Pedagogical form, study, and formless formation

ABSTRACT

Moving education to Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and the many alternatives during the COVID19-pandemic raised the question of pedagogical form. In a sense, pandemic education in its two-dimensionality was a frictionless, sanitized reduction of education to pure form; it offered a more efficient transfer of knowledge and was marked by a heightened means-to-an-end logic. This has made the informal, unforming and deformational activity that Stefano Harney and Fred Moten call study even more difficult, if not impossible during pandemic education. In this article, we consider the pitfalls of thinking in terms of pedagogical form and the formalization of education by engaging with Emile Bojesen’s work on education as (de)formation. Via Harney and Moten, we reflect on what the concept/practice of study by way of formless formation teaches us about (pre-)pandemic education and about pedagogical forms that might be in keeping with study in post-pandemic education.

KEYWORDS:

• Pandemic education
• pedagogical form
• study
• (de)formation
• call to order
• formless formation

Introduction

Moving education to Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and the many alternatives during the COVID19-pandemic raised the question of pedagogical form. In a sense, pandemic education in its two-dimensionality was a frictionless, sanitized reduction of education to pure form; it offered a more efficient transfer of knowledge and was marked by a heightened means-to-an-end logic. Concomitantly, the digital waiting rooms and the lack of a shared physical space significantly weakened the informality, sociality, and formlessness of our classrooms. This has made the activity that Harney and Moten (2013) call study even more difficult, if not impossible during pandemic education. For study is at odds with the pedagogical forms and formalization of education. According to Harney and Moten, study is informal, unforming (118) and ‘deformational, subformational, formless formation’ (2016). More generally, study is a concept and practice of ‘getting together with others and determining what needs to be learned together, and spending time with that material, spending time with each other,’ but ‘without any sense that we will escape our feeling that we are permanently immature, premature’ and ‘disconnected from the notion of instrumentalism, completion, from leading to something’ (Harney 2019).

Before the pandemic, study in its unforming, deforming and formless ways happened at the educational institution, but very much despite the educational institution, given all of its demands (Harney 2019). From the vantage point of Harney and Moten, education is the incessant capture and suppression by the institution of a mode of getting, being, and learning together that is ‘a means without ends’ (Harney 2020, 6). Put in another sense, education calls study to order (Harney and Moten 2013, 126), suggesting order as the distinction between education and study, and it does so by imposing pedagogical form or form as such. The educational institution does not recognize study; it is only interested in study to the extent that it can make study recognizable and formal. The smooth and quick shift to a more formalized and online education during the pandemic illustrates how the educational institution was already well before the pandemicon its way to capture, to call to order, to impose form on study in the name of education.

In what follows, we bring philosopher of education Emile Bojesen’s (2021) in conversation with Harney and Moten, in particular concerning the questions of form, formation and deformation in Bojesen’s work. Then, we frame Harney and Moten’s concept of the call to order in relation to pedagogical practice as the formative moment through which the educational institution imposes form on a supposed lack of form, i.e. study. After that, we take up Harney and Moten’s idea of formless formation, and Sandra Ruiz and Hypatia Vourloumis’ (2021) subsequent elaboration of it, in order to propose a notion of pedagogical form that is premised on what the educational institution misrecognizes or ignores as formless and informal. Finally, building on Bojesen and Harney and Moten, we reflect on what the concept/practice of study by way of formless formation teaches us about (pre-)pandemic education and about pedagogical forms that might be in keeping with study in post-pandemic education.

Bojesen: deformation, formation, and pedagogical form

Emile Bojesen, in his recent Forms of Education (2021), aims to deconstruct what he calls the ‘humanist legacy,’ which links education to a social mission (1). Bojesen understands the trace of the humanist legacy as follows: ‘a particular form of education, abstracted from the majority of possible experiences, considered necessary and therefore often imposed, because subjection to its processes results in the objective improvement of its subjects and society’ (5). How exactly this improvement is defined or how the link between education and society is interpreted is of secondary importance: ‘the fundamental disposition remains the same: that is the humanist legacy’ (5, emphasis in original). Thus, the humanist legacy in Bojesen’s sense is compatible with sharply different ideas of what education is for: furthering economic growth and employability, the improvement of culture, or enabling citizenship, among others. For Bojesen, there is a common logic which unites these different ideas. Humanism presupposes ‘an original sin of educational lack’ (2; 14; 47–53) on the part of students which then has to be filled up or redeemed through education, in the mode of redemption (27–31). How lack and redemption are understood in specific educational contexts ‘is always manifested in a particular form of education’ (11) guaranteed by a specialized educational institution. Hence, through a particular pedagogical form, the educational institution secures the desired outcome for students and society. Here, too, variety is possible: there can be many different pedagogies. But no matter the exact form that education takes, its structure is today predominantly a mode of excluding the experience of education insofar as it falls outside of these boundaries and is not redeemed by a higher humanist ideal (1). It is this structure that produces a highly artificial, instrumental, and compulsive process, even as schools and theories tout their progressive values.

