Dark Pedagogy: Education, Horror and the Anthropocene 9783030199333

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN EDUCATION AND THE ENVIRONMENT

Dark Pedagogy Education, Horror and the Anthropocene

Jonas Andreasen Lysgaard Stefan Bengtsson Martin Hauberg-Lund Laugesen

Palgrave Studies in Education and the Environment Series Editors Alan Reid Faculty of Education Monash University Melbourne, VIC, Australia Marcia McKenzie College of Education University of Saskatchewan Saskatoon, SK, Canada

This series focuses on new developments in the study of education and environment. Promoting theoretically-rich works, contributions include empirical and conceptual studies that advance critical analysis in environmental education and related fields. Concerned with the underlying assumptions and limitations of current educational theories in conceptualizing environmental and sustainability education, the series highlights works of theoretical depth and sophistication, accessibility and applicability, with critical orientations to matters of public concern. It engages interdisciplinary and diverse perspectives as these relate to domains of policy, practice, and research. Studies in the series may span a range of scales from the more micro level of empirical thick description to macro conceptual analyses, highlighting current and upcoming turns in theoretical thought. Tapping into a growing body of theoretical scholarship in this domain, the series provides a venue for examining and expanding theorizations and approaches to the interdisciplinary intersections of environment and education. Its timeliness is clear as education becomes a key mode of response to environmental and sustainability issues internationally. The series will offer fresh perspectives on a range of topics such as: • curricular responses to contemporary accounts of human-environment relations (e.g., the Anthropocene, nature-culture, animal studies, transdisciplinary studies) • the power and limits of new materialist perspectives for philosophies of education • denial and other responses to climate change in education practice and theory • place-based and land-based orientations to education and scholarship • postcolonial and intersectional critiques of environmental education and its research • policy research, horizons, and contexts in environmental and sustainability education More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15084

Jonas Andreasen Lysgaard · Stefan Bengtsson · Martin Hauberg-Lund Laugesen

Dark Pedagogy Education, Horror and the Anthropocene

Jonas Andreasen Lysgaard School of Education Aarhus University Copenhagen, Denmark

Stefan Bengtsson Uppsala University Uppsala, Sweden

Martin Hauberg-Lund Laugesen School of Education University of Southern Denmark Odense, Denmark

Palgrave Studies in Education and the Environment ISBN 978-3-030-19932-6 ISBN 978-3-030-19933-3  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19933-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: © PjrStudio/Alamy This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

A special thanks to our Dark Pedagogy Society colleague Lars Johansson for his critical and constructive input to the book and helping us out with the process of streamlining our, at times, heavy Scandinavian accents into a coherent written English.

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Contents

1 Introduction: Living in Dark Times 1 Part I  The Horror of Education 2 Denial 23 3 Insanity 37 4 Death 63 Part II  Towards Dark Pedagogy 5 Dark Pedagogy Between Denial and Insanity 87 6 Dark Pedagogy in the Anthropocene 103 7 A Pedagogy of Vulnerability 143 Index 159

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List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 6.1

Pithovirus Sibericum 52 A trajectory of dark pedagogy 93 Möbius strip of denial, insanity and death 97 Stone’s dark tourism spectrum (2006) 127

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Living in Dark Times

Abstract  This chapter introduces the link between speculative realism and pedagogical and educational issues that acts as the background for our conception of Dark Pedagogy. Dark pedagogy is situated as an effort to understand and rethink current pedagogical and educational perspectives on how we handle issues such as the imminent climate crisis, environmental issues on a global level and ways to include the more than human into our theories and practices. Drawing on inspiration from the horror author H. P. Lovecraft and his intriguing representation of the things that threatens and haunts us humans we argue for a tri-partite reaction pattern that the meeting with the more than human of e.g. climate crisis can result in: (1) Denial, (2) Insanity, (3) Death. These three reaction patterns form the basis of the book and our development of the concept of Dark pedagogy. Keywords  Dark pedagogy · Denial · Insanity death · Speculative realism · Education · Pedagogy · Lovecraft · Climate crisis · Climate change · Environmental issues

© The Author(s) 2019 J. A. Lysgaard et al., Dark Pedagogy, Palgrave Studies in Education and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19933-3_1

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2  J. A. LYSGAARD ET AL. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. —H. P. Lovecraft

At the end of the second decade of the new millennia, we face a strange world that is no longer the stable background for human history as it has seemingly turned against us, running amok. Previously recognized climatological standards are shattered, records are set, in a most alarming way, all over the world and we scramble in order to understand how to navigate in this extraordinary new normal. Dark pedagogy is a response to how our world is changing and an effort to think the consequences and potential new practices as pedagogical and educational key issues. Dark pedagogy is an experimental effort provide a pedagogy for an age of mass extinction. While notions of climate change have been with us for decades recent events have underlined that we no longer are in negotiation and planning mode, but unwillingly find ourselves in the midst of an environmental and climate crisis. A crisis whose causes are now being recognized on a hitherto unforeseen scale, and people—especially children and adolescents whose future the future is—mobilize in order to protest against the political status quo and business-as-usual approach to decisionmaking and to demand a new ecologically and environmentally oriented and respectful way of politically reconfiguring modern, industrial, urbanized and consumer-driven economies and societies. Dark Pedagogy took shape during 2018, a year that turned out to be record-breaking and climatologically extraordinary in more than one aspect. As we enjoyed a rare scorcher of a Scandinavian summer, the entailing consequences slowly dawned. Denmark and Sweden went through one of the longest and hottest summers in a hundred years causing a drought with severe negative consequences for farmers and urbanites alike. At the same time, ironically, Copenhagen airport had its busiest day in history (the 13th of July) with over 110.000 travellers arriving or departing by way of flight. In Sweden, we experienced wild forest fires during the worst drought since the 1940s. Not typical weather situations in Scandinavia from a historical perspective. Around the globe extreme weather conditions also manifested. Greece was ravaged by wild forest fires and on the other side of the Atlantic, California witnessed raging wildfires causing the official authorities to carry out mass evacuation of both locals and tourists in areas north of the city of Redding. In Namibia on the African continent, a seven-year drought persevered while deadly

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flash floods hit Vietnam in Asia. Considering the best available climatological research, all of these events were, however, to have been expected and events like these are, regrettably, to be expected in the future as well. And unfortunately, they are not just to be expected to recur. On the contrary, it is to be expected that the extreme weather phenomena will aggravate in the foreseeable future. As Johann Goldammer, a specialist in global fire ecology put it: “This summer is plagued by extensive and in some places deadly forest fires. And it will happen again. Actually, this is only the beginning” (Goldammer 2018). Examples of the dire symptoms of the planet’s current climatological development are omnipresent, and it is beyond any reasonable doubt that extreme weather phenomena such as the above mentioned is to a large degree co-caused by the global impact of human industrial and consumption activity on Earth since, at the latest, the 1780s. These developments have influenced, but only peripherally, how pedagogy and education have been thought for decades. It is due time, however, to draw them into the very midst of how we think the concepts that inform our pedagogical practices that go into educating the generation of tomorrow in order to ensure that they are given the best possible points of departure to theoretically acknowledge and practically change the current status quo of human societies. We are even beginning to see students themselves demanding that university curricula be changed so that issues concerning global warming, biological mass extinction and its anthropogenic (i.e. caused by humans) roots be laid bare from the perspective of all kinds of different studies. It should not only be geology, biology, environmental studies that deal with the issues and topics related to our planetary climate crisis and sustainable solutions. Economists, political theorists, psychologists and philosophers, for instance, should also engage with the pressing agendas involved in the dangerous developments characteristic of the Anthropocene. To have a dark pedagogical outlook involves a sympathetic stance towards such demands, and, as you will see, the book Dark Pedagogy offers a variety of different ways to motivate and justify such a sympathy. We, the three authors of Dark Pedagogy, are concerned with the current critical state of things and specifically how the challenges of the Anthropocene can be thought and said to take on a central role in pedagogy and education. Luckily we are far from alone in our interest in environmental and sustainability challenges and across (and beyond) academia an invigorating current of new thinking on these challenges are

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emerging. Within the tradition of continental philosophy the contemporary philosophical movement of “speculative realism” is proving most productive and influential (Bryant 2011; Harman 2009; Meillassoux 2009). The umbrella concept of speculative realism covers thinkers that specifically work with the autonomy of reality and the objects that populate it. The longstanding tradition of putting human beings at the centre of all thought and theory is now being challenged by the new theoretical perspectives and invitations of “object-oriented ontology” (OOO) (Harman, Morton), “cosmic pessimism” (Thacker, Brassier) and “speculative materialism” (Meillassoux), just to name a few. Their timeliness is seen to imply that they are currently seeping into other academic fields, and often joining forces with the prospects of “new materialism” (Bennett), “agential realism” (Barad) and “post-human feminism” (Haraway, Braidotti). Despite the many differences between the listed -isms a shared central premise seems to be the case: To critique and subvert the long reign of anthropocentrism in theory, and to propose new ways of thinking about human-related issues from the perspectives of nonhuman forces, objects, factors, materialities and life forms (Harman 2009). To put it briefly: The nonhuman appears to be the shared interest of many of the cutting edge thinkers of our time. Or, as Saari and Mullen puts it: “We argue that Morton’s thoughts further the post-structuralist and new materialist critique of bounded, stable places through introducing an ontology of finitude, withdrawal, and excess” (Saari and Mullen 2018). In this book, we draw inspiration from speculative realism, and occasionally from other contemporary trends as well, in our attempt to develop new perspectives on environmental and sustainability education (ESE).

The Horror! A central point we borrow from speculative realism is an emphasis on the constructive aspects of focusing on the darker side of central ESE concepts, such as nature, place, body, learner, climate and environment and how this approach can be a useful point of departure for trying to deal with these concepts in an educational context. By drawing on recent research on the purpose and potential of the horror genre (Haraway 2015; Harman 2012; Morton 2016; Thacker 2011; Wallin 2014) we set out to explore how the different perspectives on the notion of “the great outdoors” (Meillassoux 2009) can be understood and incorporated

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in a new and darker understanding of the role of pedagogy and ESE in engaging with the nonhuman aspects of the Anthropocene. Both the concept behind and the narrative situating the book are inspired by the ongoing surge of interest in the classic horror and weird tales author Howard Philips Lovecraft (1880–1937). An interest that is also most evidently shared by the speculative realists (Harman 2012). Lovecraft is considered by many to be the greatest horror fiction writer of his time and as one of the first writers to elevate the beforehand fringe genre of pulp-horror to a more central place within literature (Joshi 2013). Lovecraft’s universe consists of a fragile human world constantly threatened and rearranged by uncanny nonhuman powers that lie beyond the direct control of human manipulation. Through a myriad of novellas and short stories, some of which will be directly discussed in this book, Lovecraft developed his particular and distinct universe and its specifically non-anthropocentric perspectives on the human condition. Humans (or something that resembles humans) are the typical narrators of his stories, but they are never in control, never on top of things. On the contrary, humans are vulnerably suspended in a world where cosmically odd powers far greater than the frail efforts of human beings control and condition how the world is unravelling and strange and inexplicable events take place with often times disturbingly detrimental, mind-twisting and insanity inducing consequences for the human beings involved in the maelstrom of the nonhuman. Here we connect Lovecraft and his weird tales of the horrible to progressive thoughts of contemporary philosophers in order to analsze issues such as environmental degradation, global warming, large scale pollution and the like. While the Lovecraftian perspectives are proving inspirational and influential in contemporary philosophy, little has been done to link these perspectives on horror and the monstrous to ESE. A rare example of existing work on monsters and education is Lewis & Kahn’s work on education for a post-human age (Lewis and Kahn 2010). For us, Lovecraft is, as a literary phenomenon and a historic person, a condensation of the strangeness that is central to the merging concepts feeding into speculative realism. While our fascination and use of Lovecraft is an important part of Dark Pedagogy, we would like to avoid being labeled as mere Lovecraft fanboys. It is important to note that it is a well-established fact that Lovecraft was both a misogynist and xenophobe and further that these regrettable personal tendencies and dispositions that blemish his biography inform his plots and

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narrative designs, especially his later work (Joshi 2013). His psychological proneness towards highly prejudiced and malicious opinions concerning both women and non-caucasian people cannot be put aside or ignored if one wants to fully understand why Lovecraft wrote the stories that he wrote. Our hermeneutic decision for employing his cosmic horror lore as a heuristic tool for fleshing out the new educational vistas of dark pedagogy in the Anthropocene was made on the basis that the regrettable and despicable biographical factors that informed some of his weird tales might be able to explain parts of his literature, but they do not overdetermine the potential meanings of his stories. Analogously we might point to the case of German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) who was a firm believer in and supporter of the Nazi regime, at least in the 1930s where he opportunistically took active part in implementing Nazi policies at Freiburg University (Safranski 1999). In the same way as Lovecraft’s biography should not be used to rule him out as a both relevant and legitimately inspiring author of fictional narratives, Heidegger’s political inclinations should not be used to disqualify any theoretical use of his masterworks such as Being and Time from 1927 or The Question Concerning Technology from the 1954. Heidegger is still rightfully read at philosophy departments of universities all over the world. And in the same vein, we should still be reading Lovecraft not just despite of, but also and perhaps especially, in the light of his personal opinions and keep them in mind when we appreciate and interpret his work. By looking at how we as human beings relate and respond to the horrible things that dwell in darkness as they are, for instance, spatially and temporally scaled beyond our comprehension, but still influencing both our individual lives and collective societal activities we are given some essential clues as to how education, teaching and learning could be changed in order to integrate these nonhuman aspects of reality into our pedagogical practices. However fascinating and relevant Lovecraft´s stories might be, it is important to note that he did not conjure up his images of extracelestial monsters or deep-sea horrors in a vacuum. Lovecraft is part of his time, with misogynistic and racist tendencies, but is also more than that. In parallel to Heidegger, we condemn the racist and sexist views and actions of the person behind the artistic literature and conceptual thinking (Lovecraft, Heidegger). Yet, we do not condemn the core content of their writings because they neither can nor should be reduced to sheer symptomatic expressions of the opinions of their authors. Both in the case of Lovecraft and Heidegger,

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the writings supersede the writer in regards to both content and legacy. In particular, Lovecraft addresses issues that transcend the specificity and peculiarity of his own times and always emphasizes a key ingredient in human dealings with the world: More is always at stake than we can ever imagine. Attempts to fully comprehend the world is a basic human urge, but at the very core of its realization there lies insurmountable obstacles and hindrances as reality endlessly throws new and unimaginable horrors at us and to which “[o]nly poetry or madness could do justice” (Lovecraft 2008: 201). Thus, we do not reduce Lovecraft, the author, to his misogynist and xenophobic tendencies, but also read his works as the products of an author of the weird and in human terms inexplicable, as an author who engages with the weirdness of reality and strangeness of identity. We approach Lovecraft from a perspective defined by a radical interest in fully grappling with the madness required to engage with the queerness of the pedagogical practices and orientations that unfolds as educational responses to global warming, mass extinction and other frightful symptoms of the Anthropocene. In this sense, that which dwells in the darkness is not only the content of education, but according to a Bildung-theoretical outlook it reflects the as of yet obscure and unrealized potentials of the subjects of teaching and learning in the Anthropocene. This raises questions of what modes of psychological affectivity will be involved in the specific kinds of learning and teaching activities that the definitive climate phenomena of the Anthropocene can be said to demand of us as educators? It also emphasizes how learning subjects themselves engage processes of transformation and integration into nonhuman aspects of the biospherical reality of planet Earth? And, finally, how might dark pedagogy be part of the solution to the radical insufficiencies and shortcomings of current pedagogical practices in relation to the ever growing need to foster an alternative worldview and mindset of people in the Western world in regards to, for instance, individuality, consumption and the very meaning of life? With its focus on the horrific dissonance of strangeness between the finitude of human beings on the one hand and the infinite and nonexhaustible ontological possibilities of reality on the other, our reading of Lovecraft’s both thought-provoking and entertaining short stories has directly influenced the structure and key arguments of this book as well as our development of the semantic richness of the notion of dark pedagogy. One side of this is the obvious overlap between Lovecraft’s stories of the uncanny and always elusive monstrosities that threaten his more

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or less human characters and how complex issues such as global warming and extreme weather phenomena influence and impact the lives of human beings. Another and more direct inspiration from Lovecraft is his depiction of how human beings react to their exposure to the unimaginable horrors that lurks in the murky shadow realm of the great outdoors (Lovecraft 2008). A tripartite reaction pattern has given form to the basic structure of the book: Across most of Lovecraft’s stories a reappearing response pattern emerges when attention is paid to the human implications of collision with the horrors of the great outdoors, whether we are talking about collisions with alien monsters, undiscovered deepsea life forms, colours out of space, fatal sounds or mythic messages sent across aeons or light years. According to Lovecraft’s stories, the human responses to exposure to terrible nonhuman reality range from denial over insanity to death. The most common reaction is denial: There might have been a gruesome influx of green ooze into our community, which has carried half of the inhabitants away, but hey!, let us return to business as usual and see if there is a game on tonight. Denial is the resulting human state after a horrific collision when the affective powers of that horrible encounter is repressed, eradicated from mundane and homely (heimlich) life: We put it aside, hide it and never speak of it again. Denial as a Lovecraftian mode of response to the affectively severe encounters with nonhuman forces of the great outdoors, comes to the fore and is hard to avoid when it comes to the non-fictitious horrible reality of, e.g. global warming. Denial manifests in many forms both on structural and individual levels. Examples could be the work of climate change sceptics under the influence of oil lobbyists or the mundane and widespread practice of applying an ironic and sarcastic attitude towards the devastating premonitions of global warming and the steady increase of greenhouse gas emissions. When the event that triggers a reaction is not successfully denied, or if it is particularly or sufficiently horrifying to the fully constituted and idealized perceived self of a human being, then another response will kick in, namely that of gradual or instant insanity. Insanity can, for instance, show itself as the sidestepping of well-established social norms and accepting that otherwise unimaginable vistas of reality are actually real in spite of majority culture’s stubborn denial of their reality. Think of Nietzsche who decided that it was a madman that were to announce the death of god to the local townspeople and confront them with their responsibility for the divine killing (Nietzsche 2008). Sometimes madness will be seen to

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be coupled with the insights of arcane wisdom, i.e. insights not to be gained by the paths of standardized modes of inference or conventional common sense. The madness involved in accepting such a horror of the self breaks with the social requirements called for in order for human beings to function normally or to be sane according to the standards of Enlightenment society and it will often times lead to a slow slide towards social marginalization and stigmatization. Insanity and madness will be used interchangeably throughout the book as conceptual designators of the radical destabilization of the self that the horrific encounters with nonhuman reality can bring about. Finally, humans might also respond to the confrontation with uncompromising planetary reality with death. In the context of dark pedagogy, death is to be understood as a metaphor for the possibility and limit of humanity. The extinction of humanity would in this sense arrive at the state of its essence. With a dark twist the Kantian consideration that Bildung is the premise of humanity, we might say that dark pedagogy engages with the essence of humanity that is to be realized in its extinction. Dark pedagogy puts forward that it is only in a world without us that there has been something as realization of humanity. Yet, dark pedagogy does not call for an acceleration towards the realization of humanity but aims to provide a respite. To use the words of Block in Bergman’s Seventh Seal: “Death visited me this morning. We are playing chess. This respite enables me to perform a vital errand”. We will use this tripartite reaction pattern as the narrative framework and analytical structure of the book. The book is divided into two main parts. In the first part: The Horror of Education, we will look at the con­cepts of “denial”, “insanity” and “death” through theoretical lenses drawing on the before mentioned contemporary philosophical perspectives on nature and objectivity and illuminate how they might contribute to ESE. In the second part of the book: Towards Dark Pedagogy, we will look into specific challenges and potentials when developing pedagogical and ESE perspectives that embrace the darkness of the issues at play when discussing, teaching and learning about environment, sustainability, global warming and the Anthropocene more broadly. We do not consider ourselves to be gloomy messengers of despairing and apathetic propositions, but rather as experimenting thinkers trying to sensitively and reasonably include the dark themes of our book into educational practices dealing with environmental, sustainability and climate change issues. That is to say, we will explicate how education might intentionally

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engage with the educational significance of the horrific nature of nonhuman aspects of reality and the tripartite reaction pattern of human response that their impact can be seen to entail. Our dark pedagogical project is thus to be considered as a constructive undertaking that tries to walk new paths and project new possibilities in regards to pedagogical responses to the still rather unexplicated demands of the Anthropocene. What we try to do with this book is to ignite a conversation about how we are to properly respond to global warming and its many intricate and interrelated facets when it comes to education, teaching and learning.

Darkness We are using the term dark in “dark pedagogy” to denote both an ontological position and an emotional, affective resonance. With regards to the ontological position “dark” aims to infuse educational thought with emerging realist philosophical perspectives on nature’s great outdoors, i.e. reality’s host of nonhuman aspects, forces and objects, in order to recast our conceptions of the human realm of reality in an altogether nonhuman light. We use the tripartite response pattern from Lovecraft to establish productive links between disciplinary dialogues within academia and a more everyday engagement (pedagogical and otherwise) with pressing global challenges stemming from the planetary threats of the Anthropocene (Harman 2012; Morton 2016). Darkness is inherent to Lovecraft’s fictional world and that which is hidden in the dark is seen to emerge and intervene in the human world that are always on the brink of some disaster brought about by the powers of entities and incorporeal forces beyond human comprehension and control. In the following chapters, we consider how education and pedagogical practices might be understood in alternative ways once we make the philosophical concession that Lovecraft’s overall ontological framing of his fictional worlds is perhaps closer to the truth of things than we are for the most part willing to accept. The pedagogical narratives of the beautiful soul, emancipation, freedom and teleological learning progression that Enlightenment thought and in particular idealism has installed at the core of education are thus to be radically rethought from the terrible perspectives of cosmic horror (Thacker 2011). In these contemporary dark times of humaninduced mass extinction, Lovecraft´s stories can help us to emphasize how the true nature of the great challenges that humanity are currently facing will always (at least partially) elude human beings and our petty

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attempts to adequately address the challenges we face. A core insight that can be drawn from Lovecraft is that humans were never masters in their own house (as if it were “their” house to begin with) and the fact that there have always already been powers at work that elude human comprehension and mastery. Hence, what hides within the clouding fogs of the Anthropocene cannot be reduced to fictional horror. The horrors of nature are, on the contrary, uncannily real and so are we, the human progenitors of the horrors themselves. The darkness of our times is uncanny in the German sense of unheimlich, denoting a loss of homeliness and familiarity. In this way, darkness highlights a feeling of loss of place-based identity and culturally safeguarding context. It is hard to deny that global warming and its anthropogenic roots tell us something of profound significance concerning the ideals of the beautiful soul at the core of Western Enlightenment thought and conceptions of education. In the Anthropocene, the beautiful soul of good conscience changes its mode of appearance into a twisted human ideal of horrible dimensions. It does not strictly speaking become black, but rather dunkel, to borrow another German expression. As with taking a walk during the night, familiar streets and places impose a sense of difference and strangeness without directly exposing their secrets. The resulting emotions of uncanniness overwhelm our state of mind and our feeling of being at home and of knowing the streets and places “like our back pockets”, so to speak, as the twilight obscurity (“Dunkelheit”) requires us to see things as well as ourselves for what they and we also can be said to be once the light of optimism and progress is gone. Consequently, darkness as Dunkelheit haunts our understanding of ourselves as enlightened subjects that hope to illuminate and expose that which is otherwise hidden and bring it into the light of reason so that it can be manipulated at will. What the artistic, scientific and philosophical promoters of the concept of the Anthropocene are trying to teach us is that what lives in the dark resist full illumination and is of an ontologically infinite depth endlessly causing a fundamental feeling of disorientation, loss of sense of place, and of nonhuman, cosmic horror. In this sense, the Anthropocene is to be characterized by an essential paradox (Laugesen 2016). In the epoch of geological history where human beings have proven themselves to be the single most determining factor in relation to the fateful developments in planet Earth’s biosphere, human beings have themselves begun to be haunted by radically nonhuman entities, forces and objects. Anthropocene is thus also to be

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understood as the name for the geological epoch in which human beings encounter the nonhuman in a much more direct, disturbing and damaging fashion than we, the humans, have been accustomed to throughout modernity, i.e. since the end of the eighteenth century. “Anthropocene” denotes the era of the human, the anthropos, but at its very core it involves the rapidly dawning and awe-inspiring recognition of human beings’ ecologically intricate dependencies on nonhuman life forms (bacteria, algae, birds, insects, etc.) and objective circumstances (atmospheric chemistry, oceanic salinity and acidity, freeze-thaw cycles, etc.). In the epoch of the human the nonhuman makes itself heard and known with unprecedented intensity. It has always been at our doorstep, and now the time has come for us to hear the knocking and witnessing the front door being kicked in. As Timothy Morton has put it concerning objects that are spatially and temporally beyond our comprehension, the so-called “hyperobjects”, but that are nonetheless very real and of increasing epistemic significance: “They contacted us” (Morton 2013: 201). Not only do we live in dark times, the challenges we face remain obscured by this darkness and cannot be engaged with the classic scientific aim of illuminating that which is not understood. Our sense of place and identity is currently being challenged by our growing insight into our inability to grasp what is (also) out there. In this ontological and epistemological sense of turning towards a speculatively horrific outdoors that inflicts our psychological and cultural “indoors”, our conception of dark pedagogy is indebted to speculative realist thought and OOO in particular. To be specific, our speculative endeavours with Dark Pedagogy are partially inspired by Morton’s notion of “dark ecology” (Morton 2016). Morton’s darkness is more than the depressive loss of insight, navigational orientation and the firm foothold on planet Earth that human beings take great pride in claiming they have historically succeeded in establishing. His darkness also implies the bright potentials for something new and surprising to emerge on the planetary scene, something yet to be known and become acquainted with, perhaps even to enter into a kinship of solidarity with (Morton 2013, 2016). As Donna Haraway put it in 2015: “Making kin is perhaps the hardest and most urgent part. […] Kin-making is making persons, not necessarily as individuals or as humans” (Haraway 2015: 161). Another important inspiration for not only our project, but for post-structural and new materialist theory is Gilles Deleuze (Deleuze 1992). Deleuze did in many respects clear the path for current insights into the material

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distribution of subjective constitution, in his 1968 book on Spinoza he expresses ethical views of human beings that resonates with certain of the central anthropological implications of speculative realism and OOO: “In the state of nature I live at the mercy of encounters” (Deleuze 1992: 260). Both Deleuze in his vital materialist endeavours and speculative realism in its love affair with contingency are profoundly preoccupied with the manifold ways in which the nonhuman conditions and makes possible the emergence and various mutations of human beings. In this way, we can see how the fundamentally anti-humanist outlook of Deleuze’ philosophical ethos still lives on in the historically new guise of speculative realism (Grusin 2015; Laugesen 2016). Acknowledging the inheritance from Deleuze our primary theoretical inspiration is from Morton, Harman, Haraway, Thacker and Meillassoux. We understand the core concepts of this book as a contribution to the dark educational outlook that is currently taking shape influenced by the aforementioned philosophers (Oral 2015; Saari and Mullen 2018; Wallin 2014). For instance, we share the theoretical ambition of Saari and Mullen when they characterize one of the main points of their pedagogical project of “dark places” in the following way: “Our point here is not simply to dwell on what is repugnant or horrendous, but to enable engagement by not sustaining a culture of denial” (Saari and Mullen 2018: 10). We understand our book as a contribution to the conversation that they understand themselves to be trying to open up and take part in (Saari and Mullen 2018). Our turn towards that which is dunkel is not to be thought of as a simple celebration of darkness, as a form of naive and mindless masculine disposition that would position us as tough, emotionally blunt escapist dreaming of suffering and death. Far from, truth to be told. Instead, our preoccupation with darkness understood as Dunkelheit serves to highlight a specific ontological outlook that shapes our understanding of education and pedagogy. An outlook that is, as it were, heavily inspired by our engagement with speculative realism and OOO. The ontological aspect of relates to how things emerge in education in general and in particular their dwelling in the twilight. The ontic, to use the Heideggerian distinction, refers here to the concretely experienced condition of education in a Scandinavian context. Our conception of dark pedagogy is, thus, partially contextually rooted. It is rooted in the way that it gives expression to how our conception of education is reverberating the darkness of the educational setting we are engaging with.

