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Notes
See also the recent excellent analysis on Deleuze, thinking and education by Itay Snir (2020).
In line with Stengers, Schildermans uses the vocabulary of setting out on the wager of improbable, but potentializing ‘propositions’. Deleuze (1994, 157), on the contrary, speaks in this context of an ‘extrapropositional’ endeavour, as for him interrogation is exactly a form of questioning that is determined by ‘propositions’, where the term proposition in his vocabulary denotes already set, probable answers.
and thus not merely problematization as one of the three basic dimensions of study practices Schildermans (2021, 131) discerns in his book.
Interrogation ‘dismembers problems and questions and reconstitutes them in accordance with the propositions of the common empirical consciousness – in other words, according to the probable truths of a simple doxa’ (Deleuze 1994, 157).
With the notable exception of the way in which Schildermans (2021, 134) uses Stengers and Haraway to define the art of attention as ‘tentacular’, tap** into the Latin origin of the word, which means both to feel and to try. Attention is thus comparable to the challenge of finding one’s way in the dark, where the sense of touch (and probably equilibrium) guides us more than eyesight and where we must need to risk hurting ourselves by colliding with an obstacle in order to find our way out.
I will immediately add that, obviously, this Nietzschean turn might seem odd, in view of his well-known aversion for the university institution. In Stengers’s oeuvre (and of course Deleuze’s writings too) a similar bias against educational practices in general can be noted. Therefore, I was a little dissatisfied by the fact that Schildermans doesn’t go deeper into this issue, given that Stengers plays such an important role in his argument. I am - to be more exact - left with the pressing question of how Stengers views her own teaching, as she is a university lecturer after all, and how this might be inspirational for conceiving of study practices.
Cf. the forthcoming contribution of Schildermans in the special issue on ‘The Art of the Possible. On Pragmatism’s Potential for Making Futures in Troubled Times’ in Educational Theory.
Again, the Stengersian vocabulary Schildermans draws upon might run counter to my analysis, as he analyzes study practices in terms of ‘ruminations of common sense’ (which – at the level of phraseology – seems to point in an anti-Deleuzian direction). To prevent confusion, it might be useful to make a distinction between common, communal, tasteless and vulgar on the one hand and commonizing on the other hand (which would be in line with the stress on becoming: the collective a studiers involved in thinking around an obligation is always something that needs to be formed).
References
Ahrens, S. 2014. Experiment and exploration. Forms of World-Disclosure: from epistemology to Bildung (A. Rossiter, Trans.). Cham: Springer.
Deleuze, G. 1994. Difference and Repetition (P. Patton, Trans.). London: Continuum.
Deleuze, G. and Guattari. 1994. What is Philosophy? (H. Tomlinson and G. Burchill). London: Verso.
Haraway, D. 2016. Staying with the trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.
Lefebvre, A. 2008. The image of Law: Deleuze, Bergson, Spinoza. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Schildermans, H. 2021. Experiments in decolonizing the University. Towards an ecology of study. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Snir, I. 2020. Education and Thinking in Continental Philosophy. Thinking against the current in Adorno, Arendt, Deleuze, Derrida and Rancière. Cham: Springer.
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Vlieghe, J. Towards an Aesthetics of Study. Stud Philos Educ 42, 455–461 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-023-09885-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-023-09885-5