(…) [T]he notion of what it means to be educated is artificially separated, both in theory and practice, from everyday lives, except in the sense that it distorts and co-opts activities to suit its ends. It is primarily compartmentalised in schools and universities (…), partly by means of their effective monopoly on accrediting the educated person, as well as the compulsory and quasi-compulsory necessity of attendance at those institutions, making it seem as if education would not be possible (because it cannot be certified as ‘valuable’) without them. All of this when what could just as easily be called education occurs every day through individuals’ own experiences, as well as relationally in families, between friends, through purposeful activity that could loosely or definitively be called work, and within and across communities

(Bojesen 2021, 16).

Bojesen thus proposes to start philosophy of education prior to questions concerning differences between pedagogies, and prior even to questions concerning the ultimate ends of institutional education. Premising education and educational thought on pedagogical form, which in Bojesen’s sense compartmentalizes education almost exclusively to schools and education, is a specific manifestation of the humanist legacy. Proponents of this legacy use pedagogical forms to artificially separate education, once pressed into a specific pedagogical form, from educational experiences outside of the classroom. In his attempt to move beyond the humanist legacy, Bojesen’s focus is educational experience as such, which also calls for a new definition of education which recognizes that education can take place within institutions but is not ‘bound’ by them in a necessary or definitive way or in need of redemption through humanist values.

(…) [E]ducation is most openly and non-restrictively defined as the (de)formation of non-stable subjects. It does not require specific formations, nor the formation of specific forms, only that form does not cease being formed in the experience of the non-stable subject. Such a definition of education has the capacity to include all other definitions of education

(Bojesen 2021, 3, emphasis in original).

The non-stability of the subject is here contrasted with the humanist presupposition of a stable and fixed student-subject charting a predetermined course and arriving, hopefully in an efficient manner, at the outcome predefined as ‘correct’ or ‘legitimate’ (55–66). More ambiguously, Bojesen invokes both formation and deformation as potential aspects of educational experiences. This reflects the familiar observation that education, precisely where it matters most, can result in losing ground and familiarity rather than an increase of such comforts. Focusing on the experience of education is intended to capture both the experience of those educated in formal, traditional ways inside of educational institutions and radically other experiences. The humanist legacy values only the former and not the latter: Bojesen’s point is to offer a broader conception of educational experience that includes both (5). For the purpose of pedagogical form, the emphasis on (de)formation is important but not yet a final account of pedagogical form.

Bojesen’s deconstruction of the humanist legacy is powerful, and we are interested in both educational experience in his broad sense and in the processes of formation and deformation which are ambiguously related to it. What remains to be asked, however, is as follows: is there a pedagogical form not bound to the humanist legacy, which does not represent an attempt to abstract away from educational experience or to redeem it in another mode? Harney and Moten’s concept/practice of study prefigures Bojesen’s account in terms of its emphasis on what happens outside of the classroom or before class starts or after class ends. Both Bojesen and Harney and Moten are interested in an educational account that is not limited only to the parameters of the educational institution. Bojesen extends education beyond the premises of the educational institution. For Harney and Moten, too, study can and does take place everywhere and is not confined to the educational institution. In fact, there is a tense relationship between study and the educational institution. Bojesen’s explanation of what it is about the institution that produces this tension is its manifesting the humanist legacy (Bojesen 2021, 16). However, this produces the above question concerning the possibility of pedagogical form beyond this legacy. Harney and Moten introduce the notion of formless formation, which has been further developed by Vourloumis and Ruiz, which allows us to add further complexity to the notion of pedagogical form. In order to build up to this further notion of pedagogical form, we now turn via the call to order to the differences between formal education and study in the view of Harney and Moten.

