Turning the gaze to the self and away from the self – Foucault and Weil on the matter of education as attention formation

ABSTRACT

Through writings of Simone Weil and Michel Foucault, the article explores the notion of education as the formation of the attending and attentive subjects. Both writers have in different ways acknowledged the important relation between attention and the self. While Weil develops a spiritual form of attention, an attention which can be trained in any form of serious studying, aiming at dissolving the illusion of the self, Foucault understands attention as an important aspect in the Greek notion of the care of the self, which was developed outside of and due to the limitations of pedagogy aiming at a self-attentive self-formation. Both non-egotistic notions of attention address ethical and educational dimensions of human subjectivity. Foucault’s notion is anti-institutional and Weil’s notion is non-formative. As such, both perspectives inform educational thinking and practice by highlighting attention as a crucial aspect of both the active and the contemplative subject.

KEYWORDS:

• Simone Weil
• Michel Foucault
• attention
• education

Introduction

The importance of attention has been more or less a general theme within the history of educational thinking. Educational practices are per definition relational domains, where enactments of showing and pointing out are performed in order for people to act, re-act or transform (see, e.g. Mollenhauer 2014). As such, they are connected to attention in at least two ways. First, they point towards something, some specific content, certain ideas or different ways of living (Rytzler 2017). Second, by doing this, they summon transformative and self-active responses (Benner 2005). In other words, educational practices invite children and students to become attentive subjects (Sobe 2004; Rytzler 2017). However, to address the question of human subjectivity is to enter into a complex domain of thought. During the twentieth century, the very notion of a human subject with an intentional consciousness (i.e. attention) became scrutinized, from ontological, epistemological and ethical perspectives, especially from the field of philosophy (Nagel 1974; Heidegger 1981; Levinas 1985) and from the psychological sciences (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991; Arvidson 2006; Mole 2011). In the philosophy of education, critical inquiries into human subjectivity have led to fruitful discussions about education as an inter-relational and fundamentally uncertain human practice, where human subjectivity is understood as something that is dependent upon its relations to the surrounding world of other human beings (see, e.g. Biesta 2014; Bingham and Sidorkin 2004). In this article, I take as my starting point a relational approach to human subjectivity and human becoming by turning to educationally significant discussions on the relation between the self and attention, provided by Simone Weil and Michel Foucault.

The concept of attention is vast, and it can be connected to specific neurological processes in the brain (Parasuraman 2000), a complex of cognitively challenging activities (Mole 2011), a set of wanted or expected behaviors in specific social contexts (Mole 2011; Ljungdalh 2016), or different qualitative and purposeful relations between a person and the surrounding world (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991; Mole 2011; Arvidson 2006). According to Bernard Stiegler (2010), education is an intergenerational process of attention formation. However, the prevalent western discourse on education is characterized by an ever-increasing psychologization and individualization of the young generation (Stiegler 2010; Pierce 2013), where measurability, standardization, and marketization are key-terms (Biesta 2014). In this discourse, notions of education as a fundamentally uncertain practice of intergenerational and interpersonal interaction are given less and less operational space. Instead of being an educational concept that concerns the formation of human subjectivity (Sobe 2004), attention has come to signify an inherent capacity of the individual student, the lacking of which is explained pathologically and compensated for medically (Pierce 2013; Wedge 2015; Ljungdalh 2016; Rytzler 2017).

Attention is also a well-discussed topic within contemporary philosophy of education. There it is approached as an important aspect of educational practices in ways that often move beyond psychologically and instrumentally biased educational research (see, e.g. Rytzler 2017; Ergas 2015; Pierce 2013). Many of the more philosophical approaches to education do not start from a psychological definition of attention. Rather, they draw on philosophy, scholastics and etymology in order to either discuss attention as an educational concept or give suggestions on how education could promote and develop attention. These approaches focus more on what signifies an attentive activity rather than on how an attentional process works (see, e.g. Ergas 2015; O’Donnell, 2015; Caranfa 2010a, 2010b; Roberts 2011; Lewin 2014; Masschelein and Simons 2013; Lewis 2012; Cornelissen, 2010).