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Education in Scandinavia often takes place in the darkness of long winters. The darkness of winter does not only refer to an absence of light. It also refers to a certain emotional disposition of those people and object partaking in education. The much celebrated vulgar upside to this is the Danish notion of Hygge that is peedled in all good airport bookshops lately. Hygge is distilled coziness, where you hide from the depth of winter indoors through authentic acts like hand-holding and overeating. This is all fine, but we insist that this is only half of the experience of the Scandinavian dunkelness. We might here think of classic Scandinavian cinema and its obsession with the darker emotional conditions of the protagonists as well as the themes addressed. Bergman, when interviewed confessed that he was constantly thinking of death. Further, the threat of death as well as insanity is a constant theme that Scandinavian drama, cinema and literature (Jensen and Waade 2013). We here point out that Dunkel and darkness refers to a certain attunement of our understanding education towards its ecological positionality. To be surrounded in an ecology means to be emotionally affected and surrounded by objects that we are not fully aware of. That is, our understanding of education is mirroring a particular cultural disposition that places itself in a between rather than on one side, might it be light or darkness. To engage with or in education entails in this sense not so much a happygo-lucky celebration of human or personal development on the right and light side of history (the beautiful soul-syndrome) but a struggle with the threat and potentiality of the dark, that already taints the experience of the self. Dark pedagogy is in this sense melancholic, partially mourning an imbalance in or strangeness of the self. The self is attuned to it being between light and dark, neither fully in the light of summer nor in the dark of winter but always in between. Lovecraft’s work is exemplary of this movement between the light and the darkness. None of these positions can be handled for very long by the characters in his stories. You can hide away from the monstrosities of this world for only so long, but on the other hand there is no way to confront and embody the darkness that is always present as well. The monsters never fully reveal themselves in Lovecrafts stories. We always get a glimpse, a description of horrid details or a rare sight into the abyss, but the totality is never to be grasped fully (Harman 2012). Neither does Lovecraft give us the luxury of enjoying a hyggelig existence as vain efforts to ignore the great outdoors is always shattered by a creaking door, a mad fiddling of a distant violin or slow digestion in the

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bowels of an ancient sea monster. In that perspective Lovecraft is dunkel and offers an uneasy shifting position of acute focus on the things that both threatens and invigorates our existence, but never lets us settle in any form of comfortable position for long. Without overselling the gruesomeness of Scandinavian winters (in all fairness most tend to survive them), this setting, linked with the tales of Lovecraft has shaped the narrative and perspectives of this book and the multitude of possibilities that concepts of dark and dunkel brings with them.

Dark Pedagogy One way to demarcate how our conception of darkness and dark pedagogy distinguishes itself from other contemporary conceptions is to highlight that it orients itself towards the Bildung- and Didaktiktradition of Central European and Scandinavian pedagogical thinking since the eighteenth century. Accordingly, our conception of dark pedagogy is historically and contextually grounded in a critical engagement with, especially, German pedagogical philosophy and thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Friedrich Herbart, Wilhelm von Humboldt, N. F. S. Grundtvig, Maria Montessori, Wolfgang Klafki, Thomas Ziehe and Gert Biesta among others. With its focus on character formation, spiritual development and the synthesis of existential self-realization and academic ascent we link the continental European pedagogical tradition to the pedagogical challenges humanity now face in the Anthropocene epoch. We relate to existing pedagogical practices, but also insist that there are potentials yet to be deployed for darker means than they have been used for up until now. That is, to show the unheimlich (unhomely/uncanny) aspects of already well known pedagogical thinking. For something to become unheimlich, there needs to be an assumed home in the first place. Our dark pedagogical project is not, therefore, intended to serve as a universal pedagogy transcending its own history. In that sense, it is not trying to establish itself as an ahistorical ideal for future practice. Instead we conceive of dark pedagogy as an explorative effort to subvert a particular historical and pedagogically inadequate set of normative educational ideals. In the Anthropocene the state of nature demands that new ways of teaching and thinking about education are thought through and put into words so that leaders and teachers alike will gain a new conceptual navigation tool to use in their attempts to educate humanity out of the current planetary crisis.

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In relation to the Didaktik-tradition of European pedagogical thought, the focus of dark pedagogy will be on the uncanniness of both the content of education and specific modes of teaching (Bengtsson, forthcoming). The different chapters will, therefore, in one way or another explore what a realist and object-oriented outlook on the content of education might entail for both processes and products of education. In particular, we interrogate what this might mean for the focus on the production of the (human) self at the core of the Bildung project. Dark pedagogy does not abandon this project, but, on the contrary, engages with the education project of becoming a self and member of a collective as part of educational processes. The membership of self will, however, turn out to belong to more-than-human and nonhuman collectives. By doing so we try to understand how a Bildung could be envisioned that relates to the Anthropocene. Dark pedagogy underscores the undisclosed, the veiled, the hidden and the obscure as educationally crucial aspects of reality to grapple with, and it therefore implies a fundamental critique of the repressive denial of darkness and the dark that traditional approaches to Didaktik and Bildung have involved due to their anthropocentric and idealist optimism. The surreal and dangerous fantasy of being able to totally master educational content or reducing the objects of education to fully comprehensible phenomena for rationally trained human pupils, students or researchers is no longer sustainable. Didactical ideals ought to be recast with a renewed respect for and acknowledgement of the initially horrific ontological truth of the infinite depth of educational objects that lurk in the darker dens of reality. Consequently, with dark pedagogy darkness and horror enter the centre stage of education as the project of Anthropocene Bildung hinges on the learners’ relation to and engagement with reality’s plethora of radically nonhuman aspects. With Dark Pedagogy we also try to think through how the content of education in the Anthropocene have consequences for the processes of education, e.g. teaching. The self at the core of Bildung is to be ecologized and turned into a primarily natural phenomenon. Or, to put it in another way, the cultural formation of self is to be rethought as a process of natural becoming within the nonhuman parameters of the environmental conditions and foundations of modern societies. At least since the onslaught of industrialization and urbanization based on human beings’ self-augmentation through the invention and productive implementation of the steam engine in the 1780s, and subsequently the combustion engine driven by fossil fuels, Western

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societies have proven themselves to be radically unsustainable constellations of human collectives. Dark pedagogy might serve as a headline for pedagogical speculations that attempt to carve out new ways of thinking about teaching, learning and education more broadly with the ability to inspire new paths of practice to follow that lead away from the apocalyptic course we have moved along for centuries. Dark pedagogy is not to be understood as a simple and primitive shock doctrine for education. It is to be understood as an effort to emphasize the importance of pedagogical re-sensitization to the ecologically nonhuman aspects of the great outdoors. This attempt to theoretically re-sensitize pedagogy involves a fundamental rethinking of the educational potentials of denial, insanity and death as three different outcomes of confronting the radically nonhuman, and these we have attempted to develop throughout the two parts of the book. The structural logic of the first part of the book, The Horror of Education, has been developed collectively, but written by the individual authors respectively. Jonas Lysgaard has written about denial, Martin Hauberg-Lund Laugesen has written about insanity/madness and Stefan Bengtsson has written about death. We have decided to stick to a narrating “we” in the first part of the book where we lay the foundation for the second part of the book, Towards Dark Pedagogy, where we explore the new potentialities of the denial, insanity and death reaction pattern for pedagogical practices. In the second part of the book we present our individual efforts to turn the theoretical foundation of the first part into more tangible and concrete suggestions for specific pedagogical practices and approaches, and these attempts will mirror and be an expression of our individual academic interests and theoretical backgrounds. Jonas Lysgaard argues for the pedagogical and educational potential of the overlap between and the collapse of the affective reactions of denial and insanity, Martin Hauberg-Lund Laugesen expounds dark pedagogical ways of thinking and doing pedagogy in the Anthropocene, and Stefan Bengtsson establishes a pedagogy of vulnerability at the centre of the dark pedagogy project. Through our respective efforts to theoretically and practically re-sensitize contemporary notions of pedagogy and education, we hope to provide alternative and timely ways of breaking with current ideals of human, all too human pedagogical practices that rule out and/or ignore the educational significance of the ecological nature of reality itself as well as human beings’ inevitable embeddedness in this ecology of humans and nonhumans alike.

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References Bengtsson, S. (Forthcoming). The Uncanny Content of Education. Bryant, L. R. (2011). The Democracy of Objects. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press. Deleuze, G. (1992). Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. New York: Zone Books. Goldammer, J. (2018). Skovbrande som i Sverige og Grækenland er kun begyndelsen på noget, som ikke kan bekæmpes med brandfly. Politiken. Grusin, R. (2015). The Nonhuman Turn. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Haraway, D. (2015). Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene. Environmental Humanities, 6, 159–165. Harman, G. (2009). Towards Speculative Realism. Winchester: Zero Books. Harman, G. (2012). Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy. Winchester: Zero Books. Jensen, P. M., & Waade, A. M. (2013). Nordic Noir Challenging ‘The Language of Advantage’: Setting, Light and Language as Production Values in Danish Television Series. The Journal of Popular Television, 1(2), 259–265. Joshi, S. T. (2013). I am Providence: The Life and Times of H.P. Lovecraft. New York: Hippocampus Press. Laugesen, M. H.-L. (2016). The Nature of Freedom: On the Ethical Potential of the Knowledge of the Non-Human Origin of Human Being. Res Cogitans, 11(1), 15–62. Lewis, T. E., & Kahn, R. (2010). Education Out of Bounds: Reimagining Cultural Studies for a Posthuman Age. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lovecraft, H. P. (2008). Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H.P. Lovecraft. London: Gollancz. Meillassoux, Q. (2009). After Finitude. London: Continuum. Morton, T. (2013). Hyperobjects. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Morton, T. (2016). Dark Ecology. New York: Columbia University Press. Nietzsche, F. (2008). The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Oral, S. B. (2015). Weird Reality, Aesthetics, and Vitality in Education. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 34(5), 459–474. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11217-014-9447-y. Saari, A., & Mullen, J. (2018). Dark Places: Environmental Education Research in a World of Hyperobjects. Environmental Education Research, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2018.1522618. Safranski, R. (1999). Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Thacker, E. (2011). In the Dust of This Planet. Winchester: Zero Books. Wallin, J. J. (2014). Dark Posthumanism, Unthinking Education, and Ecology at the End of the Anthropocene. In N. Snaza & J. Weaver (Eds.), Posthumanism and Educational Research. New York: Routledge.

PART I

The Horror of Education

CHAPTER 2

Denial Jonas Andreasen Lysgaard

Abstract  This chapter will engage denial as a term and a mechanism that harbours both negative and positive aspects. The negative being; denying uncomfortable facts and suffering the consequences of failing to acknowledge them. The positive aspect: the ability to limit the impact of uncomfortable facts, as not to be paralyzed in horror and/or existential angst—e.g. even though we are faced with plausible “doomsday prophecies”, we are still able to cook dinner for our family and “kick back” once and a while. This chapter examines Denial in relation to education, and how denial of specific scientific, historical, medicinal facts has been applied as societal strategies, through education, in order to implement certain attitudes and values. Finally, we argue that denial offers a great potential when linked with the emerging thoughts related to Speculative Realism and Object Oriented Ontology (henceforth OOO) and how we could, perhaps, enter a more critical and productive relationship with Denial on a societal, individual and educational level. © The Author(s) 2019 J. A. Lysgaard et al., Dark Pedagogy, Palgrave Studies in Education and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19933-3_2

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Keywords  Dark pedagogy · Denial · Denialism · Lovecraft · Hyperobjects · Wicked problems · Psychoanalysis · Freud · Lacan Education · Speculative realism · Morton · Climate change

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In individuals and societies, denial represents a highly prevalent reaction towards phenomena that do not fit our factual, and normative, understanding(s) of the world and reality as a whole. Given the prevalence of denial, even when faced with seemingly undeniable facts, it is important to understand the relationship that denial represents—since denial is not necessarily an evil that should be eliminated, nor a one-dimensional concept. Denial is derived from the latin word “denegare” translating into “reject” or “refuse”, but acquired its contemporary meaning when Sigmund Freud popularized the term through his development of the psychoanalytical method and the founding of the field of psychology in the late nineteenth century. Freud described persons in denial as suffering from an “unconscious suppression of painful or embarrassing feelings” (Freud 1914). Freud’s denial (In german: Verleugnung) was always intrinsically linked to its opposite, the acceptance of factual reality, as it “rarely or perhaps never” possible for “the ego’s detachment from reality to be carried through completely” (Freud 1923). Denial, as being never complete, was further established by Sigmund’s daughter, Anna Freud, in her groundbreaking work during the first part of the twentieth century (Freud 1992). Denial in a psychoanalytic understanding is always incomplete and inscribed in a duality between the factual real and its opposite: The counter story that the denial can be rooted in. Since then, the notion of denial has been popularized to the degree where it has spurred its own -ism. Denialism is the situation where a person, often as part of a larger group, ignores a scientific or historical fact in order to protect a specific understanding of how life, society or power is structured. Well-known examples of denialism would be: neo-nazis denying holocaust, the denial of the link between HIV and AIDS by e.g. the former South African president Thabo Mbeki, and of course climate change deniers: the current work of individuals and groups that cling to the remaining 3% of scientific evidence that is not conclusive towards the link between man-made CO2 emissions and Global warming (SezenBarrie et al. 2017). One of the more disturbing symptoms of denialism

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is that of alternative facts, where some people, in the face of overwhelming evidence, seek to prove that the world is flat, or that vaccines cause autism, or that there is no such thing as global warming etc. by appealing to highly dubious, implausible or fabricated “facts”. This chapter will present denial as a term and a mechanism that harbours both a negative and a positive aspect. The negative being denying uncomfortable facts and suffering the consequences of failing to acknowledge them. The positive aspect: the ability to limit the impact of uncomfortable facts, as not to be paralyzed in horror and/or existential angst—e.g. even though we are faced with plausible “doomsday prophecies”, we are still able to cook dinner for our family and “kick back” once and a while. It is also how we handle the fact that there are countless issues that influence us, which are far beyond our control and understanding, even our beyond our sensory capabilities. To summarize: Denial plays a crucial role when handling how miniscule ingredients in our food can influence our health and well-being, to how changes on a planetary scale decides how we can live in our cities and transport ourselves around the globe, but also how we handle the sheer incomprehensibility of the universe/multiverse/reality and our place in it. We are to “the monstrous real”, what the human characters in the world of Lovecraft are to the outer gods and old ones: irrelevant. The reason we don’t just jump of a cliff or lie down and wait to die, is due to the positive aspect of denial, that tells us that there’s meaning in all of this, whether one believes it is to be a constructed or given meaning. We will explicate this later in the chapter. From here on out, we will examine Denial in relation to education, and how denial of specific scientific, historical, medicinal facts has been applied as societal strategies, through education, in order to implement certain attitudes and values. However, also the didactical and pedagogical thoughts and practices have been dealing with denial like the strong post-WW2 tradition of condemning denial of facts, as both an unsustainable societal strategy, and a dangerous personal way to cope with the challenges we face. Finally we argue that denial offers a great potential when linked with the emerging thoughts related to Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology (henceforth OOO) and how we could, perhaps, enter a more critical and productive relationship with Denial on a societal, individual and educational level.

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The Concept of Denial The concept of denial, especially understood in its negative form, as something that should be identified, addressed and “cured”, has been at the center of the modern project. The battle against denial, in this sense, is quintessentially modern: Let us enlighten myths and insist on a scientific truth and show that destinies are not rules by supernatural entities, pixies hiding in the forest or monstrous creatures talking to us from beyond the abyss of reason. Berkeley, Voltaire, Diderot, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, among others, ushered in a new age by bringing the light of reason to dispel the murky, shadowy denial, birthing the Enlightenment (Deligiorg 2005). Ever since then, we have fought hard to describe, probe and analyze all that which resides in the dark and which might aspire to be denied: the content of the great oceans, the molecular structure that binds all living matter together, the flow of capital, and last but not least the inner workings of the mind and how it relates to the world that it encounters. This process has been a great success. Christmas pixies are ousted from decision-making processes (besides their yearly festival), doctors can put a severed finger back on without getting any deities involved and our new object of obsession, big data, promises the potential of solving almost any riddle by opening the gates to the floods of illuminating data (Bollier 2010). The struggle for insight has been the battle against denial, and even though we have people that swear to alternative facts, these people are part of a minority. If something can be positively proven, it cannot be denied and thus by positively describing the universe, the quark and everything in between, denial has been delegitimized as a modern strategy of coping with the world and developing it (Specter 2009). Contemporary globalized societies seem to be fixated on the powers of insight and reason. We must identify problems and unleash the great minds of engineers, scientists and creative citizens in order to reach the holy grail of modernity: The Solution (Mathematics, plastics, couples therapy, internal combustion, subsidies, vacation, data, medicine, walls, money, wind turbines, etc.) (Dewey 1929). While the narrative of progression, and the faith in reason and science is powerful, especially with the winds of global capitalism filling its sails, alternative narratives of societal and individual denial seems to be gaining momentum. These problems can be understood as wicked problems. Some of the characteristics of the wicked problems are that they are hard

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to define, they have no specific beginning or end, they are symptoms of other problems, they change as you try to address them and there is no clear gauge for whether applied solutions are successful (Rittel and Webber 1973). Wicked problems are, simply put, problems that evade straightforward solutions. Classic examples are nuclear energy, social justice and challenges linked to global warming and climate change. These wicked problems tests the limits of our shared belief in the power of reason, as there seems to be no clear reasonable response to these challenges. Thus, denial pops up again. It seems that there is no way separating modern progress with tendencies towards denial of even well-proven facts (if those facts are connected to wicked problems). Take the example of global warming and negative climate change; we know what is causing the problems, but there are no straightforward solutions, since these problems are rooted in the foundation for our current society—it’s not just about altering a small component, we have to revise the very way we live on this planet. The Möebius strip, where the inside is inseparable from the outside can be seen as a model for the relationship between the hunger for insight, proof and solutions and the societal and individual denial of the consequences of this hunger (Starostin and van der Heijden 2007). Denial was used by Freud to describe “a specific mode of defence which consists in the subject’s refusing to recognize the reality of a traumatic perception” (Laplanche and Pontali 1973). Denying a fact, although it is clearly evident, can be a way of establishing a robust structure of meaning, in the face of reality. The value of such structures of meaning has been at the center of different schools of critique of ideology that has more often than not emphasized how the road to true freedom and emancipation was paved with a fight for insight and truth. If one wished to live a happy life, it was not only necessary to know the truth, but to revel in it and even drown in it if need be (Lazarus 2013). Freud did not share that perspective but saw denial as part of each individual’s arsenal of unconscious defence mechanisms that makes it possible to survive the challenges, big and small that we face on an everyday level. Together with other classic psychological mechanisms such as repression, projection, displacement, regression and sublimation, denial acts as an unconscious shield that enables the Ego to continue to develop patterns and structures of meaning in a basically meaningless context (Freud 1914). In his Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud identifies religion as a powerful example of the ego “denying the dangers it sees threatening it in the external world” (Freud 2002). I might suffer from a vicious

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form of cancer, but a benign deity will protect me, and if not my life, then my eternal soul in some form of afterlife—and no matter what happens, it is all according to the will of the deity. The things that the individual cannot encompass or which transcends the individual, like that of death, are hard to cope with. More often than not, we choose hope and denial in the form of religion in order to exert something that might feel like a bit of control. This can be institutionalist on a societal level in order to ensure that denial is kept to specific areas and issues and not applied haphazardly (Sezen-Barrie et al. 2017; Specter 2009). Many of the central issues and areas under systematized denial, can be better understood by applying Timothy Morton’s concept of hyperobjects to them (Morton 2013). Morton’s hyperobjects has some interesting features that in many ways could be linked to the wicked problems that we face: Hyperobjects are viscous, impossible to get rid of, they are massive, displaced in time and place and they draw in very different objects in their never-ending reach. They are in other words monstrous. When the Trump administration denies the impact of human actions in relation to global warming, when racism rears its ugly head in south east Asia or nationalism is fueled by vague descriptions of an evil outside that threatens an even more vague national inside, it bears all the marks of national or societal narratives that are threatened by the meshing of hyperobjects and their wicked problematic consequences (Thacker 2011). Climate change and Global warming relate to vast concepts of limitless complexity involving everybody and everything and yet remain almost impossible to pinpoint and fully grasp on anything that resembles individual level. There is no harmonious relationship with hyperobjects or wicked problems. They transcend all modern efforts to identify, compartmentalize and especially efforts to reach any kind of shining modernistic solution. This nature of the challenges entailed by hyperobjects leaves not only the individual in an uncompromising void, where no action is right or wrong. Since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 it has been the role of the nation-state to defend its citizens from external (and internal) treats, but against hyperobjects and wicked problems it remains increasingly hard to offer prober responses to what is coming for us, and the tried and tested strategy of denial fills the void. Arguing against IPCCs conclusions (As seen in the Trump administration), clinging to pseudo-scientific ideas of race (as seen in the 2017 attacks on the

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Rohingya minority in Myanmar) or denying the existence AIDS (as witnessed under president Thabo Mbeki in South Africa) can be a powerful, but harmful way of dealing with hyperobjects and their entailing wicked problems. Even though these examples present poor ways of dealing with these problems, they can also be seen as efforts to safeguard a relatively standard narrative of reason and progress in the face of hyperobjects and wicked problems. Rarely do simplistic ideas and concepts severely influence these monstrous wicked problems. They resist any simplistic attempt to drag core issues and potential causal mechanisms into the light or being solved through the appliance of “locked and loaded” solutions (Jacobs 2017)— They do not comply with our standard understanding of how to deal with challenges and problems. On both individual and societal level, denial and denialism can be understood as a favourite enemy of global progress, as well as a popular, albeit often, impotent, defence strategy when the world throws too much at you. The French psychoanalysts Jacques Lacan added something important to the concept of denial. His analysis intrinsically linked the denial of a given fact by the simultaneous recognition of the fact denied. There is no denial, without some level of knowledge of the denied phenomena or fact—thus it is not fully an unconscious act. The subject not only denies knowledge of the traumatic loss, but at the same time also recognizes it. The subject knows very well that the world is heading towards global environmental crisis, but in order to avoid losing grip of sanity, the subject must both acknowledge that this is a reality and simultaneously continue living life “as normal” in order to uphold a structure and sense of meaning in everyday life (Evans 2010; Lacan 2006). Through the denial, the relationship to the denied fact is intact. The fact and the denial of it form the Möebious strip that both individuals and societies are caught in by their effort to deal with massive, global, local environmental and climate challenges. When facing hyperobjects and wicked problems, denial can be construed as a healthy psychological mechanism as well as the source of our problems. We need to have denial in the form of hope, to keep on fighting to save a world that seems impossible to save, but too much denial, even in the form of hope, can make us turn a blind eye to pressing problems.

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Denial in Education Denial can be understood as a key concept in education. Through pedagogy and education specific traits, understandings, attitudes, skills, competencies, approaches and actions are positively emphasized, fostered and showcased as being benefitting for individual and society. While the content of pedagogy and education vary wildly through time and place there is a shared core of believing that something is worthwhile to pursue and thus a negation of something that might be less favoured as the goal of our pedagogical or educational affection. Freud famously characterized education as one of the three impossible professions (together with governance and psychoanalysis) (Dolar 2017). Freud’s argument hinged on the understanding of transference as central to education. Something must be transferred from one generation to the next, from the teacher to the pupil. What makes education as a profession impossible is that the process is never 100% successful. A pupil never leaves school with the exact knowledge a curriculum demands. A generation is never a mirror image of the foregoing generation. By making positive choices on a structural level with regard to a specific curriculum and educational strategies and values, the educational process in itself entails a certain level of denial of the presented insights and learnings as pupils and students focus more on some subjects and areas of interest and spend less energy on others. Denial shows up at the core of education, both by the choices made and not made in any educational activity, but also through that which is transferred consciously or unconsciously to the student or pupil. Some are more interested in math, others more interested in the cute new boy in the classroom, while others might spend their days in the classroom thinking about riding motorcycles across fields. As described in the introduction our notion of learning is not linked to formalistic empty vessel concepts of students or pupils, but we do recognize the massive effort towards transference that the educational system represents and how this effort always results in wildly varying processes of learning. When something is learnt, something is always, at least partly denied. Both on an individual and structural level. On a structural societal level, understanding education as one of any given society’s strategies to deal with the future makes it clear that very specific strategies of envisioning and shaping the future are applied across a range of different educational systems. When Carl Anders Säffström

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argues that education is, first and foremost, the effort of any society to reproduce itself, we can add that by including the impossibility of this process from Freud any given educational strategy is not only an effort of a society to understand what goes on now, but at the same time, consciously or unconsciously, a way of entering into a dialogue with the future (Säfström 2017). As the transference never succeeds fully, something different always happens. This something different an unknown quantity and always shows up in different ways. This something can be seen as an unavoidable kernel of excess, embedded within education. The notion of excess, that something always eludes total illumination and remains withdrawn, is central to speculative realism, OOO and psychoanalysis (Evans 2010; Harman 2009, 2011b; Bryant et al. 2011). It is not possible to understand education as processes of causality or direct transference of skills, instead education can be understood as imbued with the central points of the speculative realist call to arms: Education is at its core not causal, but contingent, stuff happens, but we have no way of knowing exactly what (Bryant et al. 2011). In addition, education is, as a process, both on structural and individual level, not guided by a correlationistic logic. Quentin Meillassoux uses the concept of correlationism to describe the Kantian dictum that we do not have access to the thing-in-itself, but only to the mental and intersubjective correlate of the thing-in-itself (Meillassoux 2009). This has been the central dogma of the era of post-Kantian philosophy that has been the key driver of continental philosophy until the present day (Bryant et al. 2011). The logic of correlationism thus states that everything is already always situated from a subjective point of view, and that the closest we can get to the objective real, is the intersubjective real. Some speculative realists and OOO-theorists, state on the contrary, that we are always in touch with, and have access to, the real—albeit not in a clear way, epistemologically speaking. Education does not, as phenomena, limit itself to a correlationist logic as it is heavily influenced by things, objects in themselves and the hypercomplex universe that permeates everything. Just as learning can be understood to have no limits, as being always ongoing, always developing in the vortex of untold influences. So can education be understood as an ungraspable process that in its entirety has no beginning and no end: from prehistoric efforts to pass on skills to next of kin, to highly structured PISA testing, to the individual pupil in the classroom watching a bird flying past a window, to the impact of current generations on future generations and their understanding of what is worthwhile in education

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and cannot be denied. Education is in that perspective a realist venture. It develops into a fluid relationship with totality. Always changing, always contingent. This bars us from having access to education in its totality. It is, as all good objects, withdrawn, but it does mean that we can understand education as a hyper object that opens untold vistas for exploration, but also entails wicked problems that cannot be addressed. Thus education acquires the same monstrous qualities as other fellow hyperobjects and their linked wicked problems. Examples of this could be returning efforts of nation-states to wield education as tools of institutionalized denial. The Apartheid system and its systemic use of the educational system to legitimize its racist theories and practices is a textbook example of massive denial of insights from both scientific and everyday walks of life in order to reproduce itself. The crumpling of the system is also an excellent example of issues encountered when wielding educational systems as means of oppression of majorities or minorities. The excessive characteristics of education and its contingent nature enforces a disharmonious relationship with most authoritarian accounts of how the world should be understood, and as the level of denial embedded in a given educational system becomes too jarring and obvious it can push such educational approaches and their inherent level of denials beyond the brink. Less spectacular examples can be drawn from the field of environmental education and education for sustainable development, where recent studies of different countries efforts to apply the concept of ESD on their national curriculums have thrown up some interesting emphasis. The oil producing country of Norway, one of the world’s richest countries, engages through textbooks within a range of primary schools subjects with the challenges of climate change. No harsh critique of their own national production of oil (Norway is the 15th biggest oil producer in the world), can be found in these textbooks, as climate change is externalized and something that is not linked directly with their national oil production, but instead linked to foreign overproduction and overconsumption, which is presented as severely threatening the renowned natural beauty of Norway (Witoszek 2017). Such examples of denial has been the explicit enemy of central educational philosophers and theorists for centuries. Critique of predetermined outcome of education has been the mainstay of the ongoing skill vs. broader life competencies or bildung discussions. John Dewey’s emphasis on the importance of the school, not only as a place to gain knowledge, but also as a place where social and interactive processes formed

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the learner in order to learn how to navigate life was a heavy critique of education as instrumental tools for economic growth (Dewey 1916). The same can be said about Wolfgang Klafkis continental approach to Bildung and education through epochal key problems that went were born out of a post WW2 understanding of the dangers of indoctrination and denial of the rights of minorities through education (Biesta 2002). In recent years, Gert Biesta, has continued the critique of education as a simple means of ensuring the competitiveness of a national state in the globalized struggle for economic growth, instead arguing for an acknowledgment of the inherent risky nature of education (Biesta 2002, 2014). Skills are to be transferred, but mirroring Freud, the outcome is never decided and part of an ongoing reforming of society, values and life form. The fight against the oppressive and negative aspects of collective and individual denial, continues to be at the forefront of the educational debates on a national and international level. When it comes to challenges linked to environmental issues and climate the change the debate is hotter than ever. The role of denial is often delimited to something that should be erased through the help of intense educational efforts. Both on a structural societal level and on a individual level it seems that denial is not only something that limits the potential for growth, insight and global development, but also as something positive that shields us against the contingent nature of the world that we inhabit. Education is a powerful tool of harnessing visions of the future and of interacting with such a future, but the often forgotten contingent kernel of education, always ensures that plenty of spanners are thrown into the works and the monstrous real unhinges our plans for the future, and it seems safer to protect ourselves through renewed levels of societal and individual denial.

