Response: education at the crossroads in the experience of potentiality

Abstract

This paper is a response to the previous articles on potentialism. It draws attention to the particular nature of the stance taken by potentialism. Although the project of potentialism is not a simple matter of establishing another discipline in education, it wavers at the junction between the prescriptive (‘what education should be like’) and the descriptive (‘what education is’) understanding towards education. This paper raises the question how the project of ‘potentialism’ relates to the prescriptive and the descriptive, and thereby how educational questions around the experience of potentiality can be shaped. Second, it explores further four key points in the account of potentialism as developed in the previous articles: the educational subject, tiredness vs. exhaustion, language and thinking.

Keywords:

• Potentiality
• Agamben
• education
• phenomenology
• thinking

Notes

1. This paper is an extended version of my reply to the symposium on potentialism in education.

2. Freedom is typically understood in terms of ‘freedom from’ and ‘freedom to’. In this way of thinking, freedom is often assumed as something to achieve or as something we lack. In relation to freedom, human being is often understood as an agency with will and power for freedom. I have argued elsewhere that this kind of thinking has influenced or supported the modernist understanding of the world and human being as recourses (see Yun, forthcoming).