The link between education and attention can be developed by putting forth the specificity of an educational relation as a realm of attention formation (Stiegler 2010). In order to explore the notion of education as a relational practice that forms attentive subjects, the writings of Simone Weil and Michel Foucault are enlightening, as both thinkers, in quite different ways, have acknowledged the important relation between attention and the self. While Weil develops a spiritual form of attention, an attention which can be trained in any form of serious studying, aiming at dissolving the illusion of the self (and maybe the self in itself), Foucault understands attention as an important aspect in the Greek notion of the care of the self, which was developed outside of and due to the limitations of pedagogy aiming at a self-attentive self-formation. Both notions of attention have a non-egotistic dimension that, in line with Foucault, is anti-institutional and, in line with Weil, is non-formative. Due to this, their respective perspectives inform educational thinking and practice in interesting ways, especially when it comes to the question of the attentive subject. I will in the following paragraphs show how Foucault and Weil contribute to the creation of a space for thinking of and dwelling upon the very notion of human subjectivity and also how they provide important insights when questions about subjectivity are framed educationally – that is when subjectivity is connected to the event when someone is called or summoned into presence and self-activity by a concrete other (see, e.g. Todd, 2003; Benner 2005; Säfström 2005; Biesta 2014).

Foucault and attention as care of the self

In his book Taking Care of Youth and the Generations, Bernard Stiegler (2010) argues that education, as a form of attention-formation, has to do with the caring of the maturation of society. As such, attention must be understood as something that is based on caring and waiting:

Attention, always at the base of any care system, is formed in schools, but as a rational discipline of adoption inculcated into the psyche of the student-as-scholar (i.e., rationally adopting a knowledge or skill) before the entire literate world (initially, classmates). (Stiegler 2010, 60)

Caring, to Stiegler, is not only an interpersonal practice with ethical dimensions (c.f., Noddings, 1984), as it also has a collective and formative dimension. When developing the notion of caring, Stiegler (2010) acknowledges an important point that Foucault made in later years, concerning its formative aspects. He turns to Foucault’s genealogy of the word, where caring is connected to different ways and techniques of attending to both oneself and the world, promoted through the famous motto by the oracle of Delphi: 'Take care of yourself!’ In his lecture-series, The Hermeneutics of The Subject, Foucault (1981–82/2005) argues that the motto 'Take care of yourself!’ over time transformed into another motto, namely ‘Know yourself!’ While the care of the self is a way of turning one’s gaze inwardly, of focusing on the self as a contingent entity that could be formed and developed through care and concern in specific socio-historical contexts, the knowledge of the self turns the self into an object of knowledge and truth and soon disappears completely as an object of possible development. Stiegler (2010) claims that, due to this misreading of the original motto of care for the self, education and other social institutions has come to be founded upon a double materiality that distributes both power and knowledge, allowing for control over both body/space- and mind/time-configurations.

While the reception of his thinking tends to put emphasis on the intricate network of discursive power-structures which regulate people’s actions, sayings and doings, i.e. their possibilities or limitations of becoming subjects, Foucault himself, in his later years, starts to rethink his whole project (c.f., Gros 2005). According to Foucault, the social sciences have during the twentieth century reached a point where there exist three possible paths of approaching the question of the subject: One is to pursue objective knowledge through analytical philosophy and positivism. Another is to construct a new analysis of signifying systems, such as the structuralism formed by linguistics, sociology and psychoanalysis. The third path, which is his own, is to try to put the subject back into the historical domain of practices and processes in which it is constantly formed and transformed (Gros 2005). Foucault claims that, since the historical sciences have turned everything into objects and philosophers discuss a subject disconnected from history, there is a need for a genealogy of the subject to fill the void between history and philosophy (Gros 2005).