Harney and Moten: the call to order, study, and formless formation

In an interview by Stevphen Shukaitis in The Undercommons, Moten works with the concept of the ‘call to order’ (2013, 126). As an example of such a call, he draws from his own pedagogical practice to illustrate how the teacher is supposed to become ‘an instrument of governance’ (126) at the beginning of class. Most educators will recognize the situation that Moten sketches. You walk into class, a little bit early, and students are ‘milling around and there’s a conversation already going on’ (125). At some point, we are all, as teachers, supposed to call the class to order, and with that, arrest the sociality, informality and intellectual activity that was already going on. In other words, for Moten, the call to order constitutes a disavowal of study:

What I’m supposed to do is to call that class to order, which presupposes that there is no actual, already existing organization happening, that there’s no study happening before I got there, that there was no study happening, no planning happening

(126).

As Moten suggests, the call to order misrecognizes and disavows what could already be going on, namely study. It implies that actually nothing was going on, or at least, nothing of educational importance. In this article, we understand the call to order to be an imposition of pedagogical form on a situation that is, from the educator’s perspective, considered to be in need of form, lacking form. What the educational institution by way of the educator offers, in fact, is the overcoming of the initial formlessness of the classroom before class properly starts. In that sense, the call to order is the formative moment through which education is reduced to form. Because, rather than a curricular choice for this or that particular pedagogical form(at), the call to order is the announcement as well as the enactment of pedagogical form as such. It doesn’t really matter what kind of pedagogical form class takes, what seems to matter is that the educational institution offers form. In other words, there needs to be pedagogical form for education to take place, for class to start, for education to ‘begin.’ In a way, the beginning of formal education is simultaneously the end of study in Harney and Moten’s sense.

Harney and Moten offer a notion of study as ‘formless formation’ (2016), which enables a conceptualization of pedagogical form which is in keeping with study as opposed to being its foreclosure. Through the informal and formless formation, Harney and Moten put us in a position to develop an understanding of pedagogical form that is not fully determined by the educational institution. They also allow us to bring into view and complicate the distinction between form and formlessness that the educational institution upholds and instantiates via the call to order. In the aforementioned interview in The Undercommons, Moten offers the following understanding of form: ‘Form is not the eradication of the informal. Form is what emerges from the informal’ (Harney and Moten, 128). For Moten, form is that which comes about through the informal and, hence, not a completely different state or easily distinguishable moment in relation to the informal. If we think this through in relation to the classroom, form which retains its close connection to the informal can never be imposed, can never coincide fully with the educational institution. Hence, Moten’s definition of form implies a conception of pedagogical form that acknowledges that which is often deemed non-existent or irrelevant in educational contexts.

In Formless Formation: Vignettes for the End of this World (2021), performance theorists Sandra Ruiz and Hypatia Vourloumis elaborate on Harney and Moten’s idea of formless formation. Their understanding of the formless allows us to further approximate a generative relation between pedagogical form and study. As contended above, the call to order is an imposition of pedagogical form by the educational institution which puts an end to alleged formlessness. For Ruiz and Vourloumis, however, to conceive of form through the formless, ‘does not mean to emphasize a lack of form, but to unleash it from deterministic structure, to attend to form’s momentum and its inseparability from other configurations’ (13). The formless signals a way to understand and practice pedagogical form as open-ended, relational, and forming, or as ‘form that deforms itself’ (8). Ruiz and Vourloumis permit us to think about pedagogical form by way of formlessness, i.e. what the educational institution misrecognizes and disavows as having no form. At the level of pedagogical practice, ‘formless formation’ enables us to consider the informal and formless as sites of possibility. The pedagogical question, then, becomes a question about ‘developing’ those pedagogical forms that are an extension of the informal and the formless, that extend and insist on study. Study, in these terms, becomes a practice in which form, formlessness and the informal become virtually indistinguishable from each other in a process of formation.

Ruiz and Vourloumis offer an irreverently practical characterization of form (not formlessness) as ‘just a thing we do, not a thing we must follow’ (8). Returning to the call to order, this understanding of form highlights the possibility of not doing, not following certain things, or as in Harney and Moten’s (2013) vocabulary, of refusal. Moten is particularly interested in the possibilities (and challenges) of refusing to issue the call to order, to refuse to impose form on the supposedly formless in the name of education. Not issuing the call to order is one way to experiment with formlessness and the informal, to experiment with that which was already going on in the classroom. The call to order, then, is not just an example of how teachers become the educational institution’s ‘instruments of governance’ (126), but simultaneously foregrounds the possibility (and challenges) of pedagogical acts of refusal, of experimenting with the formless and the informal on the level of pedagogical practice. Moten writes:

‘You’re basically saying, let’s just see what happens if I don’t make that gesture of calling the class to order – just that little moment in which my tone of voice turns and becomes slightly more authoritative so that everyone will know that class has begun. What if I just say, “well, we’re here. Here we are now.”’