Other Ways Forward Are we caught in the loop of the Möebious strip with visions of progress always followed by practices of denial, in the face of a contingent and monstrous reality that never gives us what we want? Well yes, but that does not mean that there are not plenty of excess in that model as well. Dreams of braking through the barrier, and reaching a revitalized sense of insight, would just to submit to the debunked vision of rational enlightenment, and forgetting the ever-looming contingency of it all. The overall teachings of speculative realism and OOO is timely. There is more than what can be discursively described and just because we cannot describe this “more”, it does not mean that it is not relevant or influencing our lives.

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Echoing Morton’s Dark Ecology, a dark pathway towards a better understanding of denial and its role in education, is not aimlessly wandering around in a dark depressive unlit place. It is also accepting the open-ended dark-sweet nature of the situation we are in (Morton 2016). That we as societies and individuals seem to be caught in a deadlock with denial could be seen as dark-depressing. Yes, it would be nice if we could agree on a few more of the facts of life (Climate change is genuine, loss of biodiversity is a problem, nation-states are not instigated by divine powers etc.). But at the same time, the totality of all the facts of life are beyond our grasp and arguably not always helpful to dwell too much on (asteroids could destroy earth, all you know will die one day, that delicious piece of sushi in front of you might poison you etc.). In that way, denial is not only dark-depressing, but also uncannily dark sweet. A more thoughtful approach to denial is not only an effort to banish simple fact-denialism, but more of an effort to understand how denial, as a societal and individual coping strategy, opens up for the excess embedded in our vision of the future and of our educational practices. There is always something more, something that we could do and relate to, consciously or subconsciously. But we need to be better at talking about this excess first, and how it influences our lives. Not in order to control it, but to widen our vocabulary when it comes to talking about that which is more than fact, and which should not be denied. Harman offers, though his OOO a highly sensitive effort to describe everything as objects that work on each other, always withdrawn, always as more than with it seems. His critique of standard approaches to the world resonates with approaches to education. Focusing on the individual parts of a curriculum and its alignment with the teaching strategies and pedagogical activities employed could be seen as an example of undermining, where a phenomenon is split into its substantial building blocks in order to reveal its true nature. The other danger is overmining, where education could be seen as a symptom of greater socioeconomic currents that really control what goes on in the classroom. Finally duomining where education could be disassembled into particular parts and then later referred to as reflecting on the core of universal characteristics. Harman argues that all these strategies loose sight of the basic withdrawnness of all objects, education included (Harman 2011a). That brings us to the third version of dark that Morton advocates. The dark-sweet argument that coexistence is possible, not only with the nature, environment and hyperobjects that surround us, but also with

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the insight that we cannot grasp these in their totality. Staring into the abyss will only get us so far. Accepting the world is dark, but that different hues of dark exist and that some of this darkness might hide facts that we can illuminate, while others will be moored outside of our reach, is a powerful step towards critiquing both societal use of education as programmes of mass denial and individual use of denial as a comforting crutch in times of accelerating complexity and fake news. Eugene Thacker argues for a new horrific ontology that spends a bit more energy on that which we label as the outside and wanted in order to interrogate our cultural narratives of that which we do not understand, but still influence us (Thacker 2011). Brassier advocates a neo-nihilistic take on the horrible vistas of totality by arguing that our discourses of power, moral and values are at best random and on its way to deconstruction, but at its worst screening us from the fact that destruction is the only horizon that humanity has. From his point of view, we should start enjoying that horizon and arranging our understandings of societies and individuals in that light (Brassier 2007). Education, with its dual core of insight and denial, should not be caught as a puppet of systemic denialisms, but neither should it be used in a blind effort to push for simplistic rationalistic narratives of endless potentials of growth, solutions and omnipotent illuminated bliss. Education is entwined with the Möebius strip of insight and denial. By testing the limits of both notions of insight and denial and pushing for a darker accept of the basic withdrawnness of the world, education can continue to be a fertile and invigorating dialogue with the contingent future that waits for no one.

References Biesta, G. (2002). Bildung and Modernity: The Future of Bildung in a World of Difference. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 21(4–5), 343–351. Biesta, G. (2014). Beautiful Risk of Education. London: Paradigm Publishers. Bollier, D. (2010). The Promise and Peril of Big Data. Washington, DC: The Aspen Institute. Brassier, R. (2007). Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Bryant, L., Srnicek, N., & Harman, H. (2011). Towards a Speculative Philosophy. In N. S. Levi Byant, & H. Harman (Eds.), The Speculative Turn. Melbourne: re.press. Deligiorg, K. (2005). Kant and the Culture of Enlightenment. New York: State University of New York Press.

36  J. A. LYSGAARD ET AL. Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and Education. New York: Macmillan. Dewey, J. (1929). The Quest for Certainty. New York: Minton, Balch & Company. Dolar, M. (2017). 7 Questions for the Professor. In A. B. Jørgensen (Ed.), What Is Education? Copenhagen: Próblema. Evans, D. (2010). An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge. Freud, A. (1992). The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence. London: Karnac Books. Freud, S. (1914). On Narcissism. London: Karnac Books Ltd. Freud, S. (1923). Die infantile Genitalorganisation: (Eine Einschaltung in die Sexualtheorie). Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, IX, 168–171. Freud, S. (2002). Civilisation and Its Discontents. London: Penguin Books. Harman, G. (2009). Towards Speculative Realism. Winchester: Zero Books. Harman, G. (2011a). On the Undermining of Objects: Grant, Bruno, and Radical Philosophy. In L. Bryant, N. Srnicek, & G. Harman (Eds.), The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism (pp. 21–40). Melbourne: re.press. Harman, G. (2011b). The Quadruple Object. Alresford: Zero Books. Jacobs, P. (2017). TRUMP: Military Solutions Are ‘Locked and Loaded’ If North Korea Acts ‘Unwisely’. Business Insider. Retrieved from http://nordic. businessinsider.com/trump-north-korea-military-solutions-2017-8/. Lacan, J. (2006). Écrits. New York: W. W. Norton. Laplanche, J., & Pontali, J.-B. (1973). The Language of Psycho-Analysis. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis. Lazarus, R. S. (2013). Psychology. New York: Psychology Press. Meillassoux, Q. (2009). After Finitude. London: Continuum. Morton, T. (2013). Hyperobjects. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Morton, T. (2016). Dark Ecology. New York: Colombia University Press. Rittel, H. W. J., & Webber, M. M. (1973). Planning Problems Are Wicked Problems. Policy Sciences, 4, 155–169. Säfström, C. A. (2017). Livable Life, Educational Theory and the Imperative of Constant Change. Paper presented at the ECER 2017, Copenhagen. Sezen-Barrie, A., Shea, N., & Borman, J. H. (2017). Probing into the Sources of Ignorance: Science Teachers’ Practices of Constructing Arguments or Rebuttals to Denialism of Climate Change. Environmental Education Research, 0–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2017.1330949. Specter, M. (2009). Denialism: The Dangers of Irrational Thinking and Ignoring Science Experts. New York: The Penguin Press. Starostin, E. L., & van der Heijden, G. H. M. (2007). The Shape of a Möbius Strip. Nature Materials, 6, 563–567. Thacker, E. (2011). In the Dust of This Panet. Winchester: Zero books. Witoszek, N. (2017). Teaching Sustainability in Norway, China and Ghana: Challenges to the UN Programme. Environmental Education Research, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2017.1307944.

CHAPTER 3

Insanity Martin Hauberg-Lund Laugesen

Abstract  The chapter explores various ways in which the psychological category of “insanity” can be used to understand central and important aspects of education and learning. It delves into the affective state of insanity, metaphorically understood to be a mode of response to encountering nonhuman objects, forces and circumstances. It then goes on to illustrate this mode of response through a philosophical engagement with H. P. Lovecraft’s novella, At the Mountains of Madness. Drawing on the interpretive resources of Graham Harman’s Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy the chapter seeks to sound out Lovecraft’s literarily staged insights into the pedagogical value of insanity, where “insanity” is understood as a temporary state of disorientation, confusion and shift to non-normal modes of perceiving, thinking and acting in the world. Keywords  Dark pedagogy · Insanity · Normality · Howard Phillips Lovecraft · Horror · Georges Canguilhem · Graham Harman © The Author(s) 2019 J. A. Lysgaard et al., Dark Pedagogy, Palgrave Studies in Education and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19933-3_3

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Introduction In this chapter we will explore the second of the three possible response modes available to human beings when they confront the nonhuman forces and objects of nature’s great outdoors of cosmic indifference. Lovecraft’s novella At the Mountains of Madness from 1936 will be interpreted from the point of view of OOO, more specifically under the inspiration of Graham Harman’s Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy from 2012, and it will do so with a specific view to insanity as one of the three possible human reactions to the cosmic horrors of the so-called world-without-us. We take Lovecraft’s narrative to be highly relevant for pedagogical practitioners and theoreticians due to its profoundly allegorical meaning(s) in the contemporary context of global warming, planetary mass extinction and, consequently, accelerating climate change. The exploration will begin by accounting for the specific way in which “insanity” and “madness” is to be understood in the present context. Not all of insanity’s possible meanings will be equally relevant for the project of dark pedagogy, hence the need for an initial conceptual clarification. We will then dive into Lovecraft’s literary exposition of insanity as a human response to the confrontation with landscapes, ­architecture and lifeforms surpassing human categories and scientific ­ prognostics. And, finally, we will assess the pedagogical relevance of insanity in the age of destructive climate change caused by human beings, i.e. the Anthropocene epoch.

Madness, Insanity and Public Appearance I don’t care about being popular. I care about climate justice and the living planet. —Greta Thunberg1

Exclamations such as “That’s just insane!”, “He’s completely mad!”, “She’s out of her mind!” and “They should be locked up!” are not hard to come by in human conversation. We have all heard, at some point, 1 Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg speaking at the COP24 in Katowice in Poland, December 2018 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzeekxtyFOY—Accessed 17 December 2018).

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somebody judge someone’s actions, statements, opinions or total personality by means of degrading the person in question to a pathological “nut case”. Most of the time, what people have in mind when they dish out psychopathological reductions of something or someone to be insane, or an expression of an underlying insanity, is not literal mental illness. On the other hand, what is usually intended by statements such as the ones above is a fundamental condemnation of a state of anomalous abnormality which, from the perspective of the condemner, appears to be in such a stark contrast to his/her values, political opinions, ways of behaving and/ or world view in general that a strong and sudden need arises to linguistically mark the person or phenomenon in question as insane. The use of propositional stigmatization is carried out by way of a psychopathological exaggeration. The above exclamations can be used jokingly to tease a friend, or they can be used in earnest to actually condemn someone or someone’s actions, values, opinions or psychological traits. Sometimes it is not clear which of the two semantic possibilities are actually at stake, but when it is used in earnest it amounts to nothing less than a serious act of dissociation. When Swedish teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg stated, in front of a host of international climate politicians at COP24 in Poland, that she did not “care about being popular” what she did was, in a way, to pre-empt the significance of anyone calling her out as insane or mad. She flashed her accurate self-consciousness that she would and will, probably, be judged as insane or mad due to the relatively radical demands she presents to elected politicians around the world. Calling well-established world leaders out as “immature”, Thunberg signalled her fundamental opposition to the global political establishment and the “system” it represents. The willingness to be unpopular is, simultaneously, the resolution to accept being perceived as crazy, mad or insane. Taken prima facie the word “insanity” appears as a negation. It is the negation of “sanity”, wherefore the question concerning the meaning of insanity quickly transforms itself into the question concerning the meaning of “sanity”. We therefore raise the question: What does it mean to be “sane”? Etymologically speaking, sanity stems from the latin expression “sanus” which can be roughly translated into “sound” or “healthy”. It can also be translated into “correct”, and therefore—derivatively— into “normal”. The etymology behind “normal” and “normality” is the latin “norma” and the greek “gnomon” which both denotes a carpenter’s square, i.e. a measuring device for the construction of buildings or

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furniture made of, say, wood or metal. Normality therefore has to do with the ruly, the orderly and the disciplined. The person said to be “normal” is, therefore, the person that appears to be “fit” when measured against widespread and broadly accepted ways of being with a view to the construction of certain social things such as families, friend groups, local communities or whole societies. And because Thunberg with her subversive political demands and environmentally idealistic claims does not exactly fit into the well-established order of the common sense of most citizens of Western societies based on consumption centred and capitalist economies, she stands out as anomalous, weird and, potentially, mad or insane. The sane person is the sound one, the one that fits in and acts correctly in such a way that the person in question is recognized as normal by his or her immediate peers. The sane person is in line with the ruling normativity of his or her societal vicinity. Now, the insane person is the one that appears to be unsound and whose actions offend and break with the standards of the preservers of the behavioural status quo, i.e. the actions, values and opinions of the common man. The insane person is, therefore, recognized and publicly scorned as abnormal and as an anomaly—at least to some extent. Historically, the ones that did not fit into the category of sanity were frowned upon and were, when their abnormality came to a sufficiently extreme expression, condemned and treated as through and through pathological, i.e. as sick or ill. Therefore, the ambassadors of normality and accepted standards of soundness have claimed to be in their good right to lock up the insane, to medically experiment on them, to sterilize them and even, in some historical circumstances, to kill them if they saw it fit. Just think about the contemporary instances of public execution of homosexuals in Iran and the witch hunt on homosexuals in Nigeria. Even vegetarians experience hard judgment and sardonic scorn if they are found out in the social context of carnivores. Perhaps especially so in rich Western countries such as Denmark with a nationally proud tradition of agriculture and where only approximately 1.8% of the population have adopted a vegetarian diet. Minorities have always been stigmatized by the people belonging to the majority culture of a given society, and sociologically as well as anthropologically speaking this has occurred in order to secure and strengthen the internal ties of the culturally predominating life world of the society in question. It seems, therefore, like an anthropological constant that we live our societally conditioned lives according to the distinction between what is normal and what is pathological.

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French philosopher of the life sciences George Canguilhem is famous for having philosophically elaborated the conceptual distinction between “normality” and “pathology”. He did so in his doctoral dissertation entitled The Normal and the Pathological from 1943 which has since become a landmark within medicinal ethics and the history of science. It is important for the exposition that follows that we properly introduce this conceptual distinction and qualify its meaning in the current context. According to Canguilhem “life”, in its essence, is characterized by being a normative activity. This fundamentally means that in contrast to basic chemical or physical processes obeying static laws of nature, life is dynamic and self-transgressing, it is (at least potentially) autonomous. That which is worthy of the name of “life” is characterized by the ability to reconfigure the norms according to which it unfolds. It is self-referential and responsive to changes in the outer conditions of living. As Canguilhem-scholar Victoria Margree has put it: “[L]ife is that which regulates its relationship to its environment through the adoption of norms of living” (Margree 2002: 301). The norms thus adopted are to be evaluated on the basis of how good they are relative to the successful survival of the organism in question. Reproduction and continuous prosperity are yardsticks for the measurement of the value of the norms of living adopted at any given point in time. But because norms of living are adopted in relation to certain environmental circumstances and environments themselves change over time as a consequence of the inherently complex dynamism of Earth’s biosphere, norms of living must themselves be replaced as time goes by. Canguilhem therefore distinguishes between “healthy” and “pathological” norms. Healthy norms of living are characterized by their ability to be changed when the circumstances under which life is unfolding demands of the organism in question that new behavioural heuristics be introduced in order to cope with the altered conditions of reproduction and proliferation. Pathological norms, on the other hand, are characterized by their inertia and fixity as well as “conservatism and intolerance of change. If health is variability and flexibility – normativity – then pathology is defined as the reduction of these” (Margree 2002: 303). Importantly, Canguilhem goes on to integrate “normality” into the otherwise binary distinction between health and pathology. He says of the inherent normative activity of healthy life that it should not be confused with the normality of, for instance, established common sense or the self-conception of majority culture (Margree 2002: 304).

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Going back to our example from before, Greta Thunberg from Sweden appears to be embodying and representing a rather nonconforming set of values and opinions in relation to the political climate of her globalized environment. Her assessments of contemporary world leaders and the norms of living she has consequently adopted to cope with and position herself in relation to the societal environment, as well as the geo-bio-physical environment of Earth itself, is fundamentally nonconforming when compared to the general outlook of most political voters. She will, therefore, risk being labelled and propositionally stigmatized as crazy, mad or insane (or maybe even “hysterical” due to her female gender) by people adhering to the norms of living that qualify as “statistically average” (Margree 2002: 304). From the point of view of Canguilhem, however, Thunberg’s way of life ought to be judged as healthy due to its inherent dynamism, flexibility and responsiveness to drastic changes in her environment that are crucial to the future life conditions of both herself, humanity and a vast multiplicity of nonhuman life forms on Earth. In contrast to (most of) the negotiating world leaders responsible for the enactment of the Paris agreement from 2015 Thunberg seems both willing to and capable of change. When seen in the light of anthropogenic global warming and the various environmental threats it has proven to entail it is not the normative attitude of Thunberg the teenage activist, but the norms of world leaders and their unproductive political stalemate that appear to be insane qua pathological: “What is constitutive of pathological norms as opposed to healthy ones is that the former are characterized by a reduced capacity to tolerate change” (Margree 2002: 303). In the present context we will operate with two distinct meanings of “insanity” and “madness”. Firstly, we will understand “insanity” and “madness” as names for the inability to rationally and responsibly cope with the confrontation with crucial changes in one’s environment with potentially dire implications for the conditions of future living. Secondly, we will understand “insanity” and “madness” as the relative appearance of something or somebody evaluated from the normative perspective of the societal majority as mad or insane. (Throughout the present chapter the words “insanity” and “madness” will be used interchangeably, and we will make sure to emphasize which of the two meanings are at stake in the specific instances of their use.)

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On the Academic Value of Madness There are two traditional sites where one could “go mad”, that is, be oneself without regard to external conventions and social pressures: the insane asylum and the academy. —Raphael Sassower

In his 1994 article On Madness in the Academy philosopher Raphael Sassower presents us with a normatively somewhat idealized conception of “madness”, which is an expression of the second of the two possible meanings of insanity or madness. Sassower writes in a passionate, experimental and lively yet both wholesome and sober style that reflects the implicit academic ideals that he takes to follow from his positive interpretation of madness. Without directly accounting for his sources of inspiration Sassower delivers a deduction of the existential demands of the intellectual life of academics that appears to be something akin to a Humboldtianism on speed. In accordance with his academic vocation Sassower conjures forth a psychological profile of the proper academic that is at its core characterized by a fundamental lust for madness or, as he himself calls it, “intellectual radicalism” (Sassower 1994: 483). From Sassower’s passionate perspective the adjective “radical” connotes “speaking out about issues that matter […], behaving in ways that make a difference in the lives of our students […] and affecting university policies in responsible ways” (Sassower 1994: 482). Thus, it does not imply simply putting on the kind of aesthetically superficial “costume” that already Simone de Baeuvoir disparagingly described in her Force of Circumstance from 1963 when talking about the fashionably vain existentialists of her time that “wore the new ‘existentialist’ uniform […] imported from Capri […] of black sweaters, black shirts, and black pants” (de Beauvoir in Cooper 1996: 2). The radical cannot be aesthetically recognized merely on the basis of clothing and outward appearance. Only the content of the radical’s public statements of opinion and enacted actions will reveal him or her as the radical that he or she is. Just think of Thunberg once again. She does not exactly strike you as a revolutionary (climate) idealist, does she now? However, that is just what she is. Sassower’s use of the term “madness” to designate something positive and ideal is not to be understood in accordance with the logic of the psychopathology of, say, serial killers or gang rapists, but is, on the other

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hand, to be seen as a constructive and deliberate misuse in order to engender the will to transgress in the otherwise anaemic mental states of average academics. As he himself polemically puts it towards the end of the article: If we turn out to repeat ourselves or the dogmas of yesteryear, we ought to relinquish our positions of power and look for other jobs, or at least admit that we are careerists and not courageous and responsible intellectuals. (Sassower 1994: 483)

Sassower’s idealizing transformation of madness into an academic virtue is, in its essence, congruent with some of the core ideals of dark pedagogy. As we shall see later on (e.g. Chapter 6 of Part II) among the very basic tenets of dark pedagogy is the crossing of boundaries, the subversion of common sense and the wild experimenting that Sassower justifies in the name of the academy. And again, it seems to be a very Humboldtian academy he has in mind, where academic researchers are meant to carry out their intellectual and critical businesses without institutional or political constraints externally imposed, i.e. from the outside of academic activity itself. Sassower’s “complaint”, as he puts it, is “that the academy does not but should encourage intellectual passion” (Sassower 1994: 478), which he takes to imply “go[ing] mad in the finest sense of the term, the voluntary and not the pathological one” (Sassower 1994: 482). In the context of our treatment of insanity it is telling that it was the character of a “madman” that Nietzsche chose to confront the townspeople with the brutal fact that “God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!” (Nietzsche 2009: 120). Nietzsche’s infamous ethics of the overman implies the courage and/or existential readiness to go insane and be mad relative to the reigning prescriptions of common sense and culturally defined normality. In the face of a human, all too human societal setting suffering from the dire symptoms of radical hypocrisy, slave morality and the troubling prevalence of double standards in relation to the challenges humanity face in the Anthropocene epoch concerning global warming and environmental pollution, does not the symbolic figure of the madman appear as an expression of both ethical and political heroism? How might an ecological madman be brought about? What kinds of experience must he or she have gone through in order to engage the mediocre rabble of environmental ignorance and apathy and rouse it from its dogmatic slumber in the silky soft sheets and linen of late modernity, endless consumerism and globalized capitalism? It will, at the least, take a certain degree of dissociative maddening of

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one’s person before one is ready to go up against the standard norms of living that pertain to large parts of the societal environment of one’s upbringing and current life situation. A certain degree of countercultural individualization will also contribute to the ripening of the ecological madman. Let us now move on to take a look at how Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness may contribute to a better understanding of how certain pedagogical practices working with insanity as a constructive affect might prove useful in this regard.

The Insanity Inducing Exteriority of the WorldWithout-Us [T]he madness of a lone survivor might have conceived the inconceivable […]. —H. P. Lovecraft2

In his 2007 bestseller The World Without Us, Alan Weisman unfolds a large-scale intellectual simulation of what would happen on Earth if all humans vanished from the face of the planet from one day to the next. The scale and literary execution of the simulation made the environmentalist Bill McKibben call it “[o]ne of the grandest thought experiments of our time” (cf. the front cover of Weisman 2017). When we no longer spray huge amounts of fertilizer and pesticides over our agricultural fields the winged pollinators of Earth will once again take over, and, as Weisman puts it, “the world without us will bloom anew” (Weisman 2007: 163). Long after the vanishing of human beings, and after the disappearance of so many constructions and artefacts made of synthetic materials the architecture of stone produced by the ancient Greek civilization will still stand: “Stone buildings will be among the last to disappear when we’re gone” (Weisman 2007: 125). Weisman also goes into the destructive forces of simple freeze-thaw cycles of the seasons once maintenance of buildings has stopped and the cycles repeat for long enough: “[T]he repeated freezing and thawing make asphalt and cement split. When snow thaws, water seeps into these fresh cracks. When it freezes, the water expands, and cracks widen” (Weisman 2007: 30). Simple and blind processes such as this one will begin their demolition of the constructions that once made human beings feel proud about their 2 (Lovecraft

2009: 483–484).