The care of the self as a practice of and for life

The notion of a culture of the self is used by Foucault to indicate that the question of the self can only be approached if it is located ‘within the network of values and social practices that come to characterize a culture at a particular time’ (Besley and Peters 2007, 5). Gros (2005) writes: ‘If Heidegger shows how mastery of tekhné gives the form of objectivity, Foucault demonstrates how the care of the Self, and particularly Stoic test practices, make the world, as occasion of knowledge and transformation of the self, the site where a subjectivity emerges’ (Gros 2005, 524). Foucault (1981–82/2005) sees in some of the early Greek thinkers a notion of the self that is not dependent upon a greater power, such as God, or Discourse. The subject and the truth are not bound together externally as if in the grip of a higher power, but as the result of an irreducible choice of existence. By going through Platonic, Hellenistic and Christian texts, Foucault identifies the care of the Self as a set of techniques of self-formation. By doing this, Foucault highlights the double process of subjects being both constituted through practices of subjection and liberated from the cultural environment. A true subject is possible, therefore, no longer in the sense of subjection, but of subjectivation (Gros 2005, 511). By turning from power to subjectivity, Foucault complicates his own studies on governmentality since he interprets the care of the self as a set of different techniques of the self rather than different techniques of dominating the self. However, these techniques have become harder to detect in the modern West since its focus on knowledge and truth has out-powered the care of the self in favor of knowledge of the self:

According to the modern mode of subjectivation, the constitution of the self as subject depends on an indefinite endeavor of self-knowledge, which strives only to reduce the gap between what I am truly and what I think myself to be; what I do, the actions I perform, only have value insofar as they help me to know myself better. Foucault’s thesis can thus be put in the following way: For the subject of right action in Antiquity is substituted the subject of true knowledge in the modern West. (Gros 2005, 523)

Foucault detects a reoccurring theme of criticizing educational institutions for not being able to arrange a satisfying passage from childhood to adulthood. It is due to this pedagogical deficiency that philosophical discourse grows so strong in the Greek society (Foucault, 1981–82/2005, 87). This philosophical discourse is nothing other than taking care of the soul. So the care of the self is not limited to a specific time in life but is promoted as a practice both for life and of life: ‘The function of the practice of the self will be as much correction as training. Or again: the practice of the self will become increasingly a critical activity with regard to oneself, one’s cultural world, and the lives led by others’ (Foucault, 1981–82/2005, 93).

The practice of the self is established against a background of errors, bad habits and is therefore developed on an axis of correction/liberation rather than on an axis of training/knowledge (Foucault, 1981–82/2005). As such, Foucault makes the care of the self a kind of unlearning. The philosopher’s action on the soul in Antiquity is similar to the doctor’s action on the body. Whereas medicine takes care of the body, philosophy takes care of the soul. This is because the care of the self has a critical function which is that it is a way of disciplining the self through the unlearning of bad habits. That is also why the care of the self is perceived as a form of struggle, often described with different types of war-metaphors or terms from athletics. The care of the self also has a therapeutic function, which makes it closer to (Greek) models of medicine than models of pedagogy. If pedagogy is organized as a preparation for life, the care of the self is a form of life. This form of life is characterized by (a) turning to one’s self, (b) dwelling in oneself and (c) establishing certain relations with oneself (Foucault, 1981–82/2005).

The care of the self is a practice not only for the privileged but according to Foucault (1981–82/2005) it appears as a universal principle for everyone (except for the slaves). However, the care of the Self takes shape in specific networks. It is never a universal form of care, but always specific to a specific group or culture. Thus, the care of the self is not a hierarchical question but a question of willingness to listen to and to be capable of taking care of the self. That means that it is addressed to all, but only a few could pursue a care of the self in as much as they actually practically are able to establish a caring relation to themselves.

The care of the other

The care of self in the Greek practices is a necessary means for caring for others, so the care of the self is at first a practice that is, if not reserved, so in any case premiered for those with power, for those who should take care of others must also take care of themselves. So caring becomes a way of paying attention to oneself as well as to the other. The care of the self is not an individual activity. The other ‘is indispensable for the practice of the self’ (Foucault, 1981–82/2005, 127). To be a subject is the function of living with others. According to Foucault (1981–82/2005), the care of the self is directed towards those who suffer from some degree of stultitia, which means those who are never satisfied. A stultus is someone who is prey to the ‘winds of external representations’, accepting them without getting mixed up with desires, ambition or mental habits. Someone who cannot discriminate objective representations from subjective elements, someone who remembers nothing, and someone who does not ‘direct his attention and will to a precise and well-determined end’ (Foucault, 1981–82/2005, 131). A stultus is constantly changing his life, willy-nilly, i.e. without the use of memory, attention, direction or will. Whereas the only object that can will freely without external determination is the self (i.e., the sapientia), the stultus separates the will from the self. There is, therefore, a need for an intervention from someone who has gained self-control, an educator. The care of the self needs the other’s insertion, intervention and presence. However, this intervention is not in the form of educare, the transmission of theoretical knowledge, but in the form of educere, the offering of a hand to the subject. It is an intervention that focuses on the mode of being of the subject himself that enables a transition from stultitia to sapientia. (Foucault, 1981–82/2005, 131–135).

