![]()
Part I
Artful teaching, learning and research
![]()
1
The poiesis and mimesis of learning
Thomas Dahl
The ‘jug-and-mug theory’
What is learning? The Oxford Dictionary defines the verb to learn as to ‘gain knowledge of or skill in’ or to ‘be told or informed’. The underlying understanding within the definition sees learning as an acquisition of knowledge or information. Learning is accessing something that is already known. Carl Rogers has called this learning theory the ‘jug-and-mug theory’ (Kirschenbaum & Henderson, 1990, p. 180). In an educational setting, “the instructor is the jug and pours knowledge into the passive receptacle, which is the mug, which is the students”. The mug is the student; more precisely, it is often the mind of the students that knowledge is poured into, or even more precisely, the consciousness. Traditional learning theory thinks of learning as a conscious process, where the mind may play an active part through thinking or reflection.
What we could call the performative turn in humanities and social sciences confronts such a learning theory. While the origin of this turn often is traced to John L. Austin and his work on “How to do things with words” (Austin, 1962; Butler, 1997; Derrida, 1972), there is still lacking a systematic account of what this turn represents and how we should account for the performative. There are, of course, many works that directly or indirectly may be counted as either building on a performative methodology or a philosophical grounding of performance, but still there is a lack of synthesizing of some of the main authors. For example, while both Gilles Deleuze and Karen Barad are strongly associated with the performative turn, their terms and vocabulary are mostly living worlds apart (Thiele, 2014).
The performative turn may be said to break with the old division of ontology and epistemology, as the knowing of something is a process where the something, Das Ding an Sich, cannot be separated from the knowing of that thing. Karen Barad prefers to speak about onto-epistemology (Barad, 2007), and Slavoj Žižek, in his reading of Deleuze, speaks about the “intimate relation between epistemology and ontology” (Žižek, 2004, p. 48). Knowledge is something emerging from the process of knowing, and the thing appears through this knowledge. The Oxford Dictionary definition of ‘gaining knowledge’ is from this onto-epistemology problematic, as it indicates knowledge as something already existing outside the process of knowing.
The performative turn hence calls for a different understanding of learning than the standard definition. There are many different contributions which could be said to be based on a performative understanding which tries to change how we should think about pedagogy and learning (Fels & Belliveau, 2008; Fenwick & Edwards, 2010; Semetsky & Masny, 2013). Lynn Fels and George Belliveau define learning as something “that emerges during performative exploration” where the learners “interpret the actions, events, responses” and “engage with empathy and conviction in the performative spaces” (Fels & Belliveau, 2008, p. 49). Learning is seen as a performative inquiry.
When Rogers criticized the ‘jug-and-mug theory’, he did that not only because of the theory’s lack of understanding of how knowledge emerges in the learning process. He did it also because he found that a learning theory should be able also to say something about the meaning of learning. How are we to define learning which has ‘meaning for… life’? (Kirschenbaum & Henderson, 1990, p. 180). While the performative turn may bring about a learning theory that opposes the ‘jug-and-mug theory’, there is still a question of how learning can produce a meaning for life. We may ask if learning with a performative aspect only is to be defined by what emerges between the interaction between different individuals and the things these individuals interact with.
I will here try to point to what could be seen as the main concepts or aspects of what could be called a performative learning theory through a reading of most notably John L. Austin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bruno Latour and Deleuze. I will, however, go one step further on than what a performative learning theory could be said to be, by making a turn back to phenomenology. The performative turn has in various ways turned its back on phenomenology, but I intend to show how the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty will address an issue mostly set aside in performative thinking: the question of ‘The Other’. While a performative approach may be said to level all the actors in the learning process to the same level, phenomenology can provide the basis for defining the difference between the teacher and the learner. With Adriana Cavarero (2005) I will expand the understanding of how ‘The Other’ may appear in a learning process. I will finally show how Aristotle’s description of drama in Poetics can be read as having a learning theory where performative and phenomenological understandings are merged.
