the Pedagogy of Voice and Political Empowerment,” Educational Theory 38(1), 1988: 61-75.

———, “Utopian Thinking Under the Sign of Neoliberalism: Towards a Critical Pedagogy of Educated Hope,” Democracy and Nature 9(1), 2003: 91-105.

———, “Cultural Studies, Public Pedagogy and the Responsibility of Intellectuals,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 1(1), 2004: 59-97.

Henry Giroux and Susan Searles Giroux, “Challenging Neo-liberalism’s New World Order: The Promise of Critical Pedagogy,” Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies 6(1), 2006: 21-32.

Curry Stephenson Malott and Bradley Porfilio, Critical Pedagogy in the 21^st Century: A New Generation of Scholars (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 2011).

Peter McLaren, “Revolutionary Pedagogy in Post-Revolutionary Times: Rethinking the Political Economy of Critical Education,” Educational Theory 48(4), 1998: 432-462.

———, “The Future of the Past: Reflections on the Present State of Empire and Pedagogy,” in Peter McLaren and Joe L. Kincheloe, Critical Pedaogy: Where Are We Now? (New York: Peter Lang, 2007): 289-314.

———, Life in Schools: An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy in the Foundations of Education (Boston: Pearson, 2007).

———, “Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy,” InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies 6(2), 2010: 1-11.

Peter McLaren and R. Farahmandpur, “Reconsidering Marx in Post-Marxist Times: A Requiem for Postmodernism?,” Educational Researcher 29(3), 2000: 25-33.

Peter McLaren and Nathalia E. Jaramillo, “Not Neo-Marxist, Not Post-Marxist, Not Marxian, Not Autonomist Marxism: Reflections on a Revolutionary (Marxist) Critical Pedagogy,” Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies 10(3), 2010: 251-262.

Peter McLaren, Gregory Martin, Ramin Farahmandpur, and Nathalia Jaramillo, “Teaching In and Against the Empire: Critical Pedagogy as Revolutionary Praxis,” Teacher Education Quarterly (Winter 2004): 131-153.

Matthew Smith, Jean Ryoo, and Peter McLaren, “A Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century,” Education and Society 27(3), 2009: 59-76.

 

Area 2: Critiquing Critical Pedagogy

Anne C. Bell and Constance L. Russell, “Beyond Human, Beyond Words: Anthropocentrism, Critical Pedagogy, and the Poststructuralist Turn,” Canadian Journal of Education 25(3), 2000: 188-203.

Gert J.J. Biesta, “Pedagogy Without Humanism: Foucault and the Subject of Education,” Interchange 29(1), 1998: 1-16.

James Campbell, “Education and its Discontents: The Pedagogy of Henry A. Giroux,” Critical Studies in Education 33(1), 1992: 96-109.

Jane Durie, “Emancipatory Education and Classroom Practice: A Feminist Post-Structuralist Perspective,” Studies in Continuing Education 18(2), 1996: 135-146.

C. Alejandra Elenes, “Reclaiming the Borderlands: Chicana/o Identity, Difference, and Critical Pedagogy,” Educational Theory 47(3), 1997: 359-375.

Scott Ellison, “On the Poverty of Philosophy: The Metaphysics of McLaren’s ‘Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy’,” Educational Theory 59(3), 2009: 327-351.

• [Peter McLaren responds: “Afterwords,” Educational Theory 60(3), 2010: 391-393.]

Nirmala Erevelles, “Educating Unruly Bodies: Critical Pedagogy, Disability Studies, and the Politics of Schooling,” Educational Theory 50(1), 2000: 25-47.

Sandy Grande, “Whitestream Feminism and the Colonialist Project: A Review of Contemporary Feminist Pedagogy and Praxis,” Educational Theory 53(3), 2003: 329-346.

———, “Red Lake Woebegone: Pedagogy, Decolonization, and the Critical Project,” in Critical Pedagogy: Where Are We Now? (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 315-336.

Ilan Gur-Ze’ev, “Toward a Nonrepressive Critical Pedagogy,” Educational Theory 48(4), 1998: 463-487.

Wendi Kohli, “Critical Education and Embodied Subjects: Making the Poststructural Turn,” Educational Theory 48(4), 1998: 511-520.

