Reconstruction Vol. 14, No. 2
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Introduction: "This unnamable movement of difference-itself": Exploring Phenomenology and Education / Elias Schwieler
<1> Today, phenomenology can take on a wide variety of meanings depending on who you ask. And so can education. This special issue of Reconstruction is an attempt to provide essays that reflect exactly this variety of the meanings of phenomenology in relation to education. Of course, the essays presented here will not provide an exhaustive study of the uses of phenomenology in education as currently practiced, but should be seen as attempts to reflect some of the possibilities phenomenology poses to education.
<2> The intricate relationship between phenomenology and education is captured in Jon Olzon's sculpture entitled The Super Pedagogue. The sculpture reprinted in this special issue to highlight both the phenomenology of education and phenomenology as education. The sculpture wants to capture the evolution of the physical characteristics of the pedagogue through the figure of irony. The material irony of the sculpture also invokes the intellectual characteristics of the teacher pedagogue, and thus becomes a critique of the ideal and/or idea of the teacher as super perceptive, which is indicated by the exaggerated ears, eyes, and mouth. Moreover, the sculpture implies the phenomenology of education, that is, education as the bracketed phenomenon of education stripped bare of any interfering context. And it also suggests phenomenology as education - the phenomenological necessity of attending to detail and to the idea, which this philosophical movement, in some not always unproblematic ways, shares with education. On the literal side of the ironical movement, the sculpture points to the importance of art for both education and phenomenology, and in its implicit reference to classical Greek sculptures invokes history and tradition as inescapable for both phenomenology and education.
<3> Jon Olzon's sculpture can thus be said to expose the difference of phenomenology and education by way of the irony inherent in the sculpture. That is, the sculpture depicts an idea of education, in the form of the super pedagogue, while at the same time constituting a work of art and a phenomenon there to be thought through.
<4> In Of Grammatology, Derrida notes the following about thought in reference to Heidegger: "Outside of the economic and strategic reference to the name that Heidegger justifies himself in giving to an analogous but not identical transgression of all philosophemes, thought is here for me a perfectly neutral name, the blank part of the text, the necessarily indeterminate index of a future epoch of differance. In a certain sense, "thought" means nothing. […] This thought has no weight. It is, in the play of the system, that very thing which never has weight. Thinking is what we already know we have not yet begun; measured against the shape of writing, it is broached only in the epistémè" (93). What I would like to suggest is to think through the difference(-itself) of phenomenology and education. And, in consequence, "think through" should be read, here, both as a way of thinking and the act of carefully considering the possibilities inherent in linking phenomenology and education. This might be a way to, in Derrida's terms, broach the two epistémès that phenomenology and education constitute. The difference between them is signaled most obviously by the conjunction "and," which binds together the two epistémès but at the same time keeps them separated, and so holds each in suspense.
<5> I would like to suggest that the double movement of thinking through, as a way or path of thinking and an act or performance, lets us approach the difference of these epistémès as difference-itself. On difference-itself Derrida notes: "This common root, which is not a root but the concealment of the origin and which is not common because it does not amount to the same thing except with the unmonotonouos insistence of difference, this unnameable movement of difference-itself, that I have strategically nicknamed trace , reserve, or differance, could be called writing only within the historical closure, that is to say within the limits of science and philosophy" (93). That is, difference-itself is here the conjunction "and," the arche-writing that disrupts science and philosophy as epistémès governed by the metaphysics of presence. What a thinking through of phenomenology and education can begin is thus an Aufhebung in Derrida's sense of this Hegelian concept, which means, not so much a sublation or sublimation as a dissemination that deconstructs the two epistémès by carefully reading one episteme with and through the other. And in disseminating they potentially become ironic exegeses of each other.
<6> In line with these thoughts, the essays in this special issue of Reconstruction represent different ways to approach the epistémès phenomenology and education. It is my hope that the essays will give the reader ways into thinking about phenomenology and education in, if not new, then at least different ways. And so, I will let the essays speak for themselves.
Work Cited
Derrida, J. (1982) Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
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