The key-term in Foucault’s analysis of the care of the self is practice instead of discourse, philosophy rather than rhetoric. This practice, however, comes in different forms. The specific care of the self depends on whatever available forms and opinions there are about the self in a particular social context. From Foucault’s genealogy of the subject, it is shown how a society or a culture enables the emergence of some subjectivity in favor of another. The care of the self, as examined by Foucault, is first and foremost a cultural activity in that it addresses and forms a certain attentive subject, through attitudes, dispositions and values concerning life in its generality.

Weil and attention as ‘un-selfing’

While Foucault is interested in the formation of the self in the practicalities of engaging in and with a culture, Simone Weil, rooted in the mysticism of religious practices, aims toward a dissolution of the self. Whereas Foucault investigates the care of the self as an unfolding of subjectivity due to the close attention to the self, the self of Weil has to resist any form of identifying good values to the self, because this would only have these values destroyed. By doing that, Weil adapts a more mystical approach and promotes practices for taking care of the not-self. This ‘un-selfing’ is characterized by an uninterested relation to the world, through the attainment of grace. Grace is one of Weil’s most central and complex concepts, and her thinking has been described as an epistemology of grace (Andic 1999). It is beyond the scope of this article to delve into it at length but grace has to do with a person’s ability to resist the ‘gravity’ of the social order. Gravity is to Weil a sort of material pull one experiences when living together with others. Grace is to Weil a form of negative gravity that makes people ‘fall towards the heights’ (Weil 2002, 4).

Grace is achieved through the practice of attention, which has to do with the upheaval of gravity, and is as such a negative effort. By negative Weil means that attention cannot be produced through the use of muscle effort, but rather by resisting muscle effort. Through grace, the love of both God and our neighbor is possible and to Weil the ultimate form of attention is best described as a form of waiting: ‘This everyday loving attention to what is given to us and fulfills us, an attention that is itself given – for both come from beyond our egoistic materialistic self – is the intellect of grace’ (Andic 1999, 9).

Attention as waiting

Weil’s attention as waiting can be seen as a suspension in time and space as it is never attention to something known or expected. It is an attention without intention that, somewhat surprisingly, is best practiced in school studies, according to Weil. This is because Weil (2012) considers school studies to be the perfect form of exercising a form of attention that is based on pure interest. Pure, in the sense that it excludes intentionality. If one was to add intentionality and purpose, school studies would only lead to a form of learning, where attention only would be the means for the process of learning. To Weil, attention is not about executing muscle efforts but a matter of concentrating through the activities of looking, listening and waiting (Caranfa 2010a). While school studies develop a less elevated part of our attention, they are completely effective for increasing the power of attention that will be available in the moment of prayer. To Weil (2012), school studies should only be a means for practicing attention, not for reaching specific results. There is true desire wherever there is an effort of attention. An exercise of study is performed with the sole desire to perform it correctly not in order to achieve anything else, like grades for instance. It is about applying oneself to an exercise, welcoming any errors that may occur, and openly trying to uncover the origin of each error (Weil 2012, 23). To Weil, understanding is not an issue in this case, since making errors, as well as succeeding, are experiences that both develop attention. This is on the condition that the studies are performed with a kind of negative effort rather than an effort of the will. By turning to the errors and the mistakes, Weil highlights the importance of critically examining our own stupidity.