Patti Lather, “Critical Pedagogy and its Complicities: A Praxis of Stuck Places,” Educational Theory 48(4), 1998: 487-498.

Zeus Leonardo, “The Souls of White Folk: Critical Pedagogy, Whiteness Studies, and Globalization Discourse,” Race, Ethnicity and Education 5, no. 1 (March 2002): 29-50.

Carmen Luke and Jennifer Gore, Feminisms and Critical Pedagogy (New York: Routledge, 1992).

• [Includes: Elizabeth Ellsworth, “Why doesn’t this feel empowering? Working through the repressive myths of critical pedagogy,” Harvard Educational Review 59, no. 3 (Fall 1989): 297-325.]

Jan Masschelein, “How to Imagine Something Exterior to the System: Critical Education as Problematization,” Educational Theory 48(4), 1998: 521-530.

Gregory Martin, “The Poverty of Critical Pedagogy: Towards a Politics of Engagement,” in Critical Pedagogy: Where Are We Now? (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 337-353.

William F. Pinar, “The Unaddressed ‘I’ of Ideology Critique,” Power and Education 1(2), 2009: 189-200.

William F. Pinar and C.A. Bowers, “Politics of Curriculum: Origins, Controversies, and Significance of Critical Perspectives,” Review of Research in Education 18 (1992): 163-190.

Willem L. Wardekker and S. Miedema, “Critical Pedagogy: An Evaluation and a Direction for Reformulation,” Curriculum Inquiry 27, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 45-61.

Eric J. Weiner, “Critical Pedagogy and the Crisis of Imagination,” in Peter McLaren and Joe L. Kincheloe (eds.), Critical Pedagogy: Where Are We Now? (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 57-77.

 

Area 3: Articulating a Radical Pedagogy

Pole 1: Ranciere and Anarchic Pedagogy

Gert Biesta, “Say You Want a Revolution…Suggestions for the Impossible Future of Critical Pedagogy,” Educational Theory 48(4), 1998: 499-510.

Gert Biesta and Charles Bingham with Jacques Ranciere, Jacques Ranciere: Education, Truth, Emancipation (New York: Continuum, 2010).

Abraham P. DeLeon, “The Time for Action is Now! Anarchist Theory, Critical Pedagogy, and Radical Possibilities,” Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies 4, no. 2 (November 2006). [http://www.jceps.com/print.php?articleID=67]

———, “Oh No, Not the ‘A’ Word! Proposing an Anarchism for Education,” Educational Studies 44, no. 2 (September 2008), 122-141.

Issue 42(5-6) Educational Philosophy and Theory – special issue on Rancière

Daniel Friedrich, Bryn Jaastad, and Thomas S. Popkewitz, “Democratic Education: An (Im)possibility that yet Remains to Come,” Educational Philosophy and Theory 42(5/6), 2010: 571-587.

Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

Richard Kahn, “Critical Pedagogy Taking the Illich Turn,” The International Journal of Illich Studies 1(1), 2009: 37-49.

Jennifer Logue and Cris Mayo, “Imagining the Future: What Anarchism Brings to Education” [review of Judith Suissa, Anarchism and Education: A Philosophical Perspective], Journal of Philosophy of Education 43, no. 1 (2009), 159-165.

Todd May, Contemporary Political Movements and the Thought of Jacques Ranciere: Equality in Action (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2010).

Nina Power, “Axiomatic Equality: Ranciere and the Politics of Contemporary Education,” Eurozine, from http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2010-07-01-power-en.html [accessed July 6, 2010].

Jacques Ranciere, trans. Kristin Ross, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991).

Stephven Shukaitis and David Graeber with Erika Biddle (eds.), Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations/Collective Theorization (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2007).

Judith Suissa, Anarchism and Education: A Philosophical Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2006).

———, “Anarchy in the Classroom,” The New Humanist 120(5), September/October 2005. [www.newhumanist.org.uk/1288/anarchy-in-the-classroom]

———, “Anarchism, Utopias and Philosophy of Education,” Journal of Philosophy of Education 35(4), 2001: 627-646.

 

Pole 2: Benjamin’s Critique of Violence and the Strategy of Refusal

Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (New York: Schocken Books, 1986).