Learning the performance of words
If one were to pinpoint the first and most important contribution for the performative turn in humanities and social sciences, the choice would normally be the Oxford philosopher Austin and his “How to do things with words” from 1955 (Butler, 1997; Derrida, 1972). Here, Austin elaborated on ‘performative utterances’, with a division of the different ways language do things. He opposed what he called the ‘descriptive fallacy’, that is, the belief that words were pointing to something. Rather, words had to be understood by the “context in which they are designed to be or have actually been spoken in” (Austin, 1962, p. 100). That could be done in several ways: through commands that generate acts, as well as through utterances saying what is happening. The saying or use of words cannot be reduced to strictly information: “Saying something will often, or even normally, produce certain consequential effects upon the feelings, thoughts, or actions of the audience, or of the speaker, or of other persons” (p. 101). Hence, the belief that you just learn by getting information about something, is naïve. The information will never be ‘neutral’, as it is embedded in and will have to use language. The actual learning does not take place through the ‘descriptive’ content of the words, but through how words work.
Austin’s understanding of how words affect the listeners was, however, equally well elaborated by Aristotle. In the Rhetoric Aristotle showed how the logos (the content), the ethos (the moral obligation) and the pathos (the involvement of feelings) could move the audience in give them new perspectives on diverse phenomena. In Poetics he tells how poets create effects by the use of words. The poiesis, as poetry, has its etymological root in poieo, that is, to “make, to fabricate, to build” (Marini, 2013, p. 172). The poets use words to create worlds. Aristotle said that this creation of the world, although being imaginative and virtual, could produce some general knowledge, while history, with its use of words, would only tell about specific facts (Aristotle, 1995, p. 34).
According to the Oxford Dictionary definition, learning has to be ‘told or informed’. This definition may be in line with most machine learning thinking, as this learning is about ‘information processing’ (Schmidhuber, 2015). But it contradicts both Austin and Aristotle. While machine learning may think that words can be reduced to information, that is not the case with how we use words in the human world. Words bring associations and meanings; they evoke feelings, they affect us physiologically.
Austin was working in Oxford; Ludwig Wittgenstein was his contemporary in Cambridge. In Wittgenstein’s work we may find a more explicit learning theory than in Austin’s work. In the unfinished work Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein introduced the term ‘language game’ (Sprachspiel). While he in his first and only published book, Tractatus Logico-Philosphicus, was arguing for a logical structure for what could be said, he saw it more pragmatically in Philosophical Investigation. The use of language was not primarily to say something about the world, but to be able to act in the world. Through language games, the gamers learn how to use to language to interact with each other and in the world. The world in which we live and interact is constituted by language. Wittgenstein even saw mathematical language as being a sort of language game: “All the calculi in mathematics have been invented to suit experience and then made independent of experience” (Diamond, 1976, p. 43). Learning from such a standpoint is about learning to play the language game: “The children are brought up to perform these actions, to use these words as they do so, and to react in this way to the words of the other” (Wittgenstein, 1953/2009, § 6). When a child learns to play a language game, it is not informed about the meaning of the word or what the word is indicating: “the teaching of language is not explaining, but training” (§ 5). The child is “learning how the language works” (§ 5). Learning is hence not about getting informed or acquiring knowledge. It is a practical training of the ability to play language games. When a teacher tells the student about something, she or he is not informing about the thing, but teaching the students how to speak about the thing. Language is performative since it is making worlds, and learning is about being able to play the language games that constitute these worlds.
While Sprachspiel commonly and with Wittgenstein’s approval is translated into language game, the term ‘Spiel’ in German also has a different meaning than game. ‘Spiel’ is also a play, like a play in the theatre. We could say that a language game is a play of actors, defining their role based on what the language and words are telling. An established language game, where the actors know how to play, can be seen as a script embodied in the players. It is a script made during the play, inherited through cultural and social norms.