Weil’s notion of attention takes the form of an aesthetic sensibility that can be cultivated through the practice of solitude (Caranfa 2007). The subject cultivates this sensibility through the exposure to art and other aesthetic and sensible experiences. Weil’s thinking is not rooted in the Cartesian ego but rather in ‘the inspiring source itself, manifesting through us only when no ego or agent is in the way’ (Finch 1999, p.33). This inspiring source is to Weil the work of a specific form of attention:

Human beings, utterly fragile, at the mercy of every material accident and at any moment exposed to the possibility of affliction, have only two tiny points where they are linked to something else. One is the capacity for impersonal, impartial attention, the waiting that is an intense receptivity to that which comes from outside; the other is the ineradicable expectation in every human being that Good will be done to us. (Finch 1999, 15)

In the quote, Finch describes Weil’s notion of waiting as an impartial attention or intense receptivity to outside impressions. This form of waiting has a strong ethical resonance, and it is to Weil a necessary condition for a pure encounter with other human beings.

Weil’s other

In the very notion of the self, Weil detects a too fixed connection between the world and the world as it is shown to me. Attention is not will because it is connected to desire but without any accomplished goal in sight (thus a form of waiting). These desires must be deprived of their mental orientation. Appearance is what attracts and forms our attention and thus also what distracts us from paying attention to being. The attentive subject of Weil is a non-subject or a self-less subject. It is not, however, an egotistic way of losing oneself; the attentive subject of Weil is also an ethical subject, open towards the unpredictable emerging of the other. That is also why school studies, if they are performed with real attention, can lead to grace and love of the afflicted. Weil’s subject waits without knowing how the other will appear or address her. Weil (2012) states that the key to a Christian conception of studies is that prayer consists of attention: ‘Never, in any case, is any effort of true attention lost. It is always completely effective on the spiritual plane, and therefore also, in addition, on the inferior plane of the intelligence, for all spiritual light enlightens the intelligence’ (22). Truth is to Simone Weil a matter of attention and contemplation as well as a matter of action and life: ‘Nothing can rightly restrict the freedom of the intellect (indeed, it is an obligation) to attend to everything and let each show itself for what it is. We must want to see things as they are and not as we want to see them’ (Andic 1999, 6). Intelligence can only be led by desire, and not muscle effort. A short period of intense attention is far better than hours of contracting muscles and the following (false) feelings of achievement. Attention is nevertheless much more difficult, as it destroys the evil within ourselves. It is about suspending our thought in order to be penetrated by the object of study. Weil (2002) coins the concept of decreation, which is a sort of acceptance of death or a willingness to become nothing. Decreation is, however, not destructive because it is a process of liberating a tied up energy. What man can know about himself is only what is lent to him by circumstances. Weil (2002) accepts that the self is formed in the intersection between our outer impressions and inner sensations, but she also aims to renounce this self as it only stands in the way for the attainment of grace. Weil’s concept of attention has more to do with a readiness to receive without searching. The attentive subject thus must resist the desire to be active. Waiting is to Weil the essence of paying attention.

Foucault and Weil brought into conversation

In their respective projects, Weil and Foucault seem to seek a sort of ‘authentic political spirituality’ (Duttenhaver and Jones 2010, 190), something that is possible through the practices of caring for the self and attention as waiting. By doing this they express a ‘... profound identity between necessity and the collective formation of social structures and individual identities’ (ibid., 183). While there is a similar goal for both Foucault and Weil, to create an active domain for the unfolding of human subjectivity, they suggest different ways of doing this. Whereas Foucault seems to become more and more aware of the possibilities for the subject to form according to the techniques and practices of caring for the self, Weil does not put much hope in neither the corporeal traits of self-formation nor the self as such. Weil, like Foucault, seeks for a reexamination of Greek culture which does not make it a humanistic contrast to the supernaturalist Christianity (Finch 1999). As Foucault shows, there was in the Greek cultures a spiritual side and according to Finch (1999), the very idea of the cultural there becomes a mediation between the human and the divine, whereas the social functions as the home of the collective ego (Finch 1999, p.18). Foucault shows that the self is empty in a sense that it can only emerge from within a specific culture or context. As the self as such is embedded in a complex of relations (of both power and care) it can never exist as a singularity. That is why the care of the self always has to be a practice, a doing. In this practice, the self emerges through a sort of double-gesture of turning both inwardly and outwardly: the formation of the self that comes as a result of the care of the self, is always a formation dependent upon the existence and the care for the other. Weil works in a rather opposite direction. She renounces the self in a way that gives it an ethical meaning, through the uninterested relation(s) to its object(s) of attention. The training of this self-less attention is characterized by looking, listening and, most importantly, waiting. While these techniques also have a very practical nature, they are supposed to work in a non-formative direction, in the sense that they work against a consolidation of the ego-self. Through Weil’s thinking, the non-cultural self, or the non-self, becomes a self that is striving for non-striving. Attention as waiting is the negative effort through which one attains Grace.