Claire Fontaine, “Ready-Made Artist and Human Strike”

“The State and the Bosses Only Understand One Language: Strike, Blockade, Sabotage,” from http://translationcollective.wordpress.com/2010/10/24/the-state-and-the-bosses-only-understand-one-language/ [accessed November 12, 2010].

“Infinite Strike,” from http://translationcollective.wordpress.com/2010/11/11/infinite-strike/ [accessed November 12, 2010].

Pole 3: Towards a Minor Education

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, trans. Dana Polan, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).

 

on the productivity of idleness

The productivity demanded by capitalism, in the division of labor, is a productivity which demands attention, time-on-task, and the reduction of creativity to activity. The productivity demanded by communism, the communism of the Paris Commune and of the flâneur, is that of idleness and detachment, the reduction of activity in order to spur creativity.

10 theses on flanerie

1. The flâneur is a phenomenon of exteriority.

2. A theory of surfaces, or topography, produces exteriority.

3. Exteriority induces movement, idleness, detachment – i.e. flânerie.

4. Flânerie has been normalized due to changes in the mass industrial city.

4a. Mass industrialism has given way to mass precarity.

4b. Flânerie is a commentary on and critique of the division of labor.

5. As significant as ‘the general intellect’ is to post-Fordism is flânerie to ‘the general intellect.’

6. Difference, multiplicity :: repetition, sameness – the dialectic of the flâneur

7. The flâneur operates at the threshold of capitalism and communism.

8. The figure of the flâneur is prophetic/messianic, containing within it a theory of time, as well as movement.

9. A political project based on flânerie must include withdrawal and a rigorous critique of everything in existence.

10. The highest form of flâneur is perhaps that of the flâneur who does not move.

an education of pure means, or towards a minor education

So, these thoughts are anything but complete or fully fleshed out. But I had to get them onto “paper” before they morphed into something else entirely. I just spent two hours discussing Benjamin’s essay “Critique of Violence,” and I’ve been reading a bit for my candidacy exam question on education/radical pedagogy, and this is basically the thought that popped into my head. Comments are most welcome, since I don’t know yet where this is going.

*****

Critical Pedagogy reinscribes a violence no different than the State and its schooling apparatus. Critical Pedagogy does not seek to supplant the legal order and reconstitute it anew; instead, it seeks to renegotiate the division (partage) of the current order.

A radical pedagogy (a minor education) must, then, resemble Benjamin’s discussion of the nonviolent proletarian strike, or what Claire Fontaine referred to as “human strike.” In this case, an education of pure means is an education of pure potentiality, for withholding from an Education and refusing the demand (for more or better or more democratic education) is to place oneself in the position of breaking the link between education and violence. The constitutive violence of compulsory education, as an apparatus of the State, only reinscribes itself in any new Education – even an education that is ‘liberatory’ – that purports to be more democratic, revolutionary, or whatever. A minor education, or an education of pure means, is like the human strike in that it is a refusal absent a demand, and in that very moment the ends are the means, severing the internal link to the violence that compels social organization.

In this way, an education of pure means is a divine education, or an education that breaks with the order of fate, where the law which constitutes Education is always already linked to a particular end. A minor education, basically, is an education that does not replicate itself for its own ends.

Agamben’s Potentialities

Giorgio Agamben, edited and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).

Potentialities is a collection of essays written by Agamben between the early 1980s and early 1990s. The essays in the collection are often familiar, as they either rehearse or expand upon the themes raised in Agamben’s early works; they also begin to point toward his work on the Homo Sacer series and therefore begin to develop in the direction of sovereignty, the state of exception, and more. Because of the broad array of topics of the essays – from early discussions of language which appeared in Infancy and History and Idea of Prose to an extended section on potentiality and a seminal essay called, “Bartleby, or On Contingency” – I will not attempt to discuss everything. Instead, I will focus on the latter half of the book, essays 10 through 15.