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species-specific accomplishments. The very indifference of the cosmos towards the petty interests and pursuits of the human species is what lies at the very core of the concept of “the world-without-us”. As he puts it early on in the book: “On the day after humans disappear, nature takes over and immediately begins cleaning house – or houses, that is. Cleans them right off the face of the Earth. They all go” (Weisman 2007: 17). Inspired by Weisman’s concept, Eugene Thacker has developed his own version of the notion of the world-without-us in his 2011 In the Dust of This Planet which constitutes the first volume in his philosophy of horror trilogy. Thacker develops a tripartite ontological distinction between (1) the world-for-us, (2) the world-in-itself and (3) the world-without-us. He also labels these three worlds World, Earth and Planet, respectively. Whereas the first two kinds of world have been well known ever since the inception of ancient philosophy (e.g. Plato’s distinction between phenomena and ideas and their correlative modes of knowing: doxa (experience-based opinion) and episteme (true insight)), the third kind of world is historically of a later date. Among Thacker’s sources of Inspiration are Arthur Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and George Bataille, whose notions of “will”, “will to power” and “eroticism” highlight the nonhuman drive behind all human enterprise. We are driven, in other words, by a conglomerate of nonhuman forces that sometimes take on a conatively supportive quality and sometimes a malign and threatening quality. Thacker’s main point remains, however, that reality was not made for us, it has not been designed with a special view to human needs, but simply is what it is irrespective of our cultural projections and scientific models. The emergence of human beings is to be considered as contingent a phenomenon in the deep time history of the cosmos as the emergence of dust, heavy molecules, algae, oxygen and whale song. This conviction that the cosmos is indifferent towards human concerns and that human beings do not, in principle, have good chances for rationally mastering the environmental conditions for their potential thriving is also called “cosmic pessimism”, and Thacker understands Lovecraft to be the seminal author of this position (Thacker 2011: 80): “The view of Cosmic Pessimism is a strange mysticism of the world-without-us, a hermeticism of the abyss, a noumenal occultism” (Thacker 2011: 17). To back up his claim that Lovecraft is among the very central authors of the tradition of cosmic pessimism, Thacker quotes a passage from one of Lovecraft’s letters where Lovecraft himself states that “all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests are emotions [that] have no validity or significance in the vast

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cosmos-at-large” (Lovecraft in Thacker 2011: 80). The special literary quality of Lovecraft’s writings is, for Thacker, that it enables the objective side of this cosmic indifference to step forward and have an aesthetic appearance in the form of alien monsters, fatal colours out of space and mists of incorporeal malignity. Or, as Thacker himself puts it, Lovecraft horrifically facilitates “the enigmatic manifesting of the world-without-us into the world-for-us” (Thacker 2011: 82). Hence the main question that is being dealt with in Lovecraft’s various novellas and short stories can be said to be the following: “[W]hat happens when we as human beings confront a world that is radically unhuman, impersonal, and even indifferent to the human?” (Thacker 2011: 96). In Lovecraft’s mythological lore this notion of the cosmically indifferent world without us is allegorically represented by the cosmic deities that populate his many writings. Cthulhu, being the highest-ranking god in the mythos, epitomizes the indifference of reality towards human beings’ endeavours. According to the Lovecraft mythos, it was Abdul Alhazred, known as “the mad Arab”, who authored the infamous tome Necronomicon. The mythical grimoire contains an account of the so-called “Old Ones” (also called “ancient ones” and “elder things”) and how to summon them. The meaning of the name “Abdul Alhazred” has been interpreted in various ways. It does, however, make good sense to stress the basic fact that “Abdul” means “slave of the …”, “worshipper of …” and similar things. Because Abdul Alhazred is the author of the Necronomicon, one might conjecture that Abdul Alhazred is “the slave or worshipper of Cthulhu”, which is, ultimately, the Old One. The Great Old Ones communicate by way of what Lovecraft calls “transmitted thought”, which must be thought of as a kind of telepathy. Using their telepathic powers, the Great Old Ones can communicate with the “sensitive” among human beings “by moulding their dreams” (Lovecraft 2009: 214). In Lovecraft’s world it is, generally speaking, not ambitious and technologically advanced scientists who are most sensitive towards the thoughts transmitted by the Great Old Ones. On the contrary, Lovecraft often has “various lower-ranking humans (foreign sailors, theosophists, witches, mad Arabs)” obtain “more direct insight into reality” (Harman 2012: 151), as Harman puts it. At the end of the day, the way of science and the laborious work of scientists can only get us so far when what we are dealing with is the innermost truths about the nature of reality, i.e. the world-without-us. Science might be able to count and measure, and for that it is extremely useful and beneficial. However, when it comes to “the most advanced knowledge of cosmic truth” it cannot be established

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and presented by calculating scientists, and it is, instead, granted “to those who gain insight from direct contact with the more monstrous beings that fill his writings” (Harman 2012: 97). On Harman’s account, one of the reasons why Lovecraft sides with the epistemic prowess of non-scientists is that he subscribes to a fundamental dichotomy between reality in itself and linguistic representation of reality as such. Harman even talks about what he calls “a classic Lovecraftian vertical rift between some underlying reality and the incapacity of language to express it adequately” (Harman 2012: 89—see also 162). (In Chapter 6 of Part II we return to the pedagogical value of confronting nonhuman reality.) One of the possible outcomes of confronting the ancient ones directly is “insanity” or “madness”. As Lovecraft-scholar Brad Tabas has put it: “In Lovecraft it is never madness that engenders the experience of the real, but rather the encounter with the real that provokes fits of madness. Madness is thus the testament and seal of having experienced the real” (Tabas 2015: 7–8). This outbreak of madness becomes, as we will see, painstakingly clear towards the very end of the novella At the Mountains of Madness. Lovecraft’s literary staging of human beings’ losing their minds in the great outdoors of nature conceived of as the world-without-us will, eventually, help us to conceptualize the pedagogical value of insanity and madness towards the end of the present chapter. For Lovecraft, human beings are radically finite creatures characterized by mortality and limited epistemic capacities. Often times he stresses that “the one primal mystery through which not even thought can pass” (Lovecraft 2009: 214) is the ancient, nonhuman forces of the universe itself, personified by the mythic figure of Cthulhu, that are, at best, indifferent to but most often directly hostile towards human beings and their petty ends. This uncontroversial view of the central theme of Lovecraft’s literary universe has been succinctly formulated by another Lovecraft-scholar, namely Robert M. Price when he stated that Lovecraft employed the entities populating his cosmic horror mythology “to symbolize the indifferent, inexorable forces of the cosmos which blindly produced Homo sapiens and will finally unknowingly destroy them again” (Price 2001: 27). In the present Lovecraftian context, insanity is thus to be seen as an affectively intense state of pre- or non-linguistic insight into secret or arcane aspects of the nature of reality. But before we go into an exposition of the pedagogical value of insanity, let us now take the plunge and dive into the narrative of At the Mountains of Madness itself.

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Venturing into the Mountains of Madness The story is told by the geologist Dyer who works as a professor at Miskatonic University in Arkham. Already at the very beginning of, but also throughout the tale, we are told by Dyer himself that the overall purpose of his retelling the story of the expedition is to issue warnings to and thus convince the organizers behind the already scheduled StarkweatherMorre expedition that they should stop their scientific endeavours immediately (Lovecraft 2009: 422, 424, 436, 446, 449, 453, 482). The main purpose of Dyer’s narration is thus characterized by caution and a newly won respect for the autonomy of nature and fear of the perilous hazards connected with the rough and mechanical scientific prying open of the unknown and altogether nonhuman regions of reality. Dyer the narrator takes his cautionary mission so seriously that he states that “the issuance of that warning is a prime necessity” (Lovecraft 2009: 468). In the story, Dyer was the leader of an expedition to Antarctica. The purpose of the expedition was to collect geologically, biologically and meteorologically significant samples to undergo further study and scrutiny back at Miskatonic University. Besides Dyer, the geologist, the scientific crew members of the expedition consisted of biologists Pabodie and Lake and physicist and meteorologist Atwood. Besides the four core members of senior staff the expedition included a group of sixteen assistants that consisted of seven graduate students and nine mechanics. Dyer has a special relationship with one of the students, Danforth, who is a knowledgeable reader of bizarre and macabre literature, such as Edgar Allan Poe. Towards the end of the novella, it is Dyer and Danforth who are the only survivors of the horrors of the Antarctic expedition, Danforth clearly suffering from fits of madness from time to time. In the plane away from Antarctica Dyer says that Danforth’s “shrieks were confined to the repetition of a single mad word of all too obvious source: ‘Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!’” (Lovecraft 2009: 503). To begin with, one of the key characteristics of Lovecraft’s literary portrayal of human beings’ encounters with nonhuman landscapes, ancient entities, blasphemous life forms and intangible forces is that everything appears “fancy-stirring”, “disquieting”, “dimly terrible”, “poignant” and “complex” (Lovecraft 2009: 426–427). Lovecraft employs all of these adjectives across merely two pages to describe the altogether alienating experience of encountering the world-without-us. His tendency towards somewhat hyperbolic language when it comes to

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the literary staging of that strangeness of reality that seeps into the world when human beings confront the nonhuman, reveals, to some extent, his overall philosophical sentiment, which comes to the fore most clearly in the celebrated opening paragraph of his perhaps most famous story The Call of Cthulhu from 1928: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. (Lovecraft 2009: 201)

In this opening paragraph Lovecraft makes it clear that he takes true, scientific insight into the fundamentally nonhuman nature of reality to involve the ominous disclosure of the “terrifying vistas of reality” in which we are doomed to be “frightfully positioned”. The notion of “the most merciful thing in the world” is interesting, since Lovecraft seems to suggest that our limited cognitive capabilities are what keep us safe from the maddening impact of a more holistic and true view of the universe, i.e. “the piecing together of dissociated knowledge”. In At the Mountains of Madness he repeats this notion of ignorance as a merciful thing when Dyer, the geologist narrator, uses the phrase “the merciful blanks” to designate the deliberate omissions in his account of what he and the rest of the crew witnessed in “the hidden transmontane world” (Lovecraft 2009: 452) in the Antarctic regions of their research expedition. Indeed, Lovecraft is an author of cosmic horror and pessimism. Another key element in At the Mountains of Madness is the fact that the expedition crew members are trying to carry out pioneering research in their various areas of expertise. They are, in other words, aiming at getting access to otherwise unexplored domains of nature through the application of brute mechanical forces such as drilling, dynamiting and ice-melting equipment. This is exemplified in the text itself when Lovecraft lets Dyer tell us that the expedition is striving to “bring to light materials of a sort hitherto unreached by the ordinary methods of collections” (Lovecraft 2009: 423), “to discern new topographical

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features in areas unreached by previous explorers” (Lovecraft 2009: 429) and to do so in “regions never trodden by human foot or penetrated by human imagination” (Lovecraft 2009: 430). That the new discoveries the research team hopes to make, concerns historically speaking pre-human or “ancestral” (Meillassoux 2009) objects of various sorts, is made clear when the narrator talks about “the white, aeon-dead world of the ultimate south” (Lovecraft 2009: 428), “the region’s primordial history” (Lovecraft 2009: 429), “that unbelievably ancient stratum” (Lovecraft 2009: 430) and, perhaps a bit more indirectly and pathosladen, “the great unknown continent and its cryptic world of frozen death” (Lovecraft 2009: 426). We do not need to look far and wide for a real-world illustration of Lovecraft’s narrative symbolism. Back in November 2017 the magazine The Atlantic published an article by technology journalist and associate editor Robinson Meyer entitled The Zombie Diseases of Climate Change: What Lurks in the Arctic’s Thawing Permafrost? In this article, Meyer elaborates upon a scientific article published in 2014 in which Mathieu Legendre and his team of fellow scientists disclose their findings from the Siberian permafrost. What the team had stumbled upon proved itself to be a new giant virus now known as “Pithovirus Sibericum” over 1 μm in length. It had been frozen for 30,000 years, but the team of scientists succeeded in reviving the virus, thus bringing it back from the realm of the dead in which it had been lying in a dormant state (Fig. 3.1). In its current state the virus does not seem to pose any threat to human beings. However, the overall take away point from the findings of Legendre and his team seems to be that through our planetary endeavours of intense mining, industrial fabrication and mass consumption based on a historically unprecedented level of energy spending, we are actively raising the temperatures of the planet and thus de-freezing the permafrost that holds in store both hitherto unknown viruses and gargantuan amounts of greenhouse gasses such as methane. As the authors behind the original article on Pithovirus Sibericum put it themselves: “Our results thus further substantiate the possibility that infectious viral pathogens might be released from ancient permafrost layers exposed by thawing, mining, or drilling” (Legendre et al. 2014: 4278). Getting back to Robinson Meyer, he ends his article on the dark viral findings in the Siberian permafrost by stating that the kinds of emergencies that will result as ominous byproducts of our techno-scientific exploitation of the Earth will appear to be beyond our common sense coordinates of rationality:

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Fig. 3.1  Pithovirus Sibericum

Such emergencies – those that overwhelm our understanding of “known knowns” - are among the most unsettling portents of climate change. Whether the emergencies of the coming century arrive in the form of fires, or floods, or plagues that rise invisibly from the ground, they’re likely to become more and more extreme and less and less familiar—a fantastical parade of crises we will be shocked to find ourselves battling. Even in its quietest places, the world will become newly hostile. (Meyer 2017)

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Meyer’s descriptions resonate deeply with Lovecraft’s basic sentiments. For instance, Lovecraft stresses how the Antarctic regions have an almost hallucinatory effect on the crew members of the scientific expedition. Dyer talks about how “[t]he last lap of the voyage was vivid and fancystirring” (Lovecraft 2009: 426) and that the observation flights “afforded us some magnificent examples of the richly fantastic and deceptive mirages of the polar regions” (Lovecraft 2009: 429). The crew quickly gets a sense of how places and phenomena not yet brought under the yolk of human knowledge exhibit a strange power over the human mind. As an example of this ominous animation of nature, Dyer tells us that the cadences of “the terrible Antarctic wind […] sometimes held vague suggestions of a wild and half-sentient musical piping, with notes extending over a wide range and which for some subconscious mnemonic reason seemed to me disquieting and dimly terrible” (Lovecraft 2009: 426—see also 448, 454, 461, 496, 501). On an ontological level, Lovecraft signals his literary neo-mysticism by letting his characters experience a sort of “unio mystica”: “On cloudy days we had considerable trouble in flying owing to the tendency of snowy earth and sky to merge into one mystical opalescent void with no visible horizon to mark the junction of the two” (Lovecraft 2009: 429). The nature of the Antarctic realms that serve as the site of the expedition is thus suggested “to be one” in a radical sense that implies an ontological severing of reality into the threefold schema of Thacker: the world-for-us, the world-in-itself and the world-without-us. The unio mystica-experiences of the crew members participating in the troubled observation flights reveal how the world-without-us creeps into the world-for-us in ways that do not meaningfully resonate with the cognitive apparatus and forms of intuition of human beings. The categorizing activities of human language practices aside, the world cannot be said to be anything other than “a mystical opalescent void” or, in Neo-Platonist terms, the One. That Lovecraft takes human language to be at a loss when it comes to naming the primordial being of nature is illustrated when Dyer describes Lake, the biologist, to be “strangely convinced that the marking was the print of some bulky, unknown and radically unclassifiable organism” (Lovecraft 2009: 430). The expedition, in other words, quickly encounters what they take to be geological specimens that do not, however, fit into the standard models of human knowledge. Nature, in other words, loves to hide, to borrow a Heraclitean gnome. It continually presents us with provocative riddles and unanswered questions.

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Dyer’s message seems to be that human beings will be punished for meddling with affairs of whose true nature they are utterly unaware and ignorant, and they should, therefore, let nature be. Or, as Dyer puts it once Lake’s camp in the mountains of madness has been demolished: The story must be told in uncensored form “for the need of warning others off from nameless terrors” (Lovecraft 2009: 446). Towards the very end of the story and almost bluntly, Lovecraft lets Dyer communicate what might be considered the true conclusion of the expedition’s horrific experiences: Certain things, we had agreed, were not for people to know and discuss lightly—and I would not speak of them now but for the need of heading off that Starkweather-Moore Expedition, and others, at any cost. It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth’s dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests. (Lovecraft 2009: 502)

When leaving Antarctica behind, Dyer concludes that the expedition crew’s experiences in the hitherto unexplored realms of the ultimate south lead to the conclusion that what they have attempted to survey is best described as “a haunted, accursed realm where life and death, space and time, have made black and blasphemous alliances in the unknown epochs since matter first writhed and swam on the planet’s scarce-cooled crust” (Lovecraft 2009: 448–449). Lovecraft thus harnesses his cosmic pessimism by way of aligning attempts to obtain scientific insights into the great outdoors of the world-without-us and the unleashing of deeply malignant forces upon humankind. Scientific insight into the secrets of geological deep time is thus considered to be hubris and deserving of nature’s nemesis. In this particular sense, Lovecraft can be seen as a normative author, and his weird tales as cautionary fables with consequences on both political, pedagogical and existential levels. We will now explicate what we take to be some of the interesting implications for pedagogy in particular.

On the Pedagogical Value of Lovecraftian Insanity Lovecraft seems to be writing cautionary tales of cosmic weirdness that take as their fundamental premise that finite human beings should not pry the inner chambers of nature too open due to the psychosomatically debilitating effects of such daring and fool hearted prying. Derivatively

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it follows that one of the educational values of Lovecraft’s fiction is that it teaches its readers that human existence is characterized by a radical finitude when compared to the elder gods of long-gone ancient ages. The architectural and cultural remnants often encountered in the tales of Lovecraft bear witness to this, i.e. man’s relatively petty worries, self-centred contemplations and overall miniscule existence. In this regard, the pedagogical value of confronting the “strange strangers” (Morton 2017) of the world-without-us is to be understood as the insane outcome of facing Cthulhu as a literary and mythological symbol of the ruling nonhuman forces of the cosmos. Harman compares the philosophical significance of Lovecraft for speculative realism to the significance of Friedrich Hölderlin for the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. He even claims that, at his best, Lovecraft ought to be seen as “a major writer” dealing with “philosophical themes of emerging interest” (Harman 2012: vii). In the context of the present book, we take such themes to include global warming and the various hyperobjects and hyperobjective modes of experience that it has been shown to imply by Morton (cf. Morton 2013). To begin with, among the central traits of Lovecraft’s implicit philosophical stance is that it is “violently anti-idealist” (Harman 2012: 3). Similar to the anti-idealist qua anti-correlationist ethos of speculative realism and OOO, Lovecraft appears to stress the potential horrors of what Meillassoux has called “the great outdoors” (Meillassoux 2009: 7). Lovecraft’s narrative emphasis on the fact that reality, nature, substance, the absolute, or whatever we decide to call that which is what it is independently of human affairs, holds unknown, weird and altogether nonhuman things in store for us, is an expression of his anti-idealism. This basic metaphysical belief is shared by speculative realists in general and OOO philosophers in particular due to their subscription to the “metaphysical principle of non-exhaustion” (Laugesen 2016: 54). Neither theoretical insight into nor practical disclosure of the hidden aspects of being are capable of fully uncovering the definitive answer to the question concerning “what is”. There will always be more to think about, more to experience and more to simply be for every single object in the cosmos. Therefore, human beings are forever doomed to live, hope and love with a certain amount of insecurity and vulnerability. Harman believes that the insecurity and vulnerability characteristic of the human condition stem from the immanent ontological structure of objects as such. This structure is, according to Harman, fourfold and he most clearly presents his philosophical conception of “the quadruple object” in his 2011 book of the same name (Harman 2011).

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Now, Harman thinks Lovecraft’s ontologically significant prose “makes him as great a hero to object-oriented thought as Hölderlin was to Heidegger” (Harman 2012: 5). One of the key traits of Lovecraft that makes him worthy of such a valorised status is his insistence on the “untranslatability” of the meaning of being (Harman 2012: 16). Often times and quite obsessively we find Lovecraft’s characters resisting or withholding literal description of what they witness when they come face to face with the cosmically indifferent world-without-us. It is, therefore, quite telling that several of Lovecraft’s famous stories bear titles such as The Nameless City and The Unnamable. The sheer number of times that a Lovecraft character has suppressed direct descriptions of “what” he or she saw, heard or felt under given horrific circumstances confronted with things from nonhuman dimensions of reality is (almost) beyond count. It is without a doubt among Lovecraft’s literary signature moves. Thus, for instance, towards the end of At the Mountains of Madness Dyer gives voice to the following quasi-philosophical reflection on the relation between reality, experience and language as well as the insanity inducing powers of the world-without-us: I might as well be frank – even if I cannot bear to be quite direct – in stating what we saw; though at the time we felt that it was not to be admitted even to each other. The words reaching the reader can never even suggest the awfulness of the sight itself. It crippled our consciousness so completely that I wonder we had the residual sense to dim our torches as planned, and to strike the right tunnel toward the dead city. Instinct alone must have carried us through – perhaps better than reason could have done; though if that was what saved us, we paid a high price. Of reason we certainly had little enough left. (Lovecraft 2009: 498)

According to Harman there is an inherent metaphysical truth to Lovecraft’s withholding of his characters’ linguistically literal exposition of the nonhuman horrors that populate his mythological stories: Language (and everything else) is obliged to become an art of allusion or indirect speech, a metaphorical bond with a reality that cannot possibly be made present. Realism does not mean that we are able to state correct propositions about the real world. Instead, it means that reality is too real to be translated without remainder into any sentence, perception, practical action, or anything else. (Harman 2012: 16)

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Because any truth claim about the real state of affairs necessarily distorts, twists and hermeneutically alters the affairs in question it is not possible for human beings to get direct and non-correlational insight into nonhuman reality. However, this does not mean that we must give up our quest for knowledge as such. As Harman puts it: The inability to make the things-in-themselves directly present does not forbid us from having indirect access to them. The inherent stupidity of all content does not mean the inherent impossibility of all knowledge, since knowledge need not be discursive and direct. The absent thing-in-itself can have gravitational effects on the internal content of knowledge, just as Lovecraft can allude to the physical form of Cthulhu even while cancelling the literal terms of the description. (Harman 2012: 17)

Due to the epistemic potential of “allusions” it is, according to Harman, possible for human beings to subscribe to a “weird realism” that shuns the epistemologically presumptuous “representational realism”—i.e. the belief in the truth value of literal descriptions—and instead embraces the conditions of indirect access to objective reality through the use of, for instance, metaphors, gestures and hints. Lovecraft puts to use two distinct literary strategies for attaining the merits of his weird realism: (1) a vertically allusive style and (2) a horizontally cubist style. The first of his two main styles consist of a radical “de-literalization” of his descriptions of otherworldly environments, nonhuman entities and objects of radical alterity. According to Harman, this style reveals “a ‘noumenal’ element in Lovecraft’s style” (Harman 2012: 25), which he also highlights as “perhaps his major stylistic trait as a writer” (Harman 2012: 24). The second of Lovecraft’s two main styles imply a descriptive overload of language “by a gluttonous excess of surfaces and aspects of the thing” (Harman 2012: 25). This involves a stacking of descriptive gestures on top of one another so that the reader ends up bereft of sane opportunities to make sense of the scenery in its totality. In other words: The reader is disabled of correlating all of the various statements in order to grasp the events or entities in question in the same manner as one solves a jigsaw puzzle. The pieces keep on coming, seemingly without end. Stephen King has commented on this specific aspect of Lovecraft’s writing, describing it as “Lovecraft’s inability to ever stop, to say enough is enough” and as Lovecraft’s “neurotic need to simply keep drilling away at

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the column of reality” (King in Houellebecq 2008: 12). Thus, Lovecraft can be said to excel at the literary employment of “obstructed descriptions” (Harman 2012: 26). This comes to the fore when, for instance, Lovecraft lets professor Dyer describe the Cyclopean city in the Antarctic realms that serves as the ultimate destination of the research expedition in At the Mountains of Madness: The effect was that of a Cyclopean city of no architecture known to man or to human imagination, with vast aggregations of night-black masonry embodying monstrous perversions of geometrical laws and attaining the most grotesque extremes of sinister bizarrerie. (Lovecraft 2009: 445)

It quickly becomes obvious that we are meant to literally visualize neither “monstrous perversions of geometrical laws” nor “grotesque extremes of sinister bizarrerie”. Whereas “vast aggregations of night-black masonry” can quite easily be visualized “grotesque extremes of sinister bizarrerie” is meant to depict the architecture’s psychological effect on professor Dyer whose account it is that we are reading. Hence, the latter is not even meant to be visualized, but merely serves the purpose of conveying Dyer’s impression of the objective state of affairs at hand. However, a passage such as the one quoted above, is an illustration of how Lovecraft is fond of using a host of different “adumbrations”, to use Husserl’s technical phenomenological term: Any given thing might be described and linguistically characterized from a potentially unlimited number of perspectives. Hence, we will never be able to adequately expound the thing by means of a finite number of literal descriptions. As already stated above, there will always be more to be said due to the metaphysical principle of non-exhaustion. In addition to the above characterizations of Lovecraft’s style of writing it makes sense to conjecture that his incessant allusions to nonhuman objects and obstructions of a psychological nature are performative gestures disclosing the mode of experience of the characters from whose points of view we, as readers, are confronted with the self-same cosmic horrors as Lovecraft’s characters confront. The final words of At the Mountains of Madness, which seals the fate of young graduate student Danforth, are telling of this non-representational aspect of Lovecraft’s prose: “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” (Lovecraft 2009: 503). According to normal linguistic standards, the words—if, indeed, words they are—are without

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semantic content, and instead serve the purpose of conveying to the reader a certain state of mind and, therefore, indirectly pointing towards that which is the cause of the state of mind in question: Danforth has gone mad through the confrontation with the blasphemous Shoggoths and the otherworldly tunnel system of the Cyclopean city in the mountains of madness. In this way, Lovecraft utilizes the oftentimes gradual, but sometimes sudden, diminution of sanity in his characters to indirectly expound the nature of the entities that thereby remain unnameable, as it were. To wrap things up concerning Lovecraft’s literary style of writing in which he frames his narrative questioning of the resilience of human sanity, we can say that his stories hinge on what Harman calls “two major axes”: [T]he “vertical” gap between unknowable objects and their tangible qualities, and the “horizontal” or “cubist” gap between an accessible object and its gratuitous amassing of numerous palpable surfaces. (Harman 2012: 31)

It is the omnipresence of descriptive events along these two axes in Lovecraft’s literature that motivates Harman to name Lovecraft “the poet laureate of object-oriented philosophy” (Harman 2012: 32). His narrative interest in exploring the vertical and horizontal gaps of reality definitive of the condition of human beings is what makes Lovecraft attuned to the fundamental propositions of OOO. Human beings are thus narratively depicted by Lovecraft as subjected to the same ontological laws that govern the being of objects. He thereby foreshadows one of the core points of OOO, namely that “the privilege or curse of (human) subjectivity is a feature of everything - humans are nothing special, and ‘objects’ are far more wondrous than we commonly think” (Morton 2011: 176). The “we” that Morton has in mind could easily have been the authors of the existentialist tradition of modern European philosophy from Kierkegaard to Sartre and Camus. As David E. Cooper explains in his book Existentialism: A Reconstruction from 1990, it is considered “[a] cardinal sin, from the existentialist viewpoint […] to conceive of human existence as being akin to the kind of being enjoyed by ‘mere’ things” (Cooper 1996: 3). The ontological severing of human beings from the world of things that thrives within the parameters of existentialism is telling of the anthropocentric dogma

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that has dominated most philosophies of the human since the inception of modernity with the rationalist philosophy of René Descartes in the 17th century. The main reason for the human exceptionalism of modernity promulgated by existentialism is that a human being is “an ‘issue’ for itself and ‘ahead’ of itself”, wherefore “human existence is to be contrasted with the being of whatever is ‘thing-like’” (Cooper 1996: 8). In the end, this leads existentialist philosophers to primarily deal with questions of subjectivity and intersubjectivity having as their ultimate end the articulation of “an ethic to guide our relations with one another” (Cooper 1996: 11). What we see here is that both things and nonhuman life forms are excluded from the arena of human ethics in a striking display of ecological ignorance. No wonder that we are just now beginning to formulate a promising self-conception fit for an age that is deeply characterized by the environmentally negative effects of our at least bicentennial exploitative relationship with nature. As we shall see in Chapter 6 of Part II, Morton provides us with a bag full of conceptual innovations that can be utilized to articulate a more-thanhuman perspective on learning and pedagogy.

Conclusion Western civilization has been built on the metaphysical logics of agriculture. Ever since the Neolithic revolution in Mesopotamia 10,000– 12,000 years ago human beings have exploited the ability to rationally tame and cultivate their surroundings in order to provide food, shelter, and tools and subsequently develop various societal orders. Morton calls this logic that enabled the transition from nomadic tribal life to settled agricultural collectives “agrilogistics”, and he considers this logic to entail the ontological dualism that since came to dominate most of Western philosophy and science. He calls this dualistic ontology “the severing” (Morton 2017: 13), where cultural societies are considered to be qualitatively different from natural environments. According to Morton this metaphysical logic of ancient Mesopotamian living still very much informs our societal endeavours in the 21st century: We still exploit the planet and consume its so-called “natural resources” for short term gratification to a dangerously large extent and in a terribly unsustainable manner. Therefore, the mind set of

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Westerners—i.e. most people on the planet living in modern societies in the global economy—is to be characterized as through and through Mesopotamian. As a consequence of these observations Morton sates the following: “We Mesopotamians are forbidden from stepping outside Mesopotamian thought space. To do so designates you as insane” (Morton 2017: 49). As we saw at the beginning of this chapter, Greta Thunberg is now a figurehead of a global movement of people who are beginning to radically challenge the hegemony of this prevailing Mesopotamian mindset. She and her millions of fellow climate activists are now stepping outside of the dominating thought space of unsustainable societies and are beginning to point in new directions for humanity. We have seen how “insanity” or “madness” can be used as adjectives to describe the state of mind required in order for such transgressive attitude formation and subsequent action to take place. Pedagogically speaking there is, therefore, a lot of sense in trying to figure out how to practice insanity inducing and madness provoking teaching in the geological epoch of the Anthropocene. Not in a psychologically debilitating manner, but in a horizon expanding, prejudice destroying and philosophically intense manner. According to Lovecraft, the psychological motivation of human curiosity is, ultimately, stronger than human beings’ fears of the unknown. In several places he hints at the truthfulness of this conviction, and in some places he even states it literally: “[H]uman curiosity is undying” (Lovecraft 2009: 449), “[w]e certainly did not mean to face what we feared – yet I will not deny that we may have had a lurking, unconscious wish to spy certain things from some hidden vantage point” (Lovecraft 2009: 485–486) and “[d]oubtless it was suicidally foolish to venture into that tunnel under the known conditions, but the lure of the unplumbed is stronger in certain persons than most suspect” (Lovecraft 2009: 491). It now seems more important than ever that school leaders and teachers give in to “the lure of the unplumbed” and, for instance, make good use of the pedagogical potentials of excursions and encounters with life, death and cosmic indifference in order for new meaning-making narratives to arise and new coordinates for thought to emerge. (We return to the more practical implications of these considerations in Chapter 6 of Part II.)