Weil, Foucault and the matter of education

With a notion of education that is formulated in the intergenerational and interpersonal nexus of becoming and transformation of the unique subject, attention becomes a spiritual element that can be both practiced and developed:

Thought and intelligence are always already collective: both are part of a process of individuation that is actually a metastabilizing co-individuation of the transindividual, where a circulating intelligence, as interlegere, forms an organological milieu linking minors and adults, parents and children, ancestors and descendants, and the generations containing mind and spirit: pneuma, ruah, spiritus. (Stiegler 2010, 34)

In the quote, Stiegler points to the peculiar nature of education that works as both a destabilizing and a formative process that cuts through the collective in the same way as it creates a spiritual milieu where intelligence grows together with the collective and the subjects coming together therein.

I believe that it is in the tension between subject as constituted as a relation of power(s) and subject as exercising power in this spiritual and collective field that the writings of Foucault and Weil become interesting as they both address the possibilities and the limitations for a subject to come forth. Important to both writers in relation to this ambivalent existence of the subject becomes the practice of attention, either as a care of the self (Foucault) or as a form of self-less waiting (Weil). Even if the Greek notion of the care of the self, in fact, is promoted as a way of letting the self maintain an open and not completely determined character, it is a self that is measured or evaluated in relation to a social or cultural context, even if culture has a more spiritual dimension in Antiquity than in Modernity. Weil’s way of renouncing the self as a way toward an ethical being in the world, where the other does not have to be grasped in cultural or contextual terms, can be used as a way of safeguarding this spiritual dimension of culture, towards which Stiegler points in the above quote.

As withdrawal, selflessness and affliction are necessary ingredients in Weil’s notion of school studies as means to develop attention, the significance of educational practices as relational domains becomes important, mainly because of the painful characteristics of this process (Tubbs 2005). Tubbs describes the teacher as a slave under the truth emerging from the student’s relation to the task at hand or the specific subject matter. The teacher, therefore, becomes both master and servant in relation to the student and her relation to the world. Understanding attention, following Weil’s writings on the matter – as a negative effort or as submitting oneself toward an unknown other – Lewin (2014) argues that the activity of paying attention within an educational context, such as the classroom, can be regarded as a gift from the student to the teacher. Furthermore, since attention and teaching both are relational practices they are both in need of a language that can encompass their respective nature of ‘being in between’ (Lewin 2014). Through his reading of Weil, Roberts (2011) claims that the development of attention is at the same time epistemological and moral.

With their rather different approaches to the self – the cultural approach of Foucault and the spiritual approach of Weil – one cannot claim that they were thinking about the same thing. However, from an educational perspective, I believe it is fruitful to bring them into a sort of conversation as the one I have presented in this article. This is due to the peculiar nature of attention itself, as it lingers on the boarder of the outwardly active subject and the inwardly reflective subject. Attention is a crucial aspect of both the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’ self. If education is conceptualized as a form of attention formation, Foucault and Weil are helpful as they provide important insights on how and why one should avoid too narrow conceptions of both attention and the subject. If educational practices are understood as relational domains where attentive subjects are summoned, attention becomes the very nexus of these relations. Foucault and Weil point to attention as a form of doing and living in a world of others, rather than a single entity that grows through egotistic adaptation to the surrounding context. With Foucault, the attentive subject is a form of being-with and being-in the world, and with Weil the quality of this being-with and being-in the world is closely connected to a form of ethical waiting in the world. With their original approaches, they contribute to educational thinking as both thinkers acknowledge the human subject as a unique cultural and spiritual subject in a cultural and spiritual world.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.