“The Messiah and the Sovereign: The Problem of Law in Walter Benjamin”

This essay was originally given as a lecture at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1992 (not published in Italian until 1998). Agamben has already demonstrated in his works a compulsion for theological analysis and its inseparability from philosophy and, in this essay, the inseparability of philosophy from law: “Philosophy is always already constitutively related to the law, and every philosophical work is always, quite literally, a decision on this relationship.”[1] He connects all of these concepts in his statement on his basic project in this essay: “The thesis I would like to advance is that the messianic kingdom is not one category among others within religious experience but is, rather, its limit concept. The Messiah is, in other words, the figure through which religion confronts the problem of the Law, decisively reckoning with it.”[2]

Agamben begins the essay with a reference to Benjamin’s Eighth Thesis in “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” and places it next to a selection from Benjamin’s collected works:

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of exception’ in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history that corresponds to this fact. Then we will have the production of a real state of exception before us as a task.[3]

The apocryphal saying of a Gospel, “Wherever I encounter someone, I will pronounce judgment on him,” casts a particular light on Judgment Day [den jungsten Tag]. It recalls Kafka’s fragment: the Day of Judgment is a summary judgment [Standrecht]. But it also adds something: according to this saying, the Day of Judgment is not different from others. In any case, this Gospel saying furnishes the criterion for the concept of the present that the historian makes his own. Every instant is the instant of judgment on certain moments that precede it.[4]

These excerpts combine to establish a connection between messianic time – discussed by Agamben in Infancy and History (IH) – and the law.

Agamben sketches out a conception of messianic time in IH which he refers to as kairology[5]:

True historical materialism does not pursue an empty mirage of continuous progress along infinite linear time, but is ready at any moment to stop time, because it holds the memory that man’s original home is pleasure. It is this time which is experienced in authentic revolutions, which, as Benjamin remembers, have always been lived as a halting of time and an interruption of chronology. But a revolution from which there springs not a new chronology, but a qualitative alteration of time (a cairology [sic]), would have the weightiest consequence and would alone be immune to absorption into the reflux of restoration. He who, in the epoche of pleasure, has remembered history as he would remember his original home, will bring to this memory to everything, will exact this promise from each instant: he is the true revolutionary and the true seer, released from time not at the millennium, but now.[6]

This sheds light on a critique of Agamben’s work that focuses in on the idea of messianic time, which misinterprets his messianism as a deferred messianism, a millenarian messianism that signifies the end-times. Agamben’s conception of time, kairology, which appears in the essay in Potentialities, places an emphasis on the immanence of judgment, the judgment which occurs now. Interestingly, for his Homo Sacer series, he places messianic time, judgment, and the state of exception up against one another by juxtaposing the quotations from Benjamin (above): “Messianic time has the form of a state of exception (Ausnahmezustand) and summary judgment (Standrecht), that is, judgment is pronounced in the state of exception.”[7]

This conception of messianic time and its relation to law and sovereignty throws into question the dominant interpretations of Agamben’s Homo Sacer – that the spatiality of the camp produces sacred man as a condition within a state of exception bounded by the camp’s exceptionality. When he notes,

In defining the messianic kingdom with the terms of Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty, Benjamin appears to establish a parallelism between the arrival of the Messiah and the limit concept of State power. In the days of the Messiah, which are also “the ‘state of exception’ in which we live,” the hidden foundation of the law comes to light, and the law itself enters into a state of perpetual suspension.[8]

This conflation of the state of exception with messianic time implies that the spatiality of the camp is irrelevant [perhaps this is too strong a word?] to the production of bare life. He merely uses the camp as a paradigmatic example of how bare life is produced. What we don’t want to face, though, is the fact that we always already exist in messianic time and the state of exception.

Perhaps not as apparent in his earlier books, Potentialities highlights a fascination of Agamben’s, theories of the law. In this essay, he reflects on rabbinic scholarship on the Torah. He claims that the original Torah was simply a mish-mash of letters that constructed no words or meaning, because, instead, the letter jumble contained the potential for all meanings. Agamben argues that this letter jumble revealed “the problem of law in its originary structure,”[9] as a “force without significance.”[10] I understand this conception to basically mean that the law is in force arbitrarily, signifying an absent presence of rationality in the strong sense of the word, i.e. foundations. He notes, “What, after all, is a state of exception, if not a law that is in force but does not signify anything.” For Agamben, perhaps through an unacknowledged debt here to Schmitt’s writing on liberalism and parliamentary democracy (which he of course engages directly in his later works), seems to place this empty presence firmly within modernity, not particular to any form of governance, but to governance in general:

Today, everywhere, in Europe as in Asia, in industrialized countries as in those of the ‘Third World,’ we live in the ban of a tradition that is permanently in a state of exception. And all power, whether democratic or totalitarian, traditional or revolutionary, has entered into a legitimation crisis in which the state of exception, which was the hidden foundation of the system, has fully come to light. If the paradox of sovereignty once had the form of the proposition ‘there is nothing outside the law,’ it takes on a perfectly symmetrical form in our time, when the exception has become the rule: ‘there is nothing inside the law’; everything – every law – is outside law. The entire planet has now become the exception that law must contain in its ban. Today we live in this messianic paradox, and every aspect of our existence bears its marks. (170)

This is an idea he develops further in State of Exception in the chapter called “Force-of-Law.”