(126).

Conclusion: pandemic lessons for education via study and form

The COVID-19 pandemic occasions a reflection on pedagogical form in part because it brought into view alternatives to established ways of ‘delivering’ education, such as the seminar or the large-scale lecture. Moving education to Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and similar teleconferencing services provided a stark contrast to established pedagogical forms and educators and students were able to perform this switch at an extremely short notice. In our analysis, this speed was made possible at least in part by an approach to pedagogical form that predated the pandemic. The switch to teleconferencing services was not a radical departure from, but a further radicalization of the fact that even in the pre-pandemic university, study was, in Harney’s words, ‘almost impossible’ (2019).

What changed during the pandemic was that those educating and those being educated were more explicitly sundered from what is formless about education, from that which cannot be recognized by specialized educational institutions such as schools and universities. Bojesen offers a reason for this lack of recognition: the humanist legacy, which postulates an original sin of educational lack before its onset and offers itself as a way to redeem experiences in such a way that they are legitimated as truly educational experiences. Forms of education that manifest this humanist legacy in that sense ‘abstract from’ prior experiences which are ‘artificially separated, both in theory and practice, from everyday lives, except in the sense that it distorts and co-opts activities to suit its ends’ (Bojesen 2021, 3; 16). In our view, the pandemic occasioned a deepening of such abstraction and artificial separation. The dependence of formal education on prior experiences was thus expressed through the even greater distance created between everyday lives and the accompanying educational experiences on the one hand and what counts as formal education on the other hand. Bojesen’s way of accommodating a broader notion of educational experience which includes both everyday lives and formal educational activities is, in our view, a more apt way to define education as the ‘(de)formation of unstable subjects’ (3).

Harney and Moten, as after them Ruiz and Vourloumis, reflect on study as formless formation in this spirit, thus further complicating the notion of pedagogical form. For us, this is a necessary complication since it shows that the relationship between form and study, as these authors understand it, is not fixed. In a similar vein to Bojesen, Harney and Moten resist and refuse the call to order which cuts off pre-existing education, the sociality that was already in operation before and outside of the classroom. Bojesen and Harney and Moten think about educational experience and study in terms of what is already there, already going on, instead of as a lack to be filled or redeemed. Another commonality is that for Bojesen, specific pedagogical forms, though they may differ sharply from each other, share the ‘same fundamental disposition’ (3), to which Bojesen adds: insofar as they are informed by the humanist legacy. Similarly, for Harney and Moten, the call to order is a way of saying: ‘Let there be form!.’ Which form is not specified: but there needs to be form in order to ensure, safeguard, and promote real education, which requires that class really starts. What was already there is dismissed as formless in the sense of lacking form: ‘there’s no study happening before I got here’ (Harney and Moten 2013, 126). The notion of formless formation complicates this simple distinction between class having started and not started, between pedagogical form and the formless. From the perspective of formless formation, form in the sense of the call to order is more than a predetermined backdrop to the education going on; rather, form is in such cases imposed or enforced, suppressing study in the process. Study thus raises the question of form in a different way: what is form if we begin before it is assumed as a backdrop within the institutions where individuals ‘receive’ their education? And what is form, in fact, if we begin before institutionalizing and individualizing assumptions have been made? Not formlessness as an absence of form, which would correspond to the original sin of educational lack, but form as an active principle: form as a process of forming and being-formed, something we do and which remains open-ended rather than something passive and given. Again, form is not something external, which determines education as if from a distance, but continually ‘figuring out’ (Moten 2019) form is part of what study is, keeping it ever open to new possibilities.

In that sense, the pandemic shows not only the importance of study because its loss is felt and experienced by all those involved but also, and at the same time, the importance of both form and formlessness. During the pandemic, we suggest, education was reduced to pure form. But not all forms are equally capacious: if the call to order suppresses, disavows, formalizes, then study, as discussed by Harney and Moten, opens up, extends, and invites. Study can also be issued as a call, but now understood as an ‘open insistence’ (Harney and Moten 2013, 109) to study, to take part in open-ended, formless formation. In this sense, it is only through the concept/practice of study that we can learn the lessons of education under pandemic conditions: not just for that set of circumstances but for forms of education under the sway of the humanist legacy more generally.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.