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References Cooper, D. E. (1996). Existentialism: A Reconstruction. Oxford: Blackwell. Harman, G. (2011). The Quadruple Object. Alresford: Zero Books. Harman, G. (2012). Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy. Winchester, UK: Zero Books. Houellebecq, M. (2008). H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life. London: Orion Publishing. Laugesen, M. H.-L. (2016). The Nature of Freedom: On the Ethical Potential of the Knowledge of the Non-human Origins of Human Being. Res Cogitans, 11(1), 15–62. Legendre, M., Bartoli, J., Shmakova, L., Jeudy, S., Labadie, K., Adrait, A., et al. (2014). Thirty-Thousand-Year-Old Distant Relative of Giant Icosahedral DNA Viruses with a Pandoravirus Morphology. PNAS, 111(11), 4274–4279. Lovecraft, H. P. (2009). Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H. P. Lovecraft. London: Gollancz. Margree, V. (2002). Normal and Abnormal: Georges Canguilhem and the Question of Mental Pathology. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, 9(4), 299–312. Meillassoux, Q. (2009). After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. London: Continuum. Meyer, R. (2017). The Zombie Diseases of Climate Change: What Lurks in the Arctic’s Thawing Permafrost? The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/ science/archive/2017/11/the-zombie-diseases-of-climate-change/544274/. Morton, T. (2011). Here Comes Everything: The Promise of Object-Oriented Ontology. Qui Parle, 19(2), 163–190. Morton, T. (2013). Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Morton, T. (2017). Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People. New York: Verso Books. Nietzsche, F. (2009). The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Price, R. M. (2001). H.P. Lovecraft: Prophet of humanism. The Humanist, 61(4), 26–29. Sassower, S. (1994). On Madness in the Academy. Journal of Higher Education, 65, 473–485. Tabas, B. (2015). Dark Places: Ecology, Place and the Metaphysics of Horror Fiction. Miranda, 11, 1–21. Thacker, E. (2011). In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy (Vol. 1). Winchester: Zero Books. Weisman, A. (2007). The World Without Us. London: Picador.

CHAPTER 4

Death Stefan Bengtsson

Abstract  This chapter engages with death by relating death to the notion of the subject at the core of educational thought. Death is shown to tell us something about the subject as learner and its assumed unity, autonomy and invulnerability. Educational thought drawing on the notion of the Enlightenment learner is not able to think its own death. Accordingly, the denial of the vulnerability of the learner, that is the possibility of its own death, haunts education and its ambition of production of self. An alternate understanding of death is put forward that is to allow for an engagement with vulnerability and a certain absence of self in education. Keywords  Dark pedagogy · Death Vulnerability · Kant · Fichte

· Enlightenment · Self ·

© The Author(s) 2019 J. A. Lysgaard et al., Dark Pedagogy, Palgrave Studies in Education and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19933-3_4

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64  J. A. LYSGAARD ET AL. And when death brings at last the desired forgetfulness, it abolishes life and being together, and sets the seal on the knowledge that “being” is merely a continual “has been”, a thing lives by denying and destroying and contradicting itself. —Friedrich Nietzsche

What was your reaction when you read the title of this chapter? Did you get a certain feeling of uneasiness or repulsion? Stop for a moment and contemplate your emotional response to the topic. Why did you get this reaction? Examine your disposition towards the association of death and education. Would it have been the same if the title had been “On the role of care or emotions in education”? While we cannot predict your response, we assume that a number of readers have raised their eyebrows, or at least responded with a feeling of hesitation or even anxiety. In this chapter, we will explore why we might be hesitant to engage with death in an educational context and consequently why the topic of death has been neglected in education all together. As we will argue, the negligence of death as a topic in education is due to the specific conceptions, developed during the enlightenment, of the learner as a self that still shape how we think of education, the self, and it’s relation to death. The emotional resonance of thinking of death in education is, hence, by us interpreted to be partially due to a Kantian outlook on education and learning that still is at the core of educational thought. As we will argue, it is connected to the Kantian anthropocentric notion of the self as being unable to think its own non-being. The engagement with death is thus, in turn, an engagement with that which is foundational to educational thought, that is the assumed unity, autonomy, and invulnerability of the learner as the Enlightenment subject. In contrast to this notion of the learner, we will offer a reconception of death to open up for an alternate educational engagement with death, which does, both, embrace and leave behind certain ideas of the learning subject as they have been put forward by these historical configurations. We will argue that the significant educational potential lies in the role that death plays in challenging some of the central characteristics of the learning subject. Since death highlights something particular about the learning subject. Death highlights an absence of self in this learning subject; an absence that traditional educational thought has tried to stitch over. In this sense, the Enlightenment project of education is to suppress

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a trauma at the core of it, to arrive at providing a present, maturing learner as self, that has been lacking. Thus, what we are trying to engage with is the horror of the self, a theme explored by Lovecraft (1926) in his short story The Outsider. A reengagement with that absence in the face of death, we argue, is crucial for environmental education as it opens up the possibility for ecological thought and accordingly allows for a rethinking of what it means to be a learning self.

Death in Education The handling of deaths educative potential within education and educational studies can be stated briefly: death is commonly not dealt with. The narrow area of the educational research that deals with death in relation to education can nearly only be found in research and training literature for health professionals (e.g. Frommelt 1991; Wass 2004). A similar observation can be made with regard to environmental and sustainability education, with the exception of Russell’s (2017) groundbreaking work, addressing the educative potential of death in environmental education research for the first time. Based on these few cases we will, however, make some general conclusions in regard to how death is perceived in relation to education. First, death is the death of the other, human or animal, living thing. It is not the personal death of the learning subject that is of concern, as we are always looking from the perspective of the living—death is non-being, thus presents a non-perspective, we must in turn externalize the concept, since we cannot think the unthinkable. Second, we differentiate between a detached or non-topical perspective on death and an experiential perspective on death. In the first case, death is looked upon as a general phenomenon of study, distanced and “over there”, while in the second case the experiences or aesthetics of death “over here” are of concern. Third, death is conceived in terms of loss, disappearance or vanishing, that is to say a form of something not being present anymore. While these conclusions may seem trivial, they are illuminating the underlying educative outlook, that is the educative gaze of the living human subject “over here” that is positioned towards or looking upon the present object of interest “over there”. Thus, the educative potential and role of death is primarily for me, the subject, which is essentially different from the object “over there”, as I am still living. As a rational subject, I am still on this side of life, thinking and living. Thus, there is a demarcation

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of an individual self from that object which is studied, as we will argue in greater detail below. The underlying educative outlook on death, as we tried to briefly summarize it above, is essentially framed by a conception of the subject as a learner as it emerges out of the enlightenment. Given that there is common neglect of death in education, we argue that it is the status of death in the notion of the learner as it emerges in the enlightenment that is of particular interest for a dark pedagogy. It is of particular interest for dark pedagogy as it produces a certain anxiety and, hence, haunts the conception of the enlightenment learner and narratives of education. As anxiety never lies, but reminds us about something crucial, we will explore how this anxiety relates to the learner and how this anxiety can be seen to have dealt with in the conception of the learner in the thought of the Enlightenment. This anxiety relates to that status of the learner as a living subject. As we will argue there is something uncanny about this status of the living subject as learner. This uncanny status is haunting the subject in its “maddening familiarity” (Lovecraft 1926). It is as if anxiety shows us a “supreme horror of that second I forgot what had horrified me” (ibid.). As we will argue, the enlightenment subject as learner keeps this supreme horror at bay by appealing to the unity, autonomy and invulnerability of that learner as a thinking self. We find the primordial notion of self in the diverse national forms of enlightenment thought as a key concept that framed notions of education. We will in the following section dissect this conception of the enlightenment learner, aiming to lay bare its unspeakable and horrific qualities.

The Concept of the Self and the Possibility of Its Death We might state that the central feature of the enlightenment subject is its unity. This unity, to be precise, is a unity of consciousness, the unity of the “I” thinking. Kant’s transcendental deduction (1781) can be seen as a formative event of enlightenment philosophy and, we argue, also a formative event for our continued understanding of the learning subject. At the core of this transcendental deduction is the notion of a pure or originary apperception (Kant 1781: 246ff., B 131–132), the synthetic and unitary I think. It is the unity of the “I” thinking, that is the condition of learning. Unity of apperception is required in order to allow for the process of making sense, assuring a synthesis between ideas.

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Kant (1781: 247, B 133–135) argues that the a priori synthetic thinking capacity of the subject is the premise for both unity of self and that of thought. Thus, what the principle of apperception entails is a relational dependence of the uniformity of thought and self. Thus, the unity of “I think” wards off simultaneously the danger of the inconsistency of thought, and that of being an inconsistent or diverse self. It wards off the originary or pure insanity of the thinking subject. Further, inconsistency of thought and that of being a self could be seen to endanger the whole project of enlightenment, that is: […] man’s emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one’s own mind without another’s guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) “Have the courage to use your own understanding,” is therefore the motto of the enlightenment. (Kant 1798: 54)

Kant’s outline of the project of enlightenment is interpreted as to highlight how the unity of the subject is closely related to its autonomy. Thus, the project of enlightenment can, according to Kant, be seen as to entail a maturing imperative, not only stipulating a call to know but also to make that knowing one’s own. We argue, that we in the autonomy and unity of the subject find the central characteristics of the enlightenment subject as it can still be seen to frame our understanding of what it means to be a learner. In this understanding of the learner, there is a primary focus on the thinking of the subject. To be precise, it is not only a focus on thinking, but on the thinking learner. This thinking, and the a priori given faculty of reasoning, are conditions for both the unity of the subject as well as the progression of thought as a form of increase in maturity. Education is, as in the case of the project of enlightenment, to ward off the threat of immaturity of the learner. In the context of this threat, Kant (1798: 54) puts forward “laziness and cowardice” as the primary impeding factor for maturing—at least in the (non)age that Kant depicts as the background for the project of enlightenment. Thus, non-age is self-imposed insofar as it is a non-action; the subject is simply not daring to engage in the practice of reasoning. Weirdly, there is in the a priori faculty of reason inscribed a future that is to come. That is, the a priori given faculty of reason is to realize itself

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fully in the future. The action of reason is the actualization of an a priori given outcome. The Enlightenment subject might for example actualize its self-annihilation through reasoning as it might bringing into being Skynet through the development of artificial reasoning. Anxiety relates, as we will show, to the horror of the self, a reflection of a future self realized in learning. Kant’s differentiation between first- and second-order nature in his outline of the project of enlightenment is used to illuminate this simultaneous past and future of thinking. Kant (1798: 54) writes: Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why such a large part of mankind gladly remain minors all their lives, long after nature has freed them from external guidance. […] Thus it is very difficult for the individual to work himself out of the nonage which has become almost second nature to him. He has even grown to like it, and is at first really incapable of using his own understanding because he has never been permitted to try it.

While non-action or non-thinking can be seen to account for a persistence of the non-age in Kant’s reasoning, given that it is due to dogmatism, there can be seen to be a paradoxical notion of nature at play that can be seen to haunt Kant’s imperative to make one’s own. If the reason is already a human faculty, which must have emerged after nature has freed humans from external guidance, how come that this non-age is once again becoming second nature as nature already has released us? We might ask us: How come laziness and cowardice are paralyzing us? Couldn’t the subject arrive at a reasonable conclusion to not engage in action? Thus, if we take a closer look at Kant’s other work, and in particular his moral imperative, we encounter a loophole in the autonomy of the subject. A loophole where anxiety can be seen to emanate from. Kant states with regards to his universal imperative of duty, “act as if the maxim of your action were to become by your will the universal law of nature” (Kant 1785: 31)—This is also known as the categorical imperative. What we here reencounter is the possibility of the thinking subject to alter the laws of nature, given its a priori faculty to reason. Yet, in an elaboration of the universal imperative of duty, Kant goes on to enumerate a number of concrete duties. Kant takes up the principle of self-love and relates it to the law of nature in the context of suicide: Someone feels sick of life because of a series of troubles that has grown to the point of despair, but it is still so far in possession of his reason that he

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can ask himself whether it would not be contrary to his duty to himself to take his own life. Now he inquires whether the maxim of his action could be indeed become a universal law of nature. His maxim, however, is: from self-love I make it my principle to shorten my life when its longer duration threatens more troubles than it promises agreeableness. The only further question is whether this principle of self-love could become a universal law of nature. It is then seen at once that a nature whose law it would be to destroy life itself by means of the same feeling whose destination is to impel towards the furtherance of life would contradict itself and would therefore not subsist as nature; thus that maxim could not possibly the law of nature and, accordingly, altogether opposes the principle of all duty. (Kant 1785: 31f.)

The discussion of the principle is interpreted to highlight two things about the enlightenment subject. First, given the faculty of reason, that characterizes that subject (“still so far in possession of his reason”), it cannot think of its own undoing (“would contradict itself and would therefore subsist as nature”). To be precise, the subject could act its own undoing, but reasonable thinking about the act of undoing one self would be contradictory (“contradict itself”). Thus, the transcendental subject is invulnerable in sense of its inability to think of its own death as an eradication of the “I” from the process of thinking. As earlier stated, the principle of apperception puts into synthetic relation the self and thinking, hence, as self, as an I, cannot reasonably think not-I. In this sense, we can say that the enlightenment subject cannot reasonably think its own death. However, here I am thinking this unreasonable thought of me not thinking. Who’s thought is it, if I cannot reasonably be my own according to the principle of apperception? Or as we earlier asked: How come that I am lazy and a coward? Second, the inability to think not-I highlights the earlier mentioned maddening loophole in the autonomy of the subject in Kant’s conception of “I think”. This loophole is precisely passivity and absolute inactivity. We might say that passivity and absolute inactivity could be seen to represent something close to a little death of the subject. As the subject has to think in order to be a subject, the act of not-thinking might remind the subject of its vulnerability. We might re-encounter this fear of passivity and the little death in education with the pre-eminent demand of action and focus on activity. Against our discussion of Kant and the project of the enlightenment we might argue, it is not only the progress of the learner at stake but the very possibility of maturity as a form of autonomy, a faculty of the self to govern itself in thinking.

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Fichte, a central figure for educational thought, can be seen to take up on this dangerous loophole in Kant’s conception of the unity and autonomy of the thinking subject. Fichte’s (1796) notion of absolute self (das absolute Ich) played and still plays a crucial role for the German tradition of Bildung (the educative project of forming the self as the central project of German Enlightenment). As we see in the quote below, Fichte can be seen to illustrate the loop-like production of the self as part of a process of observation of the I by the I. It was claimed that if one does what one is asked to do one will discover that one is active and will discover in addition that one’s activity is directed upon one’s own active self. Accordingly, the concept of the I comes into being only by means of a self-reverting activity; and conversely, the only concept that comes into being by means of such an activity is the concept of the I. By observing oneself while engaged in this activity, one becomes immediately conscious of it; i.e., one posits oneself as selfpositing. As the sole immediate form of consciousness, this immediate consciousness of oneself must be presupposed in the explanation of all other possible varieties of consciousness. It is called the original intuition of the I. (Fichte 1796: 65f.)

What the quote on the original intuition of the I is interpreted to highlight is the appeal to activity and reflection as a process of constitution of the self. The anxiety of passivity can here be seen to resurface as we might ask us: what happens to the self once we are not engaging in “self-reverting activity”? More precisely we might ask us: Where is it? Fichte can be seen to appeal to a displaced I, as the act of self-reverting activity and observation can be seen to demand a non-congruence of the I observing and the I observed. What can be seen to be at play is the unity the self, as the law of non-contradiction can be seen to demand that the I observing cannot be identical to an I not-observing. Fichte argues this “I” can be seen to be, for the most part, withdrawn when thinking about objects. In thinking about an object, one disappears into the object; one thinks about the object, but one does not think about oneself as the subject who is doing this thinking. For example, when I am thinking about the wall I am the thinking subject and the wall is the object of thought. I am not the wall, nor is the wall I. The thinking subject and the object of thought are thus distinguished from one another. But now I am supposed to think

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about the I. When I do this, as when I think of anything at all, I am an active subject. […] With the same freedom with which I think about the wall, I now think about the I. (Fichte 1796: 110f.)

What Fichte is seemingly rearticulating is the Kantian notion of originary apperception, yet, by putting the I into a loop, Fichte is interpreted to amplify anxieties about loopholes. Fichte underlines in the quote above the freedom of the withdrawn “I” thinking, but this freedom becomes questionable once we engage in a reflective thinking about that “I” thinking: Think the concept “I” and think of yourself as you do this. Everyone understands what this means. Everyone thinks of something thereby; one feels one’s consciousness to be determined in a particular manner, and it is by virtue of this that one is conscious of something specific. Now one must observe what one does when one thinks of this concept. (Fichte 1796: 110)

The imperative to think the “I” and to think of yourself put forward by Fichte can be seen to trouble his claim about the freedom of the “I” thinking. Was it my own thought of myself brought forward by me or was it originally brought about by Fichte’s imperative to think that thought? We argue that what is becoming evident is that there is an anxiety at play when thinking about, who’s thought I am thinking. This anxiety relates to the autonomy of the thinking self that Fichte can be seen so eager to be reconfirming. Shall we briefly crank up that anxiety and see if it goes all the way to eleven? Don’t think of a polar bear! What happened? Did you think about a polar bear? Let us pause for a moment. Consider carefully the next questions: Did you wholly “own” that thought, was it wholly yours? What might this mean for your freedom and autonomy as a self-governing function of you as a thinking subject? We argue the unspeakable answer to these questions haunts the notion of the learner and the educative project of the Enlightenment. Lovecraft (1926) can be seen to capture the state of the subject when trying to answer these questions in the following quote: My mind, stunned and chaotic as it was, still held the frantic craving for light; and not even cared whether my experience was insanity, dreaming, or magic; but was determined to gaze on brilliance and gaiety at any cost.

72  J. A. LYSGAARD ET AL. I knew not who I was or what I was, or what my surroundings might be; though as I continued to stumble along I became conscious of a kind of fearsome latent memory that made my progress not wholly fortuitous.

We might say that the self in the loop of thinking and feeling itself can be seen to attune to a certain perplexing presence of absence of self. This is exactly what our excursion to Fichte was aimed at illuminating. It was aimed to show how the conception of a learner as thinking subject can be seen to engage in activity and self-realization in order to cover up a certain absence of self. Consequently, there seems to be a self at play that is withdrawn from my apprehension of it, yet, real. Further, there is an uneasiness associated with the seeming self-governing capacity of our selves. To return to our discussion on the perspective on death in education at the beginning of this chapter, we argue death as experience and concept resonates with an underlying anxiety about the learner as thinking subject. When Fichte (1796: 110f.) states that when one engages in thinking of an object one disappears into that object, we interpret the death of an object to reverberate the withdrawnness of one’s self. Thus, the encounter of death reverberates with the absence of myself to myself. Death is a reminder of that withdrawnness of myself to myself and it resonates even in the death of the other. Even though the thinking subject cannot reasonably think its own death, the death of the other is reminding us about our own anxieties. Thus, the anxiety of encountering death says something about the far more fundamental or ontological condition of the self. Our point is that fear of death in education is not primarily associated with a fear of pain, suffering or disappearing. Instead, we see the fear of death to relate the status of the self, that is not fully present to a learning self. The emotional resonance of fear and anxiety brought forward by death, highlights the maddening loophole in the loop of the self to be produced and producing in learning. This questioning of the status of the presence of self permeates the educational thinking of the learner as a closed loop and consequently undermines the unity of the self, as well as its autonomy and maturity. As we tried to show, our response to death in education is informed by a notion of the learner as self that has traces to enlightenment thought, which shapes how we think of education as well as our position as subjects in society.

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Education for Death? So where does the acknowledgement of vulnerability of the subject leave us? What does this mean for learning and education in terms of its purposes and ambitions? As already mentioned in our chapter on denial, there are a number of positions available in the emergent thought of speculative realism (Harman 2011; Morton 2010; Thacker 2010; Meillassoux 2009; Brassier 2007). To generalize these positions in the context of our discussions of death, we might differentiate between two positions. First, there is a position where death is a death owned or appropriated by the subject (e.g. Brassier 2007). Second, there is a position where death is not wholly my own, but rather both mine and not mine at the same time (e.g. Morton 2013). To explicate the first position, we will briefly examine Heidegger’s perspective on death as a basis for differentiating the two positions towards death in education. For Heidegger and his existential analysis of Dasein (being here/ there) or human existence, death is always singular and individual. Every Dasein itself must take dying upon itself in every instance. Insofar as it “is,” death is always my own. And it indeed signifies a peculiar possibility of being in which it is absolutely a matter of being my own Dasein. In dying, it becomes evident that death is ontologically constituted by mineness and existence. (Heidegger 1927: 240)

The quote underlines how Heidegger is interested in death in relation to Dasein, and shows how the possibility of death relates to the possibility of being one’s own existence. Death is, for Heidegger, the key principle of individuation (Brassier 2007: 154). Consequently, death as relating to my own death creates the conditions of mineness or it individuates Dasein. At the same time, death is the very limit of that individual Dasein. As a potentiality of being, Dasein is unable to bypass the possibility of death. Death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein. Thus death reveals itself as one’s ownmost, nonrelational, and insuperable [unüberholbar] possibility. As such, it is an eminent imminence. (Heidegger 1927: 241)

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According to Heidegger, we can become aware of these possibilities offered by death in its “eminent imminence”. To be specific, we can become aware of death’s double limiting function. Death is limiting in the sense that it is only mine (individuating) as well as the limit of my existence, or the time of my Dasein. As a result of this eminent imminence, death is also providing the conditions for us to become aware of our authentic self. In crude terms, this means that, for the most part, the self is in the world, or relational and not wholly itself. Death, is “one’s own most” or the instance where the self no longer is relational, or “nonrelational” as Heidegger puts it in the quote above. In Heidegger’s conception of death there is also an imperative for an authentic-being, which can be realized in the authentic-being-towards-death. It is here, in this engagement with the imperative of authenticbeing-towards-death that we arrive at a crossroads, where there are two options or positions to be attained in authentic-being-towards-death. First, there is a will to nothingness, as an active willing towards authenticity as non-relationality and an exit from being in the world. This can be seen to entail a position that nihilism embraces (cf. Brassier 2007). Further, this position can be seen to relate to the notion of transcendence. Transcendence is here to be understood as the subject being able to break through sheer appearance and to talk about the mindindependent reality given the possibility of reason. Brassier (2007) can be seen to take such a position, reopening the possibility of a science of rationality, or in his case, the science of cognition. He returns to and embraces “the unavoidable corollary of the realist conviction that there is a mind-independent reality, which, despite the presumptions of human narcissism, is indifferent to our existence and oblivious to the ‘values’ and ‘meanings’ which we would drape over it in order to make it more hospitable” (Brassier 2007: xi). What is remarkable about Brassier’s statement is the attack on human narcissism, where the critique of such narcissism can be seen to be due to a claim to the knowability of a mind-independent reality. Thus, we would have to be able to know that reality is indifferent and oblivious to human values and meanings to make the claim of narcissism. We might say, such a position would double down on a notion of nature as in transcendental idealism, to make a true statement about nature. Accordingly, it would be our nature in the will to power, to know and to appropriate, where that will is according to Brassier, inextricably caught up with a will of nothingness or extinction:

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The will to nothingness is not an avatar of the will to power; rather, the will to power is merely a mask of the will to nothingness. But this ‘nothingness’ cannot be retrojected into the past or projected into the future; the only temporality commensurate with it is that of the ‘anterior posteriority’ proper to physical death as that which seizes organic temporality, but which cannot be seized by it. (Brassier 2007: 236)

What Brassier is interpreted to offer, is a reconfiguration of the enlightenment subject’s inability to think its own death, into an actual ability and actualization—reversing a negative into a positive. With Brassier we turn Kant on his head. To recall Kant’s comment on suicide, Kant claimed that “a nature whose law it would be to destroy life itself by means of the same feeling whose destination is to impel towards the furtherance of life would contradict itself and would therefore not subsist as nature” (Kant 1785: 31f.). Brassier embraces this nature whose law is to destroy life, as he puts into place a weaponized notion of human nature, that is a nature that is characterized by the Freudian death-drive (also called thanatos). Brassier lets the Kantian transcendental subject meet this horrific nature. Knowledge kills in this outlook. Nature is, in Brassier’s understanding, not the Kantian nature of furtherance of life, but its extinction. Consequently, a reasonable authentic response to human nature would, according to Brassier, transform this insight, and consequently learning, in a form of will to nothingness—a learning that is based in a will to power and appropriation in knowing that strives towards a will to nothingness and, subsequently, death. With regard to the crossroad we mentioned earlier in Heidegger’s conception of being-towards-death, the position resulting out of Brassier’s transcendental nihilism would be that of concluding that any form of education, which feeds on a notion of learning that is associated with a will to know and appropriate, is feeding the will to nothingness. Hence, according to this position, education as relating to the enlightenment battle cry “Dare to know!” (cf. Kant 1798: 54) can be seen to represent an education for death. What this outlook on education as education for death can be seen to represent is a sarcastic version of common critique of education in environmental education. In a standard critique of education from an environmentalist perspective, education can be seen to reproduce social structures that lead to the destruction of this planet. The sarcastic twist that transcendental nihilism would offer to this critique is that it

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(a) claims a truer account of (human) nature and (b) at the same time withholds the viability of resistance to nature. Sarcasm in this sense entails an irony of the impotent. What is crucial in this outlook is the continued commitment to a transcendental position that the subject can attain, a position that we have problematized in the discussion of the enlightenment subject. Brassier claims here an access to the reality of consciousness, which is independent of the subject of consciousness, yet attainable through a third-person perspective that is able to map consciousness’ opaque reality (Brassier 2007: 29). The transcendental position slips into the conception of the subject in the claim of an access to an objective, third-person perspective that is equipped with conceptual resources to illuminate that which is hidden from the subject. While we might agree with Brassier when he states that the reality of consciousness is independent of the subject of consciousness, we reject the second claim of an objective, third-person perspective. Recall for a moment our discussion of Fichte’s absolute self. Fichte’s reflective self can be seen as to be reflecting on something that is slippery (Fichte 1796: 110). In particular, we problematized the autonomy of the self in the imperative to think of your self. In this context we aimed to get a feel of the slippery character of who’s thought it was that brought forward that self. In line with Fichte, Brassier’s appeal to an objective third perspective can be seen to take place when one observes what one does when one thinks this concept of the I. What is at stake, in that third-person perspective and Fichte’s “I” reflecting on an “I”, is the Kantian notion of the synthetic and unitary I think. The autonomy and unity of self, the self thinking about itself, is in danger. To problematize the unity, we might state that it cannot be the same self that observes itself. We might here argue against Fichte (1796: 110) that the thinking subject as self does not only disappear into the objects it contemplates about, but the self (one) disappears into another self (two), as one self contemplates about that other self. What this is interpreted to mean for Brassier’s third-person perspective is that opaque consciousness can also be seen to disappearing from view. As a result, there is no uncovering of that opaque reality of that particular consciousness. Consciousness and the position of that “self ” associated with that particular consciousness seem to remain opaque to itself (themselves). It is here at the encounter of the opaqueness of the self to itself that we, once again, face death. Heidegger makes an interesting remark:

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Obviously, being-toward-death, which is now in question, cannot have the character of being out for something and taking care of it with a view towards its actualization. For one thing, death as something possible is not a possible thing at hand or objectively present, but a possibility-of-being of Dasein. Then, however, taking care of the actualization of what is thus possible would have to mean bringing about one’s demise. But in doing this Dasein would deprive itself of the very basis for an existing beingtowards-death. Thus, if being-towards death is not meant as an “actualization” of death, neither can it mean to dwell near the end in its possibility. (Heidegger 1927: 261)

The crucial part of the quote is where Heidegger states that the actualization of death as a possibility would deprive itself of the very basis for an existing being-towards-death. Brassier might here argue that this non-actualization is an expression of human narcissism, that the act not to take care of the actualization of death is a self-centred human presumptions about nature, for example that the will to know will not lead us near to the end in its possibility. To put it differently, the nonactualization is the denial of one’s true nature and this denial can be seen due to the fact that humanity is too occupied with itself to fail to see this true nature. However, as Heidegger highlights and we tried to argue above, death and the self are not objectively present to another. Death is a possibility and not present to the subject. Death as mere possibility and possibility of Dasein cannot be appropriated by the self. Given this inability of appropriation by the self, it cannot be known. Heidegger (1927: 262) states that “[a]s possibility, death gives Dasein nothing to ‘be actualized’ and nothing which it itself could be as something real”. As mere possibility, the will to know, as driving death, can be seen to fall short, as there is nothing present to be appropriated. What can also be seen to fall short is a potential accusation of narcissism. As we argued earlier in our chapter on denial, denial is always incomplete and hence even denial of one’s true nature might be “half right”. That is, there is in the denial of one’s true nature an opaqueness or incompleteness, something that is right about what one self is.