Potentiality

A concept in Agamben’s work that I believe needs much more consideration as his writings (particularly on homo sacer) become more popular is potentiality. His conception of potentiality is nuanced, hard to essentialize, post-humanist (I think???), and essential to understanding his conceptions of the coming community and the whatever singularity, his growing cynicism about power and governance, and his politics and ethics in general.

In a nutshell, Agamben does not think that the potential of, for example, a human child to learn such and such a subject or to grow to such and such a height – generic potentiality – is terribly interesting. It is the potential that comes with withholding the ability to actualize a potential that is potential itself – existing potentiality. An example he uses is the architect who chooses not to build. What makes us human, then, is not necessarily the choices we make and the actions we take; sometimes it is precisely those capabilities we do not know we have or those we do not mobilize that make us human:

The greatness – and also the abyss – of human potentiality is that it is first of all potential not to act, potential for darkness…To be capable of good and evil is not simply to be capable of doing this or that good or bad action (every particular good or bad action is, in this sense, banal). Radical evil is not this or that bad deed but the potentiality for darkness. And yet this potentiality is also the potentiality for light.[11]

It is this discussion of potentiality that highlights for me the problem of interpreting any figure, but perhaps especially homo sacer, as an always already ‘evil’ deed (as our typical reaction to the camp is). Unlikely as it seems, it perhaps offers grounds for new forms of being based in a potentiality that opens up in the fissures and cracks of the supposed absolute power that produced homo sacer. Agamben is Foucaultian enough to know that wherever there is power there is resistance, and even within the conditions of the camp there is no pure power leading to pure abjection. Of course, there are two primary problematics contained in this statement (at least). First, how do we not fall into a reinscription of a kind of existential humanism (like Sartre’s) and simply say we must actualize the potentiality for good through our choices – I believe Agamben’s answer to this is precisely in his notion of the coming community, the multitude. Second, how do individuals act within communities, towards one another, and when they are alone; is there something like a(n ideal) human nature emerging in his work?

To be potential means: to be one’s own lack, to be in relation to one’s own incapacity. Beings that exist in the mode of potentiality are capable of their own impotentiality; and only in this way do they become potential.[12]

It is this relation to impotentiality that is important here. Simply because I actualize potentiality all the time does not mean I necessarily lose my potentiality – although specific force relations may cause me to lose my potentiality. So it is not the case that the worker and the striker are unequally potential (in this case, the striker being a ‘greater potential’ being by withholding labor); it is the relation between potential and impotential that is important. He uses Aristotle to succinctly demonstrate this: “What is potential is capable…Aristotle says, both of being and of not being.”[13] Agamben goes on:

Every human power is adynamia, impotentiality; every human potentiality is in relation to its own privation. This is the origin (and the abyss) of human power, which is so violent and limitless with respect to other living beings. Other living beings are capable only of their specific potentiality; they can only do this or that. But human beings are the animals who are capable of their own impotentiality. The greatness of human potentiality is measured in the abyss of human impotentiality… Here it is possible to see how the root of freedom is to be found in the abyss of potentiality. To be free is not simply to have the power to do this or that thing, nor is it simply to have the power to refuse to do this or that thing. To be free is, in the sense we have seen, to be capable of one’s own impotentiality, to be in relation to one’s own privation. This is why freedom is freedom for both good and evil.[14]

The linkage between freedom, potentiality, power, and the political is the focal point of Agamben’s philosophical project, the nexus where language (poetry) and philosophy (creation of new concepts)[15] converge.

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[1] “The Messiah and the Sovereign,” 161.

[2] Ibid., 163 (italics in the original).

[3] “The Messiah and the Sovereign,” 160 (from Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”).

[4] Ibid., 160 (from Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, pt. 3, p. 1245).

