Infants, childhood and language in Agamben and Cavell: education as transformation

Abstract

In this paper we explore a new way to deal with social inequality and injustice in an educational way. We do so by offering a particular reading of a scene taken from Minnelli's film The Band Wagon which is often regarded as overly western-centred and racist. We argue, however, that the way in which words and movements in this scene function are expressive of an event that can be read as a new beginning and that it is for this reason in and of itself educational. By drawing on Agamben's and Cavell's insights on childhood and what it means to acquire a language, we argue that in this scene a form of childhood is displayed which denotes a general condition for education to take place in children and grown-ups alike. Hence, education can be understood as a (temporary) interruption of existing power structures and as a transformation of one's existence.

Keywords::

• Agamben
• Cavell
• Arendt
• education
• transformation
• childhood
• infancy

Notes

^1. An earlier and much shorter version of this paper has been presented at the 2014 PES conference in Albuquerque and will appear in the PES Yearbook under the title ‘The show of childhood. Agamben and Cavell on education and transformation’. The reader will also find there a response to our paper by Paul Standish.

^2. In his book Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow (2005), Stanley Cavell discusses two scenes from this film. We would like to thank Paul Standish for the seminar he held on these scenes (as part of a doctoral colloquium) at the Institute of Education (London) in the Fall of 2012, during which he presented his reading of these scenes. It is important to point out that, in this paper, we do not go into these scenes as such, but focus on a very specific part of one of these scenes (see note 3). Furthermore, Standish's reading, if our recollection is correct here, is partly based on what Cavell (2005) has to say about these scenes, but is also informed by a psychoanalytical framework. In this paper we try to offer another reading of a part of one of these scenes on the basis of a conjoined reading of specific aspects of the work by Agamben and Cavell.

^3. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = Gbb4kEk3NbQ

^4. Bringing these two philosophers together is most unusual. Although it is important in its own right to discuss similarities, differences and possible influences on and between these philosophers, we do not have the time to develop this here. On a more anecdotal note, during his stay in the USA, Agamben at one point was a student of Cavell and participated in the seminars Cavell held on Hollywood film at Harvard University (Kishik 2012, 1).

^5. It is in that sense that Arendt can say that education has an ‘essence’: education has essentially nothing to do with politics. Or, to draw from Nancy (2008), the main task of politics (the adults' task to care for the well-being of the world) is to make sure that not everything is political.

^6. An interesting case, portrayed in the 1974 motion picture by Werner Herzog, is that of Kaspar Hauser, a man who only learned to speak when he was biologically mature (cf. Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle, translated in English as The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser). There is no opportunity here to explore this further, but Herzog's superb portrayal of an adult person struggling with language shows something about childhood as a structural dimension of being human in the way we are developing this here. For Kaspar – although being biologically mature – every single word and sentence he says requires effort. It might feel strange, disconcerting perhaps, to see an adult ‘struggle’ with words and sentences like Kaspar does (at least as portrayed by Herzog). And, hearing the man struggle, one feels as if one would like to ‘jump in’ and complete his words and the sentences he started, like we sometimes do when conversing with children, as if to restore or repair the flow of communication (accustomed as we are to communication being fluent). But the point exactly is what is being brought out by this man struggling with coming into language (or, in a more Cavellean idiom, our quest for intelligibility): it draws our attention to the fact that this struggle is not something that ends when childhood is at its end (whenever that may be), but that it concerns a continuous given of our human existence with language. Or still, childhood remains ever part of adulthood.

^7. We do realize that there is an entire tradition (drawing on, e.g., Levinas) within which the idea of a ‘strong’ (that is, self-grounding or self-sufficient) subject is being criticized. Here the argument regarding change – genuine change, in a deep sense, i.e. transformation of one's personal existence – broadly is that whatever transformation someone is going through, this is the result of this person being affected by the (or some) other. Any potentiality for change here is not grounded in the subject itself but is occasioned by something outside the subject. We would also argue that we are undermining the idea of a strong subject. However, because we are approaching the issue from another angle, there are, we think, some important differences with this tradition. That is, though we also locate the occasion of transformation in something that ‘originally’ comes from outside the subject (i.e. language as something that exists prior to the subject's coming into being), this something can only be ‘affect-ive’ when being inherently part of that subject. Put differently, though not grounded in the subject, any potentiality for genuine change is immanent to the subject's own realm of experience, i.e. from the subject's having to appropriate language.

^8. Although we certainly think it is necessary to explore this issue further, we have no opportunity here to expand on the way in which the use of film can contribute to the development of educational theory. We limit ourselves to an analysis of a space of experience opened by a particular piece of film and try to argue why this can be properly called educational. We will deal with the educational role of using film at another opportunity, which will also allow us to articulate more concretely the implications our ideas might have for pedagogical action and ethics, as well as for rethinking the intergenerational difference (which is after all the cornerstone of traditional accounts of education).

^9. The expression ‘Kingdom of Ends’ is of course a Kantian expression. Cavell's analysis of Astaire's dance performance is part of a larger discussion, viz. whether or not Hollywood drama deserves to be ‘praised’. It is against this background that Cavell refers to Kant's philosophy of art, and more specifically to Kant's problematic definition of aesthetic judgement in terms of a purely sensuous and thus an a-moral form of gratification.