Other Ways Forward We will put forward a contrasting outlook to this perspective of death as a form of actualization through reason. We instead argue with Heidegger (1927: 262) that death is somewhat out of reach but anticipated as a

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form of the full potentiality of being. As Heidegger argues, death, or rather being-towards-death, relates to an “anticipation of a potentiality-of-being of that being whose kind of being is anticipation itself”. What we mean by this is that death relates to an anticipation of a potentiality of what one’s self might be. Anticipation of death relates to the understanding of one’s self that finds its realization in death, as “[a]nticipation shows itself as the possibility of understanding one’s ownmost and extreme potentiality-of-being, that is, as the possibility of authentic existence” (Heidegger 1927: 263). What we argue is that anticipation relates to understanding one’s finality of being as it is disclosed in death. Thus, anticipation opens up the educational potential of engaging with what one really is. Our focus is here on potentiality, which is not fully present at any given moment, but finds its actualization at the moment, or actualization, of death. In line with OOO we argue for the withdrawnness of objects (Harman 2011; Morton 2010), including the self that is, as we argued above, somewhat opaque or that seemingly disappearing from view. This withdrawnness of the self relates to the potentiality-of-being described by Heidegger, where that potentiality finds both its possibility and limit in death. We are arguing for a return to Fichte’s loop of self as a basis for thinking learning and education. However, it is Fichte’s loop with a twist, that is a weird loop of the self, where the self is anticipating itself, yet, does not arrive until the actualization of its death. We understand death as the possibility of Dasein as crucial for learning. We might refer to this learning as the moments of “little deaths” in education, which can be brought forward by an experience of, or reflection on, what it means to be oneself or a distinct self. The moments of little deaths, highlight the vulnerability of the learning subject. What we mean by vulnerability is not the possibility of actualization of death, but the becoming aware of the self that seemingly has already been out of grasp, that is withdrawn. Vulnerability relates to the unity and autonomy of the subject. The “little deaths” of education refer to a first step of death: coming aware of the non-consciousness of one’s self—the opaqueness or disappearing of one’s self into that self. Let us take Fichte’s imperative to think of yourself. We argue in this thought of oneself, there are certain things coming to mind, yet, there is also a feeling or awareness of things that does not come to mind. Vulnerability relates to that feeling of a dark, shimmering self not apparent to myself. When the self is reflecting on itself there is not mere

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nothingness, but rather a twilight self, a self barely visible in darkness. What the self finds is not an absolute nothingness, but rather a presence of absence. Thus, in this encounter of an absent self that presents itself, it is not an encounter of the limit as an encounter of one’s finitude or limited potentiality (nature) but rather the opposite, a seeming glimmering infinitude or openness of self (Morton 2015b). But what is this glimmering infinitude or that twilight encountered? Is it my ownmost self? As with the thought of a polar bear that is mine yet also not mine, in the darkness there can be seen to be something barely visible. That what is barely visible, is a surplus of self that Kant aims to ward off in his appeal to the principle of originary or pure apprehension. However, it is not a plurality of neatly distinct entities but is rather a trace to other objects in that ownmost self. On this view, what is called mind is simply an emergent property of interobjective relations. Mind is thrown into the abyss, it discovers itself there. Mind is not some special demon or transcendental vapor lurking inside the “cabinet” of self. It is simply produced in interactions between objects. (Morton 2013: 179)

According to the outlook on the self we here put forward, a self is made up at its core of non-selves, that is other objects. To put it differently, what we find are “objects wrapped in objects, wrapped in objects” (Harman 2005: 85). To clarify, we do not create a sharp boundary between thoughts, memories and other objects. For us, thoughts and memories are also objects. Hence, the discovery of thoughts and memories are not less real than “real” objects, but are exactly imprints of interactions between objects. Thoughts and memories are in this sense equally dangerous as, for example, an axe or a rifle. This is what we mean, by vulnerability, the possibility of aesthetic experiences of other objects to kill. In order to exist, objects must be fragile. This sounds obvious but when we think the deep ontological reasons why, it becomes quite mysterious. It turns out that objects are dying around us all the time, even as they give birth to other objects. An object’s sensuality is an elegy to its disappearance. What Harman calls allure, the way one being exerts power over another, is a sign of possible death. The aesthetic dimension, in other words, is where death happens. If birth is the sublime, beauty is death, as this chapter shall make clear. To be born is to be thrown into an always-already, to find oneself in a set of relations subtended by some object(s).

80  J. A. LYSGAARD ET AL. To be born is for a fresh Rift between appearance and essence to open up. To persist is for a Rift to suspend itself in relation to other riven entities. (Morton 2013: 188)

To reformulate Morton’s remarks in the context of our discussion, in order for a self to be it needs to be vulnerable. Vulnerability refers to the rift between how my self appears to me and what it really is, its essence. Its essence is not only a self that is my own but caught up in a set of relations subtended by other objects. To be a self requires this rift between myself and my self as relating to other objects to remain open. To close that rift is to fully resonate with these set of relations to other objects and thereby cancelling out that self, that is it destructs. It is here that we see what Heidegger might have meant when he described death as my ownmost. In death, my real self can no longer differ from its appearance to me or others, my real self’s difference to its appearance has been closed. What remains are appearances of that self in other objects, that is memories, thoughts, imprints and maybe even carbon footprints. The thinking of the vulnerability of the self highlights what we might call ecological thought (Morton 2010). It is a thinking of a learner that is no longer a limited self learning but involves a thinking of the learner as a self that is de-limited (see the discussion of the self as monster in the chapter on the pedagogy of vulnerability for further clarification). Further, this learner as self is no longer autonomous, but a learning self that is interdependent. The self is a self as a rift between appearance and essence where that rift and, hence, also self is a property of interobjective relations. Consequently, an educational outlook that argues for the engagement with the vulnerability of the learner is not arguing for an education for death as an ultimate actualization of death through the process of reason. We argue, reason is not able to appropriate death but only partially able to anticipate it. Inspired by the arguments found in speculative realism and OOO, we have argued for the impossibility of reason and aesthetics to fully account for the real. Thus, reason is not able to account for the self or consciousness from an objective third perspective rendering transparent that self. Neither is, for us, the development of the capacity to reason executing an original will to nothingness. Instead, we are focusing on a self that is always an in-between, caught up in the aesthetics of itself and other objects. What we are arguing for is an education for beauty, or rather death by beauty. This beauty is a beauty that relates to the weirdness of the loop of the self as learner.

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Beauty is a strange wavering in a nonlocatable, transcendental ‘between’ that is based on the proximity of at least one entity that is not me, whose indexical sign I find in my inner space as this wavering. Beauty is always about to liquefy into disgust, or pleasure, or pain. Beauty is strange and ambiguous, precisely because it is real, because to be a thing is to be weird, to be what you are yet also how you appear, and yet it is strictly impossible to locate the dotted line between being and appearing. (Morton 2015a: 157)

Beauty is deadly as beauty is a reminder of the learner’s vulnerability, that is the learner’s de-limited self that is interdependent on its relation with other objects. What the experience of beauty calls forth is a resonance between that learner experiencing and another object in its inner space. This resonance in the experience of beauty cancels out the difference between the learner and that other object resonating. The experience of beauty in learning is, literally, a little death of education. This ecstatic feeling of connection that seemingly has always been there, is the second step of the little death of education. A difference has been cancelled in the learners apprehension of its self. The final or great death is the moment when the last difference vanishes. What is left, is the apprehension of myself to other objects, my real self can no longer differ as the rift between my appearance and essence has been closed. To summarize, what we have aimed to illustrate in our engagement with Kant and Fichte is the traumatic absence of self that is at the core of their conceptions of the subject, which in turn has produced a particular notion of learning subject in educational thought. This Enlightenment conception wards off, through suppression and denial, the absence of an access to an a priori essence of that self that a self constituting itself in learning would be able to draw upon. We aimed to highlight the loopholes in that conception and underlined how that self as product is never fully present to the constituting self. Further, the self is strangely displaced in relation to the objects of that as non-selfs are constituting it. In this context, death highlights its double function in relation to the act of the self constituting itself. Death is the possibility of that self as an essence to emerge. Further, death is the limit of that essence of self and its existence. To return then to the emotional resonance of engaging with death in education, death highlights to us our vulnerability in its double function. First, it highlights the limit of being a self, that my time as self is limited. Second, it highlights the vulnerability of my

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essence as a self. Accordingly, our conception of the role of death in education undermines the Enlightenment notion of a self as autonomous and invulnerable in learning processes. The self does not merely reflect on learning objects, without itself being affected, but finds itself caught up with them. We envision the resulting conception of vulnerability to offer an ecological way of thinking what learning might become once the subject is able to fully engage with the things that it might encounter when it engages with itself.

References Brassier, R. (2007). Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Fichte, J. G. (1796). Foundations of Transcendental Philosophy (Wissenschaftslehere) Nova Methodo. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Frommelt, K. H. M. (1991). The Effects of Death Education on Nurses’ Attitudes Toward Caring for Terminally Ill Persons and Their Families. American Journal of Hospice and Palliative Medicine, 8(10), 37–43. https:// doi.org/10.1177/104990919100800509. Harman, G. (2005). Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things. Chicago and La Salle: Open Court. Harman, G. (2011). The Quadruple Object. Alresford: Zero Books. Heidegger, M. (1927). Sein Und Zeit (1967th ed.). Tübingen: Max Niewmeyer Verlag. Kant, I. (1781). Critique of Pure Reason (1999th ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, I. (1785). Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (2002nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kant, I. (1798). What Is Enlightenment? In H. S. Reiss (Ed.), Kant: Political Writing (1991st ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lovecraft, H. P. (1926, April). The Outsider. Weird Tales‚ p. 7. Meillassoux, Q. (2009). After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. London: Continuum. Morton, T. (2010). The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Morton, T. (2013). Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality. Open Humanities Press. https://doi.org/10.3998/ohp.13106496.0001.001. Morton, T. (2015a). Beauty Is Death. In M. O’Neill, M. Sandy, & S. Wootton (Eds.), The Persistence of Beauty: Victorians to Moderns (pp. 151–190). London: Pickering & Chatto.

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Morton, T. (2015b). Buddhaphobia. In M. Boon, E. Cazdyn, & T. Morton (Eds.), Nothing: Three Inquiries into Buddhism (pp. 321–460). Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Russell, J. (2017). ‘Everything Has to Die One Day:’ Children’s Explorations of the Meanings of Death in Human-Animal-Nature Relationships. Environmental Education Research, 23(1), 75–90. https://doi.org/10.1080 /13504622.2016.1144175. Thacker, E. (2010). After Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wass, H. (2004). A Perspective on the Current State of Death Education. Death Studies, 28(4), 289–308. https://doi.org/10.1080/07481180490432315.

PART II

Towards Dark Pedagogy

CHAPTER 5

Dark Pedagogy Between Denial and Insanity Jonas Andreasen Lysgaard

Abstract  This chapter argues for the potentiality of the Lovecraftian Denial-Insanity-Death spectrum and insists that a special pedagogical potential is found in the twilight zone between denial and insanity when targeting issues such as environmental, sustainability and climate change issues. Pedagogy (and pedagogy in learning and education) should aim higher than the classic linear notion of acquiring knowledge, skills and competences and ensuring emancipation through enlightenment. A dark pedagogy should address the issues and concepts that escape efforts to fully understand them and drag them into an illuminated position. The point is to emphasize that pedagogical approaches dealing with wicked problems such as climate change, environmental and sustainability issues needs to move in the twilight zone between denial-insanity-death, or push for a collapse of these distinctions in order to develop our understandings and our possibilities for dealing with the challenges that © The Author(s) 2019 J. A. Lysgaard et al., Dark Pedagogy, Palgrave Studies in Education and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19933-3_5

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seemingly moves closer day to day. By levering different positions within speculative realism on the potentiality of a denial-insanity overlap this chapter pushes for non-cynical pedagogy that both accepts the fallibilities of human beings and the need to address what is not only human, and often way beyond our comfort zone. Keywords  Dark pedagogy · Denial · Insanity · Death · Education Pedagogy · Non-cynical pedagogy · Speculative realism

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Pedagogy, as the effort to inform, lead and inspire, not necessarily towards a specific position or profession (that would be the work of education) (Biesta and Miedema 2002), but towards a critical, reflective and productive stance towards life and its challenges is the central focus of this book. How do we, as pedagogues, deal with challenges that surpass what we can grasp, but remains unavoidable in the effort to ensure that current and future generations can deal with the wicked challenges that are thrown at them? This chapter will argue for the potentiality of the Lovecraftian Denial-Insanity-Death spectrum and insist that a special pedagogical potential is found in the twilight zone between denial and insanity when targeting issues such as environmental, sustainability and climate change issues. This chapter argues that pedagogy (and pedagogy in learning and education) should aim higher than the classic linear notion of acquiring knowledge, skills and competences and ensuring emancipation through enlightenment. A dark pedagogy should address the issues and concepts that escapes effort to fully understand them and drag them into an illuminated position. As argued in Chapter 2, theories of learning, guiding pedagogical endeavors are, for very good reasons embedded within relatively classic notions of knowledge and enlightenment. The overall strategy is to ensure gradual growth in critical knowledge and insight until the best possible personal and societal navigation and action becomes possible. That is all fine as an ideal, but here we argue for a more ambitious approach that goes beyond the safe realm of Thacker’s world-for-us and develop strategies of gaining insight into the vastness of the challenges that we face and the fragility of human beings and our societies (Thacker 2011). The purpose of such a Dark pedagogy is not to tear down the wall between the short-term stability that Denial offers and open the gates for the blinding light of Insanity. Instead the point is to

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emphasize that pedagogical approaches dealing with wicked problems such as climate change, environmental and sustainability issues needs to move in the twilight zone between these positions, or push for a collapse of distinctions between denial-insanity-death in order to push our understandings and our possibilities for dealing with the challenges that seemingly moves closer day to day. By levering different positions within speculative realism on the potentiality of a denial-insanity overlap this chapter pushes for non-cynical pedagogy that both accepts the fallibilities of human beings and the need to address what is not only human, and often way beyond our comfort zone. Speculative realism offers (at least) two distinct perspective on the relationship between denial and insanity, understood as the relationship between shielding oneself from the reality through denial (Nuclear energy presents no long-term challenges!) or embracing a wicked truth and in effect going insane (sustainability is impossible in the world we inhabit today!). On one hand, we find what can be roughly labelled as the Essentialists, that argue for a graspable truth and on the other hand we have what can be understood as the Mysticists that argue for the inherent withdrawnness of any kind of object or reality in that it always hides more than what it shows. Both of these positions offer distinct potentials in a pedagogical setting, especially when considering the development of a dark pedagogy that targets the more than human. Most prominent among the essentialists we find Meillassoux who argues, as part of his critique of anti-realism and correlationism that reality can be addressed and understood (Meillassoux 2009). His chosen pathway towards a tangible hold on something that escapes the follies of mere discourse and correlationism is mathematics. The use of mathematics as an effort to disclose the inner workings of planets, ice cubes and everything between and beyond makes it possible for us to relate to and understand the inner workings of objects of any size or scale. In the same vein is Brassier’s transcendental nihilism and his consistent arguments for the possibility of truth (Brassier 2011). A truth that hinges on the unavoidable eventual destruction of everything from solar systems to specific planets and of course anything human (Brassier 2007). Truth is out there and it can be understood. Brassier finds this truth via the natural sciences and their work to uncover the mechanism that govern the past, present and future (Brassier 2011). This is far from a classical positivist positions, but it represents a radically different ontological position than several of their fellow speculative realists (Harman 2009).

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In the other camp, the mysticists argue for a more uneasy relationship with concepts of truth. Graham Harman, with his ongoing work to establish an Object Oriented Ontology, argues for the viability of objects as existing and real, but at the same time stress that they always contain more than what is shown, and not only to human beings, but to all other objects as well (Harman 2011). Levi R. Bryant builds directly on Harman’s Object oriented ontology in order to develop what he understands as a flat ontology where objects relate to and present themselves for each other, but never in their totality which always resides out of reach of any other object (Bryant 2011). Closely related to this is also Timothy Morton’s concept of hyper objects that share these withdrawn qualities as they exert obvious impact in some areas while still escaping any attempts to completely disclose the exact nature or their reach (Morton 2013). This split, between the essentialists and the mysticists, nicely illustrates the diverse thoughts and ontologies that can, at least partially, coexist under the speculative realism umbrella. It does however, also remain a central kernel of debate and ongoing arguments when attempting to apply insights from speculative realism to both philosophical and practical challenges. The split also offers different paths for linking the insights with pedagogical approaches.

An Essentialist Dark Pedagogy on the Horizon of Extinction While “pedagogy” is in itself, a much-debated term and understood very differently across the globe, it nearly always manifests itself as both anthropocentric and ethnocentric (Agyeman 2003; Sterling 2017). While a revolt against this state of affairs has a revolutionary allure, the perspectives for a potential Dark pedagogy in this chapter will still suffer and benefit from such biases, all the while trying to push the envelope of how we can understand environmental and sustainability challenges as more than closed loop anthropocentric and ethnocentric. While the ethnocentric undercurrents of pedagogy and education has been heavily criticized during decades of research and practice, any efforts to develop a strong ontological critique of the anthropocentric perspectives abound in pedagogy and education pales in comparison. If we revisit classics such as e.g. a Klafkian reliance on a continental bildung tradition and its

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inherent links to the enlightenment, or a Freirean emancipatory pedagogy or even Biesta’s critique of neo-liberal tendencies within education little help can be found in order to understand and critique the anthropocentric undercurrent of practices or theories dealing with pedagogy (Biesta 2002, 2014; Bowers and Apffel-Marglin 2004; klafki 2010). Drawing on Ray Brassier and the arguments that guides his transcendental nihilism, it is possible to argue for a way out of the deadlock of the dichotomy between a denialist full on focus on the human scope, with its anthropocentrism and ethnocentrism or an insane acceptance of the sheer totality of the challenges that face us (Brassier 2007). In his work to revitalize the nihilist insights Brassier famously declared that “I am a nihilist because I still believe in truth” (Brassier 2011). The point for Brassier is not that you either have to choose between denial of the crisis of meaning that phenomena such as global warming, swelling of the seas or climate change entails or go mad dealing with these horrible insights. There is a room for acknowledging the essential lack of meaning that we, in Brassier’s neo-nihilistic perspective are embedded in, without sacrificing all of the robust features of the narratives that we adhere to. For Brassier the ultimate horizon of everything, including human beings are extinction: Extinction is real yet not empirical, since it is not of the order of experience. It is transcendental yet not ideal, since it coincides with the external objectification of thought unfolding at a specific historical juncture when the resources of intelligibility, and hence the lexicon of ideality, are being renegotiated. In this regard, it is precisely the extinction of meaning that clears the way for the intelligibility of extinction. Senselessness and purposelessness are not merely privative; they represent a gain in intelligibility (Brassier 2007). This gain of intelligibility through the acceptance of extinction does open up for the possibility of installing a new horizon for the narratives and concepts of meaning that we as individuals and societies ceaselessly construct. Not only is meaning linked to nation states, family, and friends or at least meeting this month’s mortgage throughout life, it can also be embedded within the insight that extinction and extinction of meaning awaits us in the future. When dealing with issues that are beyond the scope of comprehension, it seems that a way out is not to insist on gaining full insight, but to insist that the world that we inhabit, is not the whole world and that our effort to encapsulate the world in narratives that places us in anything that remotely looks like the driver’s seat is a

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fallacy. Thacker’s world-without-us continues to be without us, no matter how much we try to extend the world-for-us. That does not, however, mean that we should not pay any interest in the world-without-us or not be aware of the monstrous qualities of it and how these constantly influence our tender bubble of meaning on this small globe of the worldfor-us (Thacker 2011). An outset for an essentialist, critical and (most importantly) non-traumatizing Dark Pedagogy could thus be the acceptance of the ultimate horizon of our existence: the inevitable extinction presented by a thinking through of the entropic insights from the natural sciences, the contingency of the world-without-us and the dangers and benefits of the denial-insanity-death spectrum. A pedagogy that operates on this horizon is bound to acknowledge the arbitrariness of the individual and societal narratives that scaffolds our individual meaning-making processes, but at the same time acknowledges that these processes are important and always pliable and flexible in the face of the contingent totality that surrounds us. The weirdness and uneasiness that the speculative realists argue as central to their work, thus also becomes a central to pedagogy (Harman 2012). While the central pedagogical and educational effort to prepare individuals and societies for the future, remains central. The essential contingent nature of that future and the inherent illegitimacy of any narratives that tries to gloss over the inescapable extinction turns any dark pedagogical efforts into an uneasy circling of the totality that never shows itself and never can be fully integrated into any coherent narrative. Far from distressing the pedagogical acceptance of this horizon opens up for new potentialities within the pedagogical continuum. As discussed earlier in the chapter on the role of denial in education, the classic modernistic stance towards denial has been to blow the doors of any attempts to use denial as a way of hiding from inconvenient truths and their consequences. The effectiveness of this strategy in pedagogical settings has been underlined by both critical theory and critical pedagogy (klafki 2010; Biesta 2014). Facts need to be disclosed in order to ensure that individuals and societies aligns with them and resists any temptations to be controlled or manipulated by obscure agendas with no link to the reality that we face. Accepting the neo-nihilistic horizon of Brassier and the Lovecraftian Denial-Insanity-Death reaction patterns unsettles that strategy somewhat. The fact that “the earth will be incinerated by the sun 4 billions years hence; that all the stars in the universe will stop shining in 100 trillion years; and that eventually, one trillion, trillion, trillion years

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from now, all matter in the cosmos will disintegrate into unbound elementary particles” (Brassier 2011). This horizon of extinction not only establishes the truth of extinction as a fervent baseline for all human activities, including pedagogical and educational, it also delimits the first level emancipatory potential of a classic enlightenment strategy. If all there is at the end of the rainbow of insights from the natural sciences is the cataclysmic end of everything, then it might not be the singular strategy that will ensure most action competent pupils or students. Thus the hard act of balancing back and forth, between insight-insanity and denial-comfort is emphasized as a potential way of acknowledging a non-negotiable truth, while still establishing a space where the more short-sighted human endeavors of meaning-making can establish a resilient narrative that both emancipates the individual and supports a sustainable social. Such a space to develop an essentialist dark pedagogy can be visualized as part of the Lovecraftian Denial-Insanity-Death continuum. As described in the linear illustration below the relationship can be understood as an overlapping borderland between denial and death. This would encourage a position where pedagogical activates move between stances that are linked with the rejection of the dire situation we are in through denial and the acceptance of the totality labelled as insanity, through the existential truth that is found in extinction or death (Fig. 5.1). Visiting a modern industrialized farm in order to show to pupils or students how present day food production is carried out could be an example of an effort to move from the comfortable cocoon of everyday denial of the impact of our consumptions patterns and gain insight into the harsh realities of how the globe is fed. Studies of such activities show the strong reactions from youth and adults witnessing how e.g. handling of pigs are fully automated and without any links to romantic notion of the pigs as sentient beings that are recognized on any kind of individual basis (Storksdieck 2006; Boogaard et al. 2008; Mannion et al. 2013).

Fig. 5.1  A trajectory of dark pedagogy

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By going beyond how food is presented in supermarkets and prepared in homes, but actual products of huge industrial endeavors has the possibility to enrichen understanding of food supply chains in contemporary societies and enrichen discussion and future choices made by those involved in such activities. It also depends on a psychological delineation between what is witnessed at an industrialized farm, and the later consumption of those products at home. While critique of the food supply industry is widespread and often nurtured by visits to such farms, it does not change the fact that very few of us can grow our own food and that even our best options be that organic, vegetarian or vegan diets still rely on mass-produced food that severely influences our planet, albeit on different scales. A dark pedagogy relying on an essentialist take on speculative realism could draw on the possibility of edging from the widespread position of denial towards the truth and reality found within the areas of insanity (and potentiality death). Within the borderland of denial and insanity it would be possible to argue that we humans, only exist as the result of coordinated mass murder on other fellow beings (as can be witnessed in the before mentioned pig farm), it might also be possible to go even further, through discussions with natural scientists or researchers working with aspects of deep history and grasp the miniscule role that humanity plays in our solar system or even just the history of our own planet (Shryock et al. 2011). Concepts such as planetary boundaries, the idea that a finite number of resources are at the disposal of humanity on our planet could be seen as efforts to move closer to the area of insanity, as concepts such as planetary boundaries plays almost no role in the way that contemporary societies manage their resources (Anders Wijkman 2012). If, following Brassier and Meillassoux, the truth can be accessed either through the insights of the natural sciences or mathematics, then this truth can be wielded as part of a Dark pedagogy. As stated earlier the objective would not be to push the individual learner into the blinding light of this truth as a return to the existential comfort of denial would be partly necessary in order to make ends meet in everyday life. Contemporary societal issues such as disregard of environmental issues, lack of interest in the importance of bio-diversity and no clear path towards mitigating climate leaves depressingly little room for the truth that are presented by any number of natural scientist (Griffin 2017). The truth does have a pedagogical potential, but it would be an immoral pedagogy that would insist that learners should embrace such a truth, when

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exactly such a truth is, depressingly, still incompatible with the way most human beings live their lives on this planet. The importance of this ambiguity cannot be underestimated, as it underlines the role of movement, of being able to test the limits of denial and insanity in order to critique and change how both of these positions are framed by the individual as existential questions and as societies as political, social and economic questions. An essentialist Dark pedagogy would stress the importance of the constant movement between denial and insanity, in order to change grasp as much as possible of a given truth that resides in the field of insanity and drag as much of it as possible back to the hard shores of denial. The goal would be to at least moderate or perhaps even change the status quo of individual and societal denial towards a state of greater insight into the realities that govern our planet.