[5] IH, 105 (the translators use the spelling cairology; I use kairology as I am more familiar of the spelling in American contexts of kairos, which is also used by de la Durantaye).

[6] IH, 105 (emphasis added).

[7] “The Messiah and the Sovereign,” 160.

[8] Ibid., 162. He goes on to state: “The thesis I would like to advance is that the messianic kingdom is not one category among others within religious experience but is, rather, its limit concept. The Messiah is, in other words, the figure through which religion confronts the problem of the Law, decisively reckoning with it.” (163)

[9] “The Messiah and the Sovereign,” 167.

[10] Ibid., 168.

[11] Ibid., 181.

[12] Ibid., 182.

[13] Ibid., 182.

[14] Ibid., 182.

[15] This is one of many points of convergence for Agamben and Deleuze. For Deleuze and Guattari, philosophy is the creation of new concepts; for Agamben, poetry and philosophy converge (as in Idea of Prose) in ways that serve as a coming-into-being (as in Man Without Content). It isn’t an exact overlap between them, but there is some fertile ground for further exploration.

agamben’s infancy and history

Giorgio Agamben, trans. Liz Heron, Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience (New York: Verso, 1993).

In Agamben’s third book, Infancy and History (IH), a few themes that seem to be important to his work as a whole begin to stand out. First, his insistence on the existence of a crisis that must be addressed. Second, his idiosyncratic readings of major philosophers that tend to go against the grain of most established scholarship (to my knowledge). Third, his identification through use as primarily an Aristotelian and a Benjaminian. And finally, the centrality of the concept of messianism and messianic time to much of his work. Many of these themes are interrelated, so I will not deal with them as completely stand-alone issues in a rote fashion, but they are themes that seem to pop up in Agamben’s older and more contemporary work and begin to sketch a portrait of a philosophical project.

In what is, by now, becoming characteristic of Agamben’s work, he begins IH with an assertion that forces us to confront something that we normally take for granted. Previously it was aesthetics (The Man Without Content) or the scission between philosophy and poetry (Stanzas). Unlike his previous works, however, he is not calling for an end to experience; on the contrary, he is saying that experience is something we are no longer having and we must put a stop to that. This seems an absurd statement (as de la Durantaye points out[1]), for surely we experience things all the time. Yesterday I experienced being sick, the day before that I experienced frustration while reading. A few months ago I experienced joy when I found out I could, in fact, change departments. It also seems reasonable to say that I can (and do) experience physical pain, emotional trauma, and so on. Not to mention that I experience the sky being blue, Rome’s beauty, and the absolutely singular experience of my niece’s smile. So what on earth does Agamben mean?

For Agamben, the very experiences of everyday life are being “expropriated”:

“For modern man’s average day contains virtually nothing that can still be translated into experience. Neither reading the newspaper, with its abundance of news that is irretrievably remote from his life, nor sitting for minutes on end at the wheel of his car in a traffic jam. Neither the journey through the nether world of the subway, nor the demonstration that suddenly blocks the street. Neither the cloud of tear gas slowly dispersing between the buildings of the city centre, nor the rapid blasts of gunfire from who knows where; nor queuing up at a business counter, nor visiting the Land of Cockayne at the supermarket, nor those eternal moments of dumb promiscuity among strangers in lifts and buses. Modern man makes his way home in the evening wearied by a jumble of events, but however entertaining or tedious, unusual or commonplace, harrowing or pleasurable they are, none of them will have become experience.”[2]

Such statements must, I think, conjure images of Marx’s alienated labor and the Situationists’ alienated… everything, and should be read within and against those contexts. However, at this point in his writing career, he makes little or no reference to this aspect of Marx or the Situationists (Debord, especially, makes appearances later).

To make sense of this, at this time, Agamben turns to Walter Benjamin to parse out a definition of experience. Leland de la Durantaye’s explication was essential to my understanding of this point, as he further articulates what Agamben meant (indeed, he is more clear than Agamben here).[3] He notes that Agamben uses an Italian word, esperienze, which seems close to its English equivalent, experience. However, “[a]s Agamben makes clear, the term he employs is borrowed from Benjamin,” and in German there are two words for experience, Erlebnis and Erfahrung:

“Erlebnis is an experience in the sense of ‘to have an experience,’ something literally ‘lived through,’ reflected in the word’s etymology (its root is leben, “to live”).