From actors to actants
Are the words which we learn about only acquired through the making of words and the playing of language games? Is the world constituted only by games? What is the role of things? Are they performative as well? For Wittgenstein, even if opposing a theory where words were pointing to things, things got involved in language games through an “associative connection between word and thing” (Wittgenstein, 1953/2009, p. 6). Although it can be discussed, it would not be wrong to say that things are not given any active role in Wittgenstein’s philosophy. It is language games that are performative, and these games are initiated by humans.
The performative is much more radically understood by Latour. Latour has stated that he does not find any legal argument for why we a priori should differentiate between words and things, or between things and those producing the words: “Action is not a property of humans but of an association of actants” (Latour, 1999, p. 182). Latour is widening the scope of the performative by giving all sorts of phenomena the capability to produce something. It is not only humans that make things; things can also make things. What has been called the post-humanistic turn is clearly articulated in the works of Latour. One can only understand this position by bringing into account what Latour has called actor-network: neither humans nor things operate on their own; they are always involved in a network with other ‘actants’. It is this network that makes the actants performative.
By defining everything that is involved in action as ‘actant’ and not making any ontological differences between different actants – be it humans, machines, scientific facts or mechanical door openers – Latour avoids operating with concepts that deal with phenomena of a mental kind or theories that ascribe action to some sort of inner cause. Instead of looking for what the things and humans are, one should look for what they are able to do: “always shift from actors to actants, from competences to performances” (Latour, 2013, p. 11). What they are able to do is not dependent on their competences and essences, but on the practical setting where the actant has to interact with other actants: “agents have performances long before they are granted competences. What an agent is able to do is deduced from what it has done” (p. 60).
Latour’s levelling out of the ontological difference between humans and things in the networks of actants and his focus on the performance of the actants means a shift in how to think about knowledge. The Oxford Dictionary definition operates with learning as acquiring already existing knowledge. In Latour’s world, knowledge emerges from the network of actants. When knowledge is produced, it gets the status of being ‘ready-made’. But it does not bring it outside of the network, as knowledge would also operate as an ‘actant’. While the traditional view of science is as a process of finding scientific facts and establishing scientific knowledge, Latour says that this is only one side of science. But a scientific fact is also operational: it works like words in Wittgenstein’s language games.
With this perspective we should oppose not only the Oxford Dictionary definition of learning, but also how one traditionally thinks about learning in schools. In schools, things, from textbooks to the digital computer, are defined as learning aids. They are, however, not only aids; they are also actors that can generate learning. Learning is fostered through the interplay of all the ‘actants’ in the classroom.
The living passage
Latour has shown debt to Deleuze on several occasions (Latour, 1999, p. 303; Schmidgen, 2012). Both are central thinkers in what we may call a post-humanistic turn on performance. Deleuze shares many of the central elements in actor-network theory and is also clear on the shift from the old division between ontology and epistemology. It is not that things exist and that we learn to know about things: Everything is in flux, in a state of becoming. The main philosophical term is not being, as it was in the case of Heidegger, nor subjective intentions, as in the case of Husserl, but difference. Difference is the core concept to describe the world; it is through differences that things evolve and become, always in flux. Happening is an event, it is pure becoming (Deleuze, 1968).
Learning from this perspective is also an event. Learning is not about copying or reproducing what others know or are able to do. The learner is herself, or himself, producing the knowledge needed to learn. Deleuze exemplifies this by showing how one learns to swim. One who learns to swim does not do so by copying a sort of predefined swimming – like the swimming the teacher shows on the beach before the swimmer has tried in the water. And it is not that the swimmer learns to swim when getting in the water by copying the movements of the waves. It is first when the learner is able to act by herself or himself through the impulses of the signals from the teacher and the movement of the waves that the learner learns. The learner acts on the signs from the surroundings actors, the teachers and the waves. The signs do no tell the l...