Dark Pedagogy as the Collapse of Denial, Insanity and Death While a linear illustration of the relationship between denial-insanitydeath hints the essentialist possibility of harnessing some form of truth, a mysticist take on this relationship requires a different visual representation and presents different pedagogical and educational possibilities. Harman’s notion of the always withdrawn object leaves no room for a privileged all-seeing position encapsulated as a specific accessible notion of Truth. This makes it very hard to locate such a truth on a linear denial-insanity-death spectrum and even harder to move between denial and insanity, if we understand insanity as the possibility of breaking with contemporary illusions of meaning-making, and for a short moment stare into abyss of the always insisting totality of the world-without-us. With Harman’s OOO it is possible to argue that the relationship between a given object and other objects cannot be inscribed on a linear scale progressing from the veiled position of denial towards ever more insanity-inducing levels of insight. Truth is, as such, not a specific place, or position, from which it is possible to navigate existing efforts to establish, often highly, ethnocentric, anthropocentric, chronocentric processes of meaning-making. Any given truth is just as withdrawn as all other objects in Harman’s understanding, and any effort to access it fully is futile. This does not necessarily mean that there is not truth, but that the truth cannot be isolated, but instead seen as always embedded in all objects, but

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never fully accessible or something that can be provoked to reveal itself. From such a mysticist perspective, the linear representation of denial-insanity-death as described earlier must be discarded and replaced by a model that leaves room for the inherent weirdness and withdrawness of all objects. The important point is not the demarcation of denial, insanity, death, but the insistence on the collapse of these reaction patterns and how they are all present at the same time in all objects. We are never fully retracted into the comfort of denial, but also partially exposed to and provoked by the obvious insanity that unfolds around and inside of us. Any given level of true existential comfort is, arguably only present in rare moments, too abruptly disrupted by the ambiguous and insisting world that we inhabit. Falling raindrops on uncovered heads, rumblings of hungry stomachs, thoughts of future challenges and efforts to plan around these, longings for loved ones alive, dead or yet not met, intrusive motions of trains stopping and starting, drafts filling rooms with invisible turmoils of mixing temperatures and aromas. Objects and relations such as these press it home that there is no escaping the weirdness of it all. Any effort to truly deny the totality of it all is always highly permeable as we constantly strain our physical, bodily, emotional, cognitive faculties to navigate the processes where the world-with-out-us bumps into the thin crust of the world-for-us in a cycle of continuous collapse of the world-for-us, the world.-in-itself, the world-without-us or denial, insanity, death. In this light, the linear representation of the denial-insanity-death spectrum misses the point of how we can never escape any of these reactions, but always are in a flux of exactly denial, insanity and death. In the light of Harman, Morton and Thacker’s work a more constructive representation could be the Möbius strip with its embedded weirdness of non-separation. The start, is the end, is the front, is the back (Fig. 5.2). If the relationship between insanity and death is not understood and visualized as linear, but instead visualized as the Möbius strip above (and as discussed in Chapter 2), it informs a dark pedagogy more in the spirit with the underlying focus on the weird qualities of reality and objects that Harman has stressed (Harman 2012). From such a position it could be argued that it is never possible to acquire an all-knowing position, nor it is possible to retract into full-blown denial. The position becomes Dark in a Mortonian perspective, in that it eludes all efforts to separate positions within the dark pedagogical spectrum

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Fig. 5.2  Möbius strip of denial, insanity and death

and instead invites us to insist on the basic strangeness and weirdness imbued in all objects and relationships through the inherent withdrawn kernel of these (Morton 2016). Could such a collapse lead to a dizzying lack of signposts by which it might be possible to navigate the pedagogical challenges linked to environmental and sustainability education practice and research? Is this the caricatured relativism of post-structuralism pushed to the next level? Do we risk just being the proverbial pedagogical bulls in China shops when trying to engage with the pre-eminently human activity of pedagogy or education, even when trying to address issues that draws on the far more than human? Instead of diving into those particular and often numbing rabbit holes, we argue for the importance of Morton’s emphasis on understanding dark as not only dark-depressing, but also dark-sweet. In following Harman, Mortons and Thacker’s mysticist take on speculative realism we argue that this does not represent the end of pedagogical space, but instead a possibility to further develop how we frame such a pedagogical space and engage with environmental and sustainability challenges (and beyond) that so clearly resists the boundaries of anthropocentrism, ethnocentrism and chronocentrism. An example could draw on Morton’s understanding of what can be considered strange in trying to live up to the classic anthropological ideal of “making the strange familiar and the familiar strange” (Miner 1956). Engaging with the great outdoors is important and a central exercise in testing the limits of the socially embedded level of denial in

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any kind of educational system, but a key argument of Morton and others is that there is no clear line of demarcation to be found between the great indoors and the great outdoors (Morton 2016). The strangeness sought when visiting an industrial pig farm in order to question the hegemonic modes of food production and consumption is just as much at play in any mundane object surrounding us, as it is in the spectacle of soon to be butchered masses of pigs. In his The Ecological Thought from 2010 Morton argues for a radical understanding of strangeness as an underlying principle of all relations (Morton 2010). Familiarity is but an illusion that is dispersed with as we move into how things and objects (including human beings) are always interlinked and can never be separated. The more we get to know about a person, a thing or object, the stranger it becomes. As we try to pry out the inner workings of any object it relentlessly shows itself as impossible to pry open and always showing more links, more relations to other objects. There is no full deconstruction, only an understanding of the bottomless nature of all objects, even the most seemingly familiar or mundane. In that perspective the much-lauded excursion to significant sites of ecological flourish or destruction is not the only way to engage with the differing levels of denial and insanity embedded in educational and pedagogical activities. Examining any objects in a classroom, the near environment or even through abstract representations can, with the help of Morton and Co. stimulate some of the insights that underpins his ecological thought. Later Morton merged his thoughts on ecology with Harman OOO and focused his work on the earlier discussed hyper objects. These became the ultimate strangers in Morton’s universe as one of the qualities of these hyperobjects are how they are not only strange towards us, but even towards themselves (Morton 2013; Saari and Mullen 2018). Hunting hyper objects in any given environment could thus be seen as a pre-eminently dark pedagogical move. Understanding that a chair, a hair on the head of a pupil or thoughts about freedom are embedded in never-ending relations and with excessive links to, through or in hyperobjects opens up for discussions and understandings of the strange qualities of the seemingly familiar surrounding us and at the same time emphasize that there is no safe harbour of true denial, but drawing on psychoanalysis, at best the always partial strategy of disavowal. We can try to exclude the strangeness of the world surrounding

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us, but any attempts to do so will ultimately fail in the face of the withdrawn objects that never truly corresponds to our efforts to domesticate and control them. Specific pedagogical strategies could find inspiration in Ian Bogost’s concept of alien phenomenology. In his perspective the core of thinking, and for our use pedagogy, is the capacity to wonder. Though the capacity to wonder over the world the “alien mystery of objects” show themselves (Bogost 2012). In doing this Bogost argues that he represents a rare pragmatic approach to speculative realism. In examining the never-ending alien depth and strangeness of the always withdrawn objects lies the potential to ensure that wonder not only leads to the all too familiar dark-depressing despair that climate change and global warming risks to introduce in the classroom. There is always a dark-sweet insight that argues for the always inherent potential contingent change and the possibility of both navigating and changing the current narratives that govern how we as individuals and societies deals with e.g. issues linked to environmental and sustainability challenges. The collapse of the denial-insanity-despair spectrum, into an inescapable part of the human condition, means that the comfort of the illusion of true denial vanishes, but instead opens up for pedagogical potentials of developing more ambiguous positions such as disavowal through pedagogical activities. If disavowal is more than flawed denial, and instead represents a truer and more permeable position, then it could also be seen as a hotbed of potentials for developing more constructive relationships with the always present denial-insanity-death. The more unstable position of disavowal can be understood to represent a pedagogical approach that makes it possible to develop different ways of engaging ways with environmental and sustainability challenges. A dark pedagogy trying to turn any efforts towards clean cut denial of the challenges we face into a more open position of disavowal could develop ironic positions towards the challenges we face, drawing on Rorty’s notion of irony and the ironist as a person with three characteristics: (1) She has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books she has encountered; (2) she realizes that arguments phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts; (3) insofar

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as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power not herself. An ironic stance thus can be seen as an open and vulnerable position that has the potential to dislodge norms and habits in order to engage with issues through different vocabulary and in a pedagogical sense through other practices. Other stances could be Platonic developing a sense of the emotional strings that binds us together with objects without the chaining us to them, or we could go all the way to an erotic stance towards the issues at hand stressing the intimacy of the carbon molecules that binds us to any living organism and with an added dash of interstellar chrono-perspective, binds us to all objects in the universe.

Conclusion The Dark pedagogical space between denial and insanity is immense. If we approach it from an essentialist speculative stance, using Meillassoux and Brassier to underline the importance of circling an human and inhuman truth whenever we critique or try to develop the meaning-making processes and narratives that scaffold our societies and practices. We can venture into the hinterlands of insanity, learn that human beings thrust themselves on a planet and all that inhabit it, with very little thought beyond our own short span enjoyment and miniscule understanding of what constitutes the good life (for humans). After these ventures we can hasten our way back to the relative comfort of denial, in order to insist on the plastic qualities of this denial and that it can manifest in other, perhaps less suppressive forms. There is also the more radical possibility of insisting the impossibility of accessing truth and on the collapse of the linear position of denial-insanity-death into a inescapable constant flux of both being in denial of the perils we are in while understanding that we are more perilous and helpless than ever with all of this inscribed on the entropic horizon of death and guaranteed extinction. In this perspective we are always venturing, as the darkness of the insanity is always present and the pedagogical activities becomes more of a question of how to open up for a constructive, sweet dark stance towards this flux than how we bypass denial or even denialism.

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References Agyeman, J. (2003). “Under-Participation” and Ethnocentrism in Environmental Education Research: Developing “Culturally Sensitive Research Approaches”. Canadian Journal of Environmental Education, 8(1), 80–94. Anders Wijkman, J. R. (2012). Bankrupting Nature: Denying Our Planetary Boundaries. London and New York: Routledge. Biesta, G. (2002). Bildung and Modernity: The Future of Bildung in a World of Difference. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 21(4–5), 343–351. Biesta, G. (2014). Beautiful Risk of Education. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Biesta, G., & Miedema, S. (2002). Instruction or Pedagogy? The Need for a Transformative Conception of Education. Teaching and Teacher Education, 18(2), 173–181. Bogost, I. (2012). Alien Phenomenology, or, What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Boogaard, B. K., Oosting, S. J., & Bock, B. B. (2008). Defining Sustainability as a Socio-Cultural Concept: Citizen Panels Visiting Dairy Farms in the Netherlands. Livestock Science, 117(1), 24–33. Bowers, C. A., & Apffel-Marglin, F. (2004). Re-thinking Freire: Globalization and the Environmental Crisis. London: Routledge. Brassier, R. (2007). Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Brassier, R. (2011). I Am a Nihilist Because I Still Believe in Truth. Kronos, Kronos. Bryant, L. R. (2011). The Democracy of Objects. Michigan: Open Humanities Press. Griffin, A. (2017). 15,000 Scientists Give Catastrophic Warning About the Fate of the World in New ‘Letter to Humanity’. Independent. Harman, G. (2009). Towards Speculative Realism. Winchester and Washington, DC: Zero Books. Harman, G. (2011). The Quadruple Object. Alresford: Zero Books. Harman, G. (2012). Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy. Winchester and Washington, DC: Zero Books. Klafki, W. (2010). Studien zur Bildungstheorie und Didaktik. Weinheim: Beltz. Mannion, G., Fenwick, A., & Lynch, J. (2013). Place-Responsive Pedagogy: Learning from Teachers’ Experiences of Excursions in Nature. Environmental Education Research, 19(6), 792–809. Meillassoux, Q. (2009). After Finitude. London: Continuum. Miner, H. (1956). Body Ritual Among the Nacirema. American Anthropologist, 58(3), 503–507.

102  J. A. LYSGAARD ET AL. Morton, T. (2010). The Ecological Thought. London: Harvard University Press. Morton, T. (2013). Hyperobjects. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Morton, T. (2016). Dark Ecology. New York: Columbia University Press. Saari, A., & Mullen, J. (2018). “Dark Places: Environmental Education Research in a World of Hyperobjects.” Environmental Education Research, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2018.1522618. Shryock, A., Smail, D. L., Earle, A., & Shryock, A. (2011). Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sterling, S. (2017). Assuming the Future: Repurposing Education in a Volatile Age. In B. Jickling & S. Sterling (Eds.), Post-sustainability and Environmental Education. Cham: Palgrave. Storksdieck, M. (2006). Field Trips in Environmental Education. Berlin: BWV Verlag. Thacker, E. (2011). In the Dust of This Panet. Winchester and Washington, DC: Zero Books.

CHAPTER 6

Dark Pedagogy in the Anthropocene Martin Hauberg-Lund Laugesen

Abstract  Drawing on Gert Biesta’s tripartite conception of education the chapter expounds a novel interpretation of qualification, socialization and subjectification. It does so under the influence of the concept of the Anthropocene and the way(s) in which this concept has been elaborated by literary scholar and philosophy prophet Timothy Morton. The normative didactical implications that follow from an Anthropocene inspired appropriation of Biesta’s three dimensions of education are put into context towards the end of the chapter where a piece of autoethnography illustrates how one might conceive of dark pedagogy as an instantiation of “good education”. We will follow a group of primary school pupils that are given a tour at a local slaughterhouse and take a look at the affectively intense outcome of their school excursion. Keywords  Dark pedagogy · Gert Biesta · Anthropocene Nonhuman curriculum · Timothy Morton © The Author(s) 2019 J. A. Lysgaard et al., Dark Pedagogy, Palgrave Studies in Education and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19933-3_6

· Didactics · 103

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We live on a finite planet. That is a given fact. However, the underlying premise of both the quality and quantity of human industry and consumption seems to deny this fact, pointing, instead, to another fact, namely that human beings do not currently live, feel, think and act in accordance with this planetary finitude. And because of the statistically well-documented and objective reality of what has come to be known as “the great acceleration”, we, as a species, are currently facing the historically greatest challenge that we have (probably) ever faced: To bring about a fundamental socio-cultural, techno-scientific and politicoeconomic transformation of our societies towards sustainability on all of these three levels—and to do so as fast and efficient as possible. This calls for a rethinking of pedagogical practices and didactical ideals so that the young generation of today will be enabled to become the responsible change makers of tomorrow. As UN’s IPCC representatives stated in their presentation of their report on climate change from the fall of 2018: If we are to achieve the goal of staying within the limit of a global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2100 it will require “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” (IPCC 2018). I will begin the chapter by expounding what I take to be a central trait of the Anthropocene: The Anthropocene paradox. I then go on to clarify the distinction between “didactics” and “pedagogy” in order to lay the foundation for the further development of a dark pedagogy of the Anthropocene. I then move on to further expound the notion of dark pedagogy relying on Geert Biesta’s understanding of education. According to Biesta, all education is defined by three functions or aspects, namely qualification, socialization and subjectification, and in line with Biesta’s analytical distinction I will put forward a tripartite content specification of dark pedagogy. On the basis of this specification, I go into a somewhat lengthy treatment of “the excursion” as a central educational activity for dark pedagogues to pursue. The focus on the pedagogical value of excursions will be vivaciously exemplified by a short case description and a piece of autoethnography that stage the dissecting of a giraffe and a visit to a local slaughterhouse respectively. I wrap it all up with some concluding remarks on the overall pedagogical relevance of speculative realism and OOO.

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The Anthropocene Paradox The sheer number of annual scientific publications with the word “Anthropocene” in the title has grown rapidly during the period of 2011–2017 (Mau 2017). An accelerating interest in the concept of the Anthropocene thus seems to take place—at least within academia. The growing interest takes place within the natural sciences and especially among the people involved in or associated with The Anthropocene Work Group led by professor Jan Zalasiewicz at the University of Leicester, England. However, the interest is also very much emerging across disciplines including the social sciences (political theory, sociology, anthropology) as well the humanities (literature, art theory, philosophy). Now, in light of this burgeoning and varied literature on the Anthropocene it seems highly relevant to pose the question: What is the meaning of the Anthropocene? To being with, the “Anthropocene” is the suggested name for the latest geological epoch in Earth’s history. The epoch is said to be defined by human technological supremacy and dominance over all other life on the Planet. Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer therefore (re-)introduced the term in 2000 to designate “the central role of mankind in geology and ecology” (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000: 17), taking into consideration the many scientifically documented anthropogenic effects on the biosphere and Earth’s climate. They ended their short (re-)introduction of the notion of the Anthropocene by highlighting that “to develop a worldwide accepted strategy leading to sustainability of ecosystems against human induced stresses will be one of the great future tasks of mankind” (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000: 18). Based on human beings’ industrial horsepowers and inspired by Crutzen and Stoermer’s initial determination of the concept of the Anthropocene, leading climate scientists have claimed that human beings now rival the great forces of nature in regard to deciding the fateful developments of Earth’s planetary biosphere within the decades and centuries to come (cf. Steffen et al. 2007: 614; 2011: 843). Urbanization and terraforming cities and industry have played and are still playing a crucial role in the ongoing technological reconfiguration of natural environments all around the world (cf. Zalasiewicz et al. 2011: 836). Processes which were recently convincingly visualized and presented in an aesthetically impressive if not simply awe-inspiring manner

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by the documentary movie Anthropocene: The Human Epoch from 2018. The population explosion during the second half of the twentieth century has led to a correlating explosion in human consumption entailing what has been called “the great acceleration”. Climate scientists use this concept to designate the exponentially growing consumption and impact rates within the wealthy OECD-countries of the Western world. The great acceleration has to do with consumption (e.g. fossil fuels, fertilizer, water), on the one hand, and the derived implications for the Earth system (e.g. biosphere degradation, ocean acidification, rise of surface temperature), on the other (Steffen et al. 2015: 84–87). The correlation is clear: The current modes of human expansion drive the destructive dismantling of the otherwise semi-stable biospherical state of the Holocene, i.e. the scientifically ratified name for the geological epoch of the Earth that began by the end of the last ice age and ended at the beginning of the Anthropocene. In other words: The Anthropocene is the name for the epoch in which a single life form (i.e. human beings) managed to exterminate a critical amount of nonhuman species and jeopardize the livelihood of itself out of greed, self-centred speciesism and, ultimately, species specific conquests—or, what Nietzsche in many places call “will to power”, i.e. a desire for power that is willing to acquire and increase the power so desired even at the risk of not being able to reproduce the conditions of one’s own survival and reproductive success (cf. Nietzsche 2005: 98–100). In their wake of destruction, human beings have left a trail of waste consisting of discarded computer screens, wrecked cars, synthetic islands of microplastics and a thin layer of radioactive plutonium dust. Currently, most scientists argue that the Anthropocene epoch began around 1945–1950, which correlates with the bottom of the exponentially growing graphs visualizing the great acceleration (Steffen et al. 2011: 851–852; Morton 2013: 4–5). Now, what I will call “the Anthropocene paradox” consists in the following: In the geological epoch where human beings have ­transformed Earth into a reservoir of useful resources to the historically largest extent ever, human beings are confronted with Earth’s multitude of nonhuman life forms, forces and phenomena to a hitherto unprecedented degree. The Anthropocene paradox showcases the manifold ways in which human beings are deeply “enmeshed” in and “haunted” by nonhuman aspects of Earth’s planetary reality at the historical moment at which human beings’ technological power over the biosphere is at its peak (Morton 2017). Human beings have shaped the Earth in their own

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image and through this shaping activity human beings have wrought forth nonhuman forces from the ecological depths of Earth. These forces are becoming ever more present and pressing and they manifest as, for instance, ecological destabilization in the wake of accelerating loss of biodiversity, rising water levels of the oceans in the wake of the de-icing of polar ice caps and growing emissions of greenhouse gases in the wake of the Arctic Tundra’s melting permafrost. In a time where human beings as a species set the agenda for what is going to happen with life on Earth, nonhuman forces break in and disturb our self-centred, speciesistic and imperialistically invasive behaviour. They demand of us that we respond to their address, and it is only getting harder and harder to ignore the ethically beckoning gaze of Earth. The question now is: Can we actually bear to see what we glimpse in the depths of the gaze of the planet itself? Following Morton, the accelerating intensification of the human shaping of Earth is among the core traits of the Anthropocene. What made this acceleration possible was, in the first place, the sudden increase in available universal machine power in the 1780s due to James Watt’s— and others’—invention and industrial implementation of the steam engine. Once the machine-driven shaping of Earth got started, according to Morton, human beings’ Earth-shaping activities got hacked by the profit logics of capitalism, thus subjugating them to serve the purpose of producing “abstract value”. This moment in the history of large-scale industrial intervention into the life systems of the hitherto mostly nonhuman planet coincides with the birth of what Karl Marx theorized as “capital” (cf. Malm 2016). Since this happened, the Earth-shaping processes have, on Morton’s account, acquired a gradually increasing “vampire-like” quality, implying that the otherwise human friendly machines have come to serve other masters than the human beings who (think they) control them. This process of de-anthropomorphising of an otherwise and originally human undertaking has now turned out to have dire implications for Earth itself. In the present context, this means that nonhuman entities are “pressing in on all sides, in the charnel ground at the end of the world” (Morton 2013: 196). All talk about “the end of the world” naturally sounds drastic. Therefore, let me explain the meaning of Morton’s ominous diagnostics. In his apocalyptic proclamation of “the end of the world”, Morton (implicitly) draws on a distinction from phenomenology. Multiple sources can be used to illustrate this distinction, but I have decided to focus on Heidegger’s essay On the Origin of the Work of Art originally from the

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1930s. In his essay on art, artworks and artists, Heidegger introduced a distinction between “world” (German: “Welt”) and “earth” (German: “Erde”). Whereas world stands for beings as a whole, i.e. the totality of phenomena, earth stands for that which is withdrawn and withstands appearance when that which appears appears. In other words, world is always already the “life world” of historically situated human beings, or what Heidegger calls “Dasein”, populated by forthcoming sights and sounds of so many more or less artistically gifted expressions. Earth, on the other hand, remains concealed and undisclosed. It shies away from visibility, from aesthetic intimacy, it withdraws. Heidegger illustrates this distinction by phenomenologically analysing what happens when one appreciates a painting, in his case the famous peasant shoes of van Gogh: A work of art sets up a world (e.g. the immediacy of rural life) out of the earth that itself comes forth as self-concealing (e.g. the wooden frame of the painting and the canvas). When we (really) appreciate the motif of the painting in question we have automatically stopped focusing on the material basis of its appearance. The tension between that which is defined as phenomenologically given (world qua the motif of the painting) and that which is defined as phenomenologically giving (earth qua the materiality of the painting) Heidegger calls “strife”. The world continually tries to bring earth into the light of appearance, and earth continually tries to withstand this pull into the clearing of world. The struggle of concealment and unconcealment is the place of the work of art. As an object of aesthetic contemplation, it manages the otherwise impossible task of making visible the very strife between world and earth, and thus it is with van Goghs peasant shoes, according to Heidegger (2002: 14, 32). Despite the deeply romanticizing and nostalgic qualities of Heidegger’s concrete analysis of the painting, the ontological distinction that he offers as a basis for thoughtful appreciation of art is useful for understanding the meaning of Morton’s notion of the end of the world. That which ends with “the end of the world” is the exclusively human lifeworld of anthropocentric guidelines and heuristics for production, consumption and, generally speaking, careless techno-scientific intervention into Earth’s biosphere. Understood as “works of art” the reports of the IPCC, for instance, have now made the strife between our human, all too human world of late modernity, on the one hand, and the planetary ecological crises of Earth, on the other, visible to such an extent that forces of the world have now begun to dismantle the world’s own earthly conditions of possibility. These forces are, primarily, humans in solidarity

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with their evolutionary relatives: the myriad of nonhuman lifeforms that together weave the deeply interconnected web of life on the planet. The whole movement towards sustainability and “green”, “circular” and/or “doughnut” economies is, in some cases, an expression of entrepreneurial and political responses to the recognition that the one earth that is currently capable of allowing us to bring about any world at all, is beginning to tremble and crumble under our feet. Thus, the world that Morton claims to be ending is the world of Thatcher’s capitalist and neoliberal T.I.N.A. (There Is No Alternative), the world of the so-called “politics of necessity” (cf. the prior Danish minister of finance Bjarne Corydon and the selling of DONG to Goldman Sachs), and the world based on the belief that endless and unsustainable consumption of natural resources is a viable strategy for future living. The Anthropocene is thus characterized by a decisive urgency felt by those of planet Earth’s human population that have begun to feel and intellectually comprehend the demand to reconfigure the relationship between our Western lifeworld(s) and the finite Earth capable of materially sustaining certain (but not all) kinds of world. At the very moment at which human beings have the historically largest amount of control over the course of events on the planet, the specific kind of control they collectively exercise has proven to be self-undermining, i.e. has proven to be a “sick” will to power. The societal reversals needed on a global scale are, necessarily, also needed on an educational level. Before we go into the specificities of how to reconceptualize education in the Anthropocene under the headline of “dark pedagogy” let us first clarify the distinction between didactics and pedagogy that is essential for any education theoretical innovation.

Didactics and Pedagogy: A Conceptual Clarification In his 2009 article Good Education in an Age of Measurement, that foreshadowed his 2010 book of the same name, Biesta argues for the pressing need of reconnecting with questions concerning the purpose of education. The main predicament in our late modern times where measurement as a means of assessing the quality of given educational practices tend to be turned into an end in itself, is, according to Biesta, “that we end up valuing what is measured, rather than that we engage in measurement of what we value” (Biesta 2009: 43). Questions concerning what is of value in education are committed, on Biesta’s account, to consider

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three aspects or traits of education that he takes to be constitutive of all education regardless of the specific context or setting in which it takes place. These aspects are qualification, socialization and subjectification. Whereas qualification has to do with the specific knowledge and skills students or pupils learn during a given educational process, s­ocialization has to do with the ways in which students or pupils enter and are initiated into given social practices and ways of being together with other people. Subjectification has to do with the ways in which students or pupils are existentially conditioned or formed through the educational processes in question, more or less irrespective of what they have learned in such a way that it could, potentially, be tested. Subjectification thus has to do with what is called “character formation” in the Anglo-Saxon world, what the Germans call “Bildung” and the Danes call “dannelse”. It follows from Biesta’s critical account of the implicit didactical trends in the age of educational measurement that especially the third aspect of all educational practices, namely subjectification, is being left out of thorough consideration when more and more educational policy is being moulded on the basis of “raising standards” on a (almost) purely cognitive and learning outcome-focused level, i.e. the qualification aspect (Biesta 2009: 34). Students and pupils are, however, still and inevitably undergoing subjectification in the classroom, but school leaders and national policymakers are not taking this third and crucial aspect of all educational practices sufficiently into account when reforming and re-planning education on a regional or national level. This seems, at least, to be the critical conclusion of Biesta’s diagnosis. Anyone working within the field of education—either as a practicing teacher and/or as an educational researcher—will be able to recognize the trend that Biesta addressed in his 2009 article. After the widespread introduction of internationally comparative tests such as TIMMS, PIRLS and PISA within the past 20–25 years and the ensuing changes of direction of educational policy on a national level in a lot of participating and affected countries, there can be no doubt as to the policy prescriptive soft-power of transnational organizations such as the OECD. This has also been convincingly demonstrated by policy researchers such as Stavros Moutsios (2010), Anja Jakobi and Kerstin Martens (2010) and Stephen J. Ball (2012), just to name a few. In Denmark, and other countries as well, we even talk about the so-called “PISA shock” referring to the horrifying realization a lot of Danish politicians made when the first PISA-results were published in the first half of the 2000s. As an almost

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instant response, national tests specifically focusing on the PISA curriculum (reading, mathematics and science) were implemented in Danish schools in order to make a better relative score probable in the PISA tests to come. This changed didactical focus have come with a cost: We have seen detrimental consequences for creative disciplines such as music (cf. Lembcke 2010: 112, 118) with low utility value from the perspective of education policymakers due to their low measurability. From the vantage point of international competition, that which cannot be quantitatively measured seems to be ruled out and judged to be didactically worthless and, at the same time, the pedagogical trend of “teaching to the test” becomes more widespread. The internationally comparative tests and their implications for educational policymaking have consequences for both “didactics” and “didactology” of education. Following Danish music didactician Frede V. Nielsen this distinction can be defined as follows: Whereas didac­ tology is the name of the scientific exploration of the contents, aims and rationale of teaching and learning (primarily the “what” and “why” of educational practices), didactics is the name of the practical ways of actually achieving them (primarily the “how” of educational practices) (cf. Nielsen 2007: 31–32). Thus, didactology deals with the curricular determinations of educational activities as well as their justification (existential, cultural, societal, etc.), whereas didactics deals with the practical planning and actual procedures that are to lead to the realization of the chosen contents of and reasons for education. As an academic and scientific pursuit, didactology can support practically engaged didacticians in their decision-making processes concerning the what, why and how of their educational practices. Even though Nielsen himself stresses that one cannot consistently uphold a rigid distinction between didactology and didactics understood as a distinction between a theoretical and a practical pursuit respectively (Nielsen 2005: 9–10), it serves the purpose of the present chapter to keep such a distinction in mind: Didactology deals with the theoretical exploration of the what and why of education, didactics deals with the practical realization of the what and why through an engagement with the how of education. In accordance with the conception of didactics as necessarily involving normative decision-making concerning ideals of education, Danish education scientists Søren Bengtsen and Ane Qvortrup have highlighted that all didactical planning of educational activities is based on “intention”, understood as “to want to achieve something with someone”

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(Danish: “at ville noget med nogen”) (Bengtsen and Qvortrup 2013: 294). They go on to emphasize the inevitable aspects of (implicit or explicit) normativity and volition in any “didacticizing” procedure: ‘This knowledge, this content, this method or this capability is important to learn’. There can be given various reasons for why it is important, but all of these reasons rest on a conception of what kind of human being, citizen and individual one wants to promote. (Bengtsen and Qvortrup 2013: 298–299)

Didactics thus cover the decisions being made prior to or during educational activities concerning the pedagogically active shaping of pupils or students through teaching and learning. Or, as Nielsen has put it: “What is essential to learn, and therefore to teach, and why?” (Nielsen 2005: 6). Deliberations concerning what students or pupils should engage with and learn, the reasons for why they should do so as well as the planning that goes into finding out how they are going to do it, are all didactical in nature. Pedagogy, on the other hand, deals with the socio-psychologically complex art of actually carrying out the didactical plans that are intended to lead to the pupils or students learning what they were meant to learn as well as for the reasons decided upon. (Please note that when I use the phrase “what students were meant to learn” I do not necessarily mean something that has been decided in advance by the teacher. Pedagogically successful teaching often, if not always, involves unintended learning). These learning goals (what) and their rational justification (why) can be defined more or less loosely depending on the discipline specific considerations of the course(s) in question. Now, because any answer to the didactologically normative question concerning what constitutes “good” education (as such) needs to address all three aspects of didactics (what, why and how) it is necessary to engage in not just didactical, but also pedagogical considerations concerning how to actually facilitate the social processes intended to lead to the successful realization of the didactical plans in question. Towards the end of the present chapter, I will try to explicate what I take to be some of the possible pedagogical implications of what might be called “Anthropocene didactics”. I will do so when I go through the case description of the dissection of a giraffe in a zoo and the school excursion to a slaughterhouse. Before I delve into the tripartite exposition of what can be said to constitute good education in the Anthropocene, it is important to note, however, that even though Biesta emphasizes the need to (re-)consider both

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qualification, socialization and subjectification of educational practices, it is not self-evident that all three aspects of education ought to be of the same importance and weight (Biesta 2009: 41). In the age of measurement, which historically coincide with the beginning of the Anthropocene (i.e. approximately 1950), there is, obviously, an overemphasis on the qualification aspect of educational practices at the expense of especially the subjectification aspect (cf. the above-mentioned negative effects of the PISA tests for music as a primary school course in Denmark). But before we deal with the subjectification of educational practices in the Anthropocene let us first take a closer look at the qualification and socialization aspects implicitly called for by the suggested current epoch of Earth’s geological history.