When Benjamin speaks of a “change in experience” or a “poverty of experience,” he employs the term Erfahrung because it is Erfahrung that changes you, Erfahrung that affects you in a durable fashion, that you learn from and lean on, and that is handed down to you by tradition. (A clear illustration of this is found in the fact that in German one can know something not by Erlebnis but only by Erfahrung).”[4]

So experience is not merely something we live through, but that which changes us. Again, this is why I think much of this work needs to be read alongside notions of alienation and why Agamben turns to the Situationists in later works.

All of this talk of experience is, to some extent, a prelude to introducing the concept of infancy, which is the primary appearance of a topic that will continue to preoccupy Agamben for years: potentiality. Agamben introduces the term in his discussion of language:

“The transcendental subject is nothing other than the ‘enunciator’, and modern thought has been built on this undeclared assumption of the subject of language as the foundation of experience and knowledge…For if the subject is merely the enunciator, contrary to what Husserl believed, we shall never attain in the subject the original status of experience: ‘pure, and thereby still mute experience’. On the contrary, the constitution of the subject in and through language is precisely the expropriation of this ‘wordless’ experience; from the outset, it is always ‘speech.’ A primary experience, far from being subjective, could only then be what in human beings comes before the subject – that is, before language: a ‘wordless’ experience in the literal sense of the term, a human infancy [in-fancy], whose boundary would be marked by language…A theory of experience could in this sense only be a theory of in-fancy, and its central question would have to be formulated thus: is there such a thing as human in-fancy? How can in-fancy be humanly possible? And if it is possible, where is it sited?”[5]

For Agamben, this concept of infancy, in-fancy, seems to be the pure experience of things without the mediation of language. This state of in-fancy is a state of being before language, and for Agamben, a site of intense potentiality.[6] This lays the groundwork for much of his discussion of language, identity, and community in The Coming Community.

The notion of a pre-linguistic (or language-free) potential being raises, later, the question of time. A misconception of much of Agamben’s work is its reliance on messianism as being somehow overly metaphysical or overly reliant on the revolutionary moment. But what Agamen means by messianic time is not eschatological, but instead, time in its very “now-ness.” He notes, “The original task of a genuine revolution…is never merely to ‘change the world’, but also – and above all – to ‘change time’.”[7] Focusing on a reading of Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History, Agamben develops the notion of messianic time as a time of the Now, an immdediacy. De la Durantaye summarizes it well:

“His [Agamben’s] idea is not of apocalypse but of immediacy; it is not waiting for the Messiah to come, it is acting as though He were already here. It is for this reason that Agamben will say not only…that the central idea in Benjamin’s Theses is “messianic time,” but also that “the paradigm for understanding the present is messianic time” (UL, 18).”[8]

I will not dwell long here, but it is important to note that this sense of immediacy, of urgency in its Now-ness, characterizes a great deal of Agamben’s writing and feeds into the feeling of his constant reaction to crises.

Agamben is now becoming clearer as engaging in a philosophical project that transcends each individual work. The elaborations of in-fancy and messianic time, and the development of a degree of alienation, are becoming central themes in his work. Eventually, he brings them together in The Coming Community, but for now they appear as thoughts on the page, yet to be developed. They are similar to the incomplete works he posits in the introduction (to pull my favorite quote from this book):

“Every written work can be regarded as the prologue (or rather, the broken cast) of a work never penned, and destined to remain so, because later works, which in turn will be the prologues or the moulds for other absent works, represent only sketches or death masks.”[9]

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[1] Leland de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). He notes, “Yet the reader might ask whether his concern is justified, whether the idea of a ‘destruction of experience’ is to be taken seriously. For all the ravages that might be visited upon an individual or a culture, experience, it would seem, is precisely what cannot be destroyed.” (82)

[2] Agamben, IH, 13-14.

[3] de la Durantaye, 85.

[4] de la Durantaye, 85.

[5] Agamben, IH, 47 (italics in the original; bold is my emphasis).

[6] de la Durantaye (92) notes that Agamben later drops infancy/in-fancy altogether to focus on the term potentiality.

[7] Agamben, IH, 91.

[8] de la Durantaye, 103.

[9] Agamben, IH, 3.