From Dark Ecology to Dark Pedagogy: Qualification, Socialization and Subjectification Qualification: “[T]he Human-World Relation Has No Privilege at All”1 According to Biesta “qualifications” are “the knowledge, skills and under­ standing” as well as “the dispositions and forms of judgement that allow [human beings] to ‘do something’” (Biesta 2009: 39). Qualifications have to do with that which students retrospectively talk about as stuff they have learned “to do”. They have to do with practical capabilities of both a sensorimotor and cognitive nature. I will now go into the possible implications of OOO for the formulation of educational qualifications of dark pedagogy. It is a characteristic trait of both speculative realism generally and OOO specifically that they focus on what is real and true independently of how and whether human beings think about it or not. They strive to philosophically transgress the limiting boundaries of correlationism, when correlationism is defined as the prohibition against thinking the knowing subject or the known object in themselves and not relative to one another (cf. Meillassoux 2009: 5). On the original poster for the first ever speculative realism conference it read that speculative realism is an attempt to uphold “the autonomy of reality”. In this regard speculative realism and OOO share a fundamental theoretical ambition with the various new materialisms of, say, Donna Haraway and Jane Bennett. 1 (Harman

2011: 119).

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In so far as all three movements wish to put a theoretical spotlight on the ontological significance of nonhuman objects, life forms and circumstances impacting human subjectivity in more or less supporting or inhibiting ways, they can all three be said to point in the direction of what I will now move on to define as “the importance of a nonhuman curriculum”. OOO advocates a “flat ontology” as the point of departure for philosophizing about reality. This notion, flat ontology, refers to the methodological decision to “initially [treat] all objects in the same way” (Harman 2018: 54). The point being that it has proven philosophically futile to initiate speculative thinking about reality taking as one’s point of departure “premature taxonomies” that have been “smuggled into philosophy from the outside” (Harman 2018: 55). As Harman puts it in an epistemological vein: “Human consciousness does not transcend the cosmos and observe it from a neutral scientific void” (Harman 2011: 113). In contrast to what many people come to think when they encounter OOO’s flat ontological starting point, this methodological premise does not entail that one can no longer qualify a distinction between so-called “nature” and “culture”. As Harman points out, it is fruitless to talk about nature–culture “hybrids” all the time, because all objects are not a product of such an ontological mixing of types of objects. Latour is wrong when he employs this analytical category in equal ways to quite different types of objects, wherefore Harman prefers to use the notion of “compounds” as an alternative category. As he himself puts it: “To say that ‘everything is a hybrid’ would be to say that nature and culture are always mixed: an idea that must be rejected, since this preserves the very two terms that Latour meant to abandon” (Harman 2018: 58). So, what Harman has in mind is an ontological foundation for getting to know the world that “only” stipulates the existence of objects, where an object is defined as “anything that has a unified reality that is autonomous from its wider context and also from its own pieces” (Harman 2011: 116). Objects are always partially withdrawn and defined by a fundamental undisclosedness. At all times, objects are defined by a “surplus” “that is both deeper than its effects and shallower than its constituent pieces” (Harman 2018: 50). This ontological excess, so to speak, is what guarantees that one will never be totally done with one’s investigations of a given object. There is always more to explore. In this regard, Harman talks about an object as “a dark crystal veiled in a private vacuum” (Harman 2011: 47), and only through engaging the object in question by various more or less practical means will it come to shine out from

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its dim den in which it dwells. To engage the “strange but refreshing geography of objects” (Harman 2011: 77) is to venture half-blind into “a Caribbean region where proper relations between objects [have been] corrupted by rum, parrots, and volcanoes” (Harman 2011: 105). As a teacher such circumstances will inevitably be hard to navigate, hence the need for a new compass to steer by. Finnish educational philosopher Anti Saari has proposed a notion of “dark education”. Together with his colleague John Mullen he characterizes dark education by the “interest of bringing encounters with abjects into the fore of pedagogical experiences” (Saari and Mullen 2018: 7). Saari and Mullen’s use of the term “abject” refers to Julia Kristeva’s notion of abjectivity and abjection. Put briefly, abjects are things and phenomena that appear radically ambiguous and challenge our otherwise stable and everyday sense of self and self-identity. Common examples of abjects (i.e. objects that have undergone abjection) include faeces, saliva, pus, dandruff and other bodily fluids that we usually hide away from public sight out of concern for, e.g., social hygiene. As Kristeva puts it in her classic book Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection from 1980: Abject. It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us. It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite. (Kristeva 1982: 4)

Based on the already given account of the Anthropocene paradox it should not be hard to see why most (if not all) properly Anthropocene phenomena appear as abjects relative to the ruling quasi-hegemony of pro-capitalist, consumer culture. The signs and symptoms of the Anthropocene disturb late modern identities and disrupt the political systems and socio-cultural orders. According to Saari, dark education happens as a kind of place-based pedagogy in a world of hyperobjects, whereby he signals his conceptual inspiration from Morton. In a lecture from 2017, Saari unfolds how hyperobjects demand of us that we rethink the educational significance of place. Drawing on Gruenewald (2003) and others he and Mullen sketch out a generous multifaceted conception of place and highlight both perceptual, social, ideological, political and ecological dimensions (cf. Saari and Mullen 2018: 2). Hyperobjects force us to rethink

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our conception of place, according to Saari, because human beings are becoming gradually more displaced in the Anthropocene due to the disasters so definitive of the epoch. These disasters take place as eerie, ­otherworldly and almost surreal events that radically surpass our causal grasp of the ways in which the world function: “Like seeing an environmental catastrophe in the beautiful colour of the sun”, to use Saari’s own words (Saari 2017). It is impossible for us to fathom and comprehend what is “really” going on due to our always very partial perspective(s) on the planetary whole. Being at home in our own embodied perspectives on the planet and its ongoing series of Anthropocene catastrophes, we feel ill at ease. There is something “uncanny” (German: “unheimlich”) at stake, yet we struggle to get a hold of its essential meaning. On a planetary level a host of things are going on, we hear about them in the news, but we do not see the connections between the roaring local catastrophes and the intricate planetary Earth system. In other words, we do not get the local-planetary-spectrum of scales. Dark pedagogy of place should not remove our dark attunement in the face of the uncanny but ought instead to actively bring about a change of attitude towards the “dark sweetness” of melancholy. It ought to highlight the weirdness and uncanniness of existence—across scales, temporalities and spatialities—thus emphasizing the ontological similarities between such different entities as viruses, fungi, geological sediments, insects, cosmic background radiation and mammalian vertebrates. Such an approach will not—and should not—do away with our sense of alienation towards our environmental circumstances. It can, however, alter our predicament into something to be weirdly appreciated in terms of, as it were, the dark sweetness of melancholy. A dark pedagogy of place actively clears a space for the shared and collective articulation of loss, ignorance and anxiety in the face of hyperobjective threats such as global warming—in contrast to the human, all too human responses of collective denial (Klein 2014: 22). Encountering hyperobjects entails a blurring of the ordinary coordinates of everyday living. Things and events long gone become eerily present or are made to appear nearby in the vicinity of our own bodies in the shape of ghost like apparitions, in the shape of our “spectral doubles” (cf. Morton 2017: 79). Dark ecology teaches us that we are always already in the potentially disturbing presence of so-called “strange strangers”. Morton defines these as lifeforms and planetary phenomena that are so strange that even their strangeness appears strange to us: a strange kind

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of strangeness, you might say. We are “haunted” by (often times) imperceptible spectral beings whose conditioning omnipresence reveals that our human existence is really to be understood as an “X-existence” where the x, as an unknown variable, marks the ecological surplus of our own, individual being (cf. Morton 2017: 79). This ecological surplus is to begin with and for most of the time undisclosed and hidden to us, and it is among the central didactical ambitions of dark pedagogy (as well as Saari and Mullen’s dark education) to engage with it in affectively intense and academically fruitful ways. Thus, when wanting to translate the ontological insights of dark ecology into the language of a potential dark pedagogy, the initial questions to be answered are, perhaps, the following: How to pedagogically facilitate young peoples’ learning to face the strange strangers of the Anthropocene in existentially non-debilitating ways? How to pedagogically scaffold adolescents’ acquisition of critical coping skills in relation to the ever-present potential of going mad in the context of learning to live inside the autonomous hyperobject of global warming, i.e. anthropogenic mass extinction? As Morton himself indirectly points out, it poses a grave challenge to educators around the world to teach courses on these dire topics: Two and a half thousand people showed up at the University of Arizona in Tucson for a series of talks on cosmology. Evidently there is a thirst for thinking about the universe as a whole. Why is the same fascination not there for global warming? It’s because of the oppressive claustrophic horror of actually being inside it. (Morton 2013: 132)

Now, the present ecological crises of the Anthropocene can be said to involve a crisis concerning our concept of what the present, as such, is. We tend to think about the present in terms of the last couple of decades, last week or simply in terms of “now”. However, according to Morton, human beings have been living in the same historical period since the birth of agriculture. Agriculture arose approximately 12,000 years ago in Mesopotamia. An area that was made fertile by the grand Tigris-Euphrates river system. The implications of the rise of agriculture are important to consider when trying to grasp the extent and scope of the ecological impact of the human species. In this sense, we have been living in the same “present” ever since the birth of agriculture. The

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systematic exploitation of the Earth brought about by our newly settled ancestors ushered in a radically new relationship between the human species and the rest of the web of life in the Earth system. Human beings made themselves stand out from the background of the biosphere and took upon themselves to domesticate selected animals and plants in order to control and enhance the acquisition of proper food and shelter. Thus, the ontological dichotomy between man and world came into being and we are still to the present day living under the influence of this “severing” (Morton 2017: 13), as Morton calls it. Now, the deep ecology movement of the 1960s and 1970s and the introduction of the concept of the Anthropocene in 2000 have begun to change the thoughts, perceptions and moral sentiments of human beings in relation to the ecological disasters that are currently unfolding around the globe. As Alex Blasdel put it in a lengthy feature on Morton’s work: We’re not only driving global warming and ecological destruction; we know that we are. One of Morton’s most powerful insights is that we are condemned to live with this awareness at all times. (Blasdel 2017)

Morton himself defines ecological awareness as “knowing that there are a bewildering variety of scales, temporal and spatial, and that the human ones are only a very narrow region of a much larger and necessarily inconsistent and varied scalar possibility space” (Morton 2017: 186). “Scalar contingency”, we might now suggest, ought to be among the central learning goals of our emerging nonhuman curriculum. Thus, one might talk about “multi-scalar didactics” or “pedagogy of nonhuman scales”, etc., when one wants to specify the qualification aspect of dark pedagogy. Returning to Biesta’s definition of qualification we can now say that students ought to learn how to engage with objects in ways that are sensitive to the specific temporalities, velocities, materialities and perceptual capacities that define the objects in question, and not just the ones definitive of the human learners themselves. In other words, dark pedagogy strives to qualify students to become able to practically handle and intellectually analyse objects on the objects’ own terms and in accordance with the nonhuman facets of object being.

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Socialization: “The Feeling That I Am Surrounded and Penetrated by Entities”2 On Biesta’s account the socialization aspect of education consists in the various pedagogical activities that strive to foster, for instance, democratic competences and active citizenship in pupils and students. Socialization deals with how we relate to one another in society, and what kinds of manner and behaviour are appropriate when we engage in societal affairs. Or, as Biesta himself puts it, socialization “has to do with the many ways in which, through education, we become members of and part of particular social, cultural and political ‘orders’” (Biesta 2009: 40). Thus, pedagogical socialization has traditionally exhibited a rather anthropocentric attitude towards learning in the sense that it has primarily dealt with human socialization and, largely, left out nonhuman aspects of planetary existence and ecological embeddedness. Dark pedagogy demands that this notion of socialization be supplemented by the nonhuman sensibilities of ecological awareness, casting human socialization in an altogether different light, casting it in colours out of space. This new kind of ecological socialization is to be thought under Morton’s banner of “solidarity with nonhuman species”, which served as the subtitle of his 2017 book Humankind. The slogan-like subtitle reveals that he intended the book to be about the possibility of a planetary politics in the vein of communism, where it is not just the workers of all countries who are to unite, but the species of all continents and oceans as well. However, besides the explicitly political themes of the book, it also (more or less indirectly) develops concepts and perspectives highly relevant for ethical as well as educational thinking. Part of the ecological socialization that follows from Morton’s dark ecology and its ontological underpinnings has to do with the highly distributed subsistence of the existence of individual human beings. As Stuart Jeffries put it in his review of Morton’s book: “For Morton, our task is to become haunted beings again, possessed by a spectral sense of our connectedness to everything on this planet” (Jeffries 2017). In Morton’s technical philosophical vocabulary this is cryptically communicated in the following manner: “To exist is to X-exist. You can’t be counted as one” (Morton 2017: 79). “X-existence” is Morton’s label for the fundamental ontological heteronomy that defines all objects, 2 (Morton

2017: 66).

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including humans. We are what we are thanks to a host of things that we usually and for the most part do not consider as part of ourselves. Dark pedagogical socialization might, in this way, also imply new ways of understanding and perceiving agency along the lines of Stacy Alaimo’s new materialist take on the Anthropocene: “The Anthropocene suggests that agency must be rethought in terms of interconnected entanglements rather than as a unilateral ‘authoring’ of actions” (Alaimo 2017: 102). The objects that we X-exist with and are haunted by can, at times, be bodily very intimate objects such as the bacterial microbiome in our intestines that sustain our nutritional uptake and condition our cognitive capacities. Our spectral doubles will, for the most part, have an aura of abjection about them, but through dark pedagogical socialization it is possible to get to know them and to learn about their ways and to befriend (many of) them. However, the persuasive and often very practical everyday conviction about individuals’ inviolable autonomy is at faults with the actual state of affairs. From ecological awareness it follows that what we usually tend to understand as (literally) an individual—e.g. an individual human being—is actually a distributed conglomeration of a myriad of individuals. Acknowledging this fact and its multiple concrete manifestations give rise, according to Morton, to “the abject awareness that I can’t peel nonhumans from me without ceasing to be myself” (Morton 2017: 67). On a fundamental level we are slowly but steadily beginning to realize that the politically and ideologically charged notion of “the individual” must be substituted with the ontological notion of “the compound”. Jeffries has succinctly phrased Morton’s ethical ideal of “humankind” in the following manner: “Morton’s kindness is to do with being permeated by other beings, in recognizing there is no inside-outside binary. The new human he yearns for passively allows him or herself to be infected by the healing solidarity of non-humans” (Jeffries 2017). The order into which dark pedagogy seeks to socialize students are of a fundamentally ecological nature. And it seeks to do so by way of what Morton defines as “fascination”, “appreciation” and “solidarity”. In Humankind, Morton defines fascination in relation to human socialization as “including nonhumans in our social designs” (Morton 2017: 143). He stresses that the reason why we “should” do this is not to do with doing good deeds or a culturally contingent distinction between good and evil. On the contrary: “We need to include nonhumans because it’s fascinating. Because we can’t help it. Because we know too

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much. We’re not trying to be kind. It’s that this is our kindness in the sense that this is how we are” (Morton 2017: 143). He then goes on to emphasize fascination as “what fuels solidarity” (Morton 2017: 144). When we become fascinated with alien life forms or nonhuman geological sediments and foreign and exotic-seeming plant life we have already begun to “appreciate” their nearness, their interests, values, conatus and perspectives on the(ir) world. It is not the same as “tolerating” them but has to do with a comprehensive sympathy across species boundaries that, according to current industrial and commercial interests, ought not to be crossed. In Being Ecological from 2018 Morton rephrases his point concerning the irrationality of fascination and subsequent appreciation of “nonhuman people”, as he calls them: Reasons for being nice to other lifeforms abound, but around them there is a ghostly penumbra of feelings of appreciating them for no reason at all. Just loving something never has a great reason attached to it. If you can list all the reasons why you ‘should’ love this particular person, you are probably not in love. (Morton 2018: 179)

Pedagogical activities involving interspecies engagement might now be added as another central learning goal in our dark pedagogical curriculum. Such activities could have to do with what it might mean to be one of the many nonhuman people populating (also) the world of humans. Engaging with questions such as “what is it like to be a bat?” might prove both useful and relevant, as long as the answer we are going to give is not pre-empted by boring perspectives bereaved of empathetic imagination, thus prompting a negative and disappointing “We will never know” for an answer. Subjectification: “A State of Natural Wonder at the Alien Mystery of Objects”3 According to Biesta “subjectification” has to do with “individuation”, i.e. with “becoming a subject” (Biesta 2009: 40). Biesta defines the subjectification function of education in contrast to the socialization function due to the fact that whereas socialization is about integrating the individual student into a pre-existing social, cultural and political order, 3 (Bogost

2012: 126).

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subjectification qua individuation has to do with facilitating learning processes that allows for the individual to be itself. In this sense, subjectification belies the ecological truth about individuals, i.e. that they are always already compounds. However, it is also subjectification that enables the individual to break free of societal constraints concerning, for instance, the eco-political identification with nonhuman species. Biesta formally defines subjectification in this manner: “[Subjectification] is precisely not about the insertion of ‘newcomers’ into existing orders, but about ways of being that hint at independence from such orders; ways of being in which the individual is not simply a ‘specimen’ of a more encompassing order” (Biesta 2009: 40). One way to facilitate individuation processes of learning in the context of dark pedagogy would be through a didactically active appropriation of “wonder”. Wonder as a didactical ideal in the Anthropocene epoch entails an awareness of the reciprocity between self and not-self, between I and not-I, and, ultimately, between human and nonhuman. Wonder implies an openness towards that which one is not already familiar with, i.e. the strange, odd and alien. One way to pedagogically facilitate learning to appreciate the dense multiplicity of objects is to let students first encounter a new object of study by way of making what Ian Bogost has called “ontographic lists”. These lists are also named “Latour litanies” (Bogost 2012: 38), because Latour and his irreductionist actor–network approach to his various objects of study emphasize the multifariousness of any given object. As Bogost himself explains: Instead of removing elements to achieve the elegance of simplicity, ontography adds (or simply leaves) elements to accomplish the realism of multitude. It is a practice of exploding the innards of things – be they words, intersections, shopping malls, or creatures. This “explosion” can be as figurative or as literal as you like, but it must above all reveal the hidden density of a unit. (Bogost 2012: 58)

This active explosion of units (i.e. Bogost’s name for objects) increases the modes of being of any given object, and it reveals that both Bogost and OOO subscribe to what might be called ontological “messiness” (Bogost 2012: 59). This haunting, spectral messiness is, ultimately, what gives objects their capacities for making us wonder, or, as Bogost puts it, “[w]onder is a way objects orient” (Bogost 2012: 124). His definition of wonder is, in accordance with this formulation, as follows: “To wonder

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is to suspend all trust in one’s own logics, be they religion, science, philosophy, custom, or opinions, and to become subsumed entirely in the uniqueness of an object’s native logics” (Bogost 2012: 124). Bogost points out that the way many science classes are now being taught might actually undermine the cultivation of awe and wonder in students. We tend to treat wonder “as an itch meant to be scratched so we can get on with things” (Bogost 2012: 129) and thus almost like a practical problem. On this practical and utilitarian view, to wonder means to be sensitive to problems meant to be solved. In contrast to such a view of awe and wonder, Bogost suggests that wonder reveals that we have become enthralled by a given object understood to be “worthy of consideration for its own sake” (Bogost 2012: 129). Or, as he puts it a couple of pages later, “[t]o wonder is to respect things as things in themselves” (Bogost 2012: 131). French philosopher Elie During has also recently expounded wonder as an essential, even crucial didactical ideal in the context of university teaching. In the interview-based article Education in an Age of Distraction from 2017, During goes into the educational value of “the feeling of bewilderment that makes you want to know more” (During 2017: 93). During talks about instilling a certain “ethos” in students, an ethos that has to do with a heightened sensibility for “the capacity for astonishment” (During 2017: 93). Of course, During is talking about education and the ethos of wonder in the context of teaching philosophy, but his considerations are, at least to a certain extent, generic and can easily be translated into the context of other disciplines such as, say, biology, physics and the social sciences. He talks about “taking detours” and “dilating time” in order to provoke the students to become distracted by the theoretical and conceptual expositions that are unfolding right before their eyes. In an age of ubiquitous digital technologies and distracting social media, it is always tempting to turn off one’s academic attention and wander off into the crooked woods of insignificant online breaks. It is, therefore, a challenge for contemporary teachers to aesthetically “convince” students to stay attentive and to pedagogically facilitate classroom or lecture hall activities in such a way as to enhance “the inherent oddity which is the hallmark of genuinely creative thought” (During 2017: 100). To employ the means of wonder, astonishment and bewilderment into one’s pedagogical practice will, all else being equal, enable teachers of today to galvanize otherwise tendentially apathetic students of mass universities.

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As a didactical ideal in the Anthropocene epoch and as a learning goal of dark pedagogy’s nonhuman curriculum, “wonder” allows for processes of subjectification that take place on nonhuman premises and foundations. It challenges established, conservative and anthropocentric courses that do not insist on the fundamental perforation of all things human, i.e. compounds that X-exist with their spectral doubles. Instead of (only) focusing on the semi-stable cultural scaffolding of human society, attention is directed towards this scaffold’s spacious gaps and openings in order to facilitate an amplified awareness of nonhuman entities, species, factors and forces always already at play underneath the surface of the supple and, at times, brittle autonomy of human individuals. Recounting the topics of madness and insanity in Chapter 3 of the present book, Lovecraft’s educational allegory of At the Mountains of Madness has almost been paraphrased by Jill Schneiderman in her article The Anthropocene Controversy from 2017: At an outcrop at Siccar Point, Scotland, Hutton found field evidence of vast time in the form of an angular unconformity – juxtaposed geological strata representing two different sets of environmental conditions – and hence a protracted gap in time […]. John Playfair, Hutton’s confidant in science, wrote of their excursion to Siccar Point that, upon gazing at the unconformity, “the mind grew giddy” looking into the “abyss of time”. (Schneiderman 2017: 178)

Almost parallel to the retrospective recollections of Lovecraft’s professor Dyer, the leader of the Miskatonic expedition to Antarctica, Playfair’s written testimony to the awesome and wondrous sights at Siccar Point bears witness to the pedagogical value of excursions to nonhuman places where pupils and students may undergo more or less transformative experiences supporting and amplifying their processes of individuating subjectification: To begin to wonder and to stay wondrously wondering!

On the Pedagogical Value of Dark Excursions In the 2019 March issue of the German Spiegel-magazine two seemingly very different articles point to the same pedagogical Bildung ideals when read side by side and from the perspective of dark pedagogy: An interview with EU politician Manfred Weber and an article about “dark tourism” featuring interview snippets with amateur photographer and

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blogger Peter Hohenhaus. Both of them want to preserve and promote a stronger historical awareness of the atrocities of the past. Weber wants to enable all school children in EU countries to visit a Nazi concentration camp before leaving primary school. He promotes this didactic proposition with reference to the thought-provoking fact that approximately 5% of the EU population do not know that holocaust actually took place. 1 in 20, that is. Weber aims to corroborate a common European cultural identity through the dissemination of shared and collective past experiences across national borders (cf. Weber 2019: 30). With his own excursions of dark tourism, Hohenhaus wants to fight for the remembrance of the horrible past that we are wise not to forget, be it genocides, atomic catastrophes or terrorist attacks. A past that we all, to a larger or lesser extent, share and have been and are still affected by. A past, therefore, that we all ought to grapple with and remember. His ambitions might not be explicitly political as Weber’s are, but he is equally convinced that the sites of horrifying remnants ought to be kept open and alive through engaging excursions. In the Spiegel-interview Hohenhaus mentions the areas of high radiation in Pripyat, Ukraine, after the 1986 meltdown of the Chernobyl power plant as one of his favourite sites to visit, photograph and contemplate. With his camera Hohenhaus tries to capture the vibrant echoes of the terrible past that still sound in the walls, the fields and abandoned houses in the area surrounding the site where the power plant once towered from the ground. And he does so not because of the simple enjoyment of the cheap effects of horror. On the contrary, his purpose is of a more noble and constructive kind. For Hohenhaus, dark tourism “is about the processing of history. About being able to better understand why something happened. And about not forgetting this fate” (Hohenhaus in Piltz 2019: 44 [My own translation]). Hohenhaus subscribes to the notion of “dark tourism” as the name for his somewhat exotic excursions. In my further exposition of the relationship between dark tourism and dark pedagogy I will draw on the analytical distinctions of Philip Stone (2006) who has provided us with a so-called “dark tourism spectrum” that I will translate into a “dark pedagogy spectrum” that can help us to better assess and evaluate the shades of darkness of specific pedagogical initiatives. “Dark tourism” is the name for a growing trend within the tourism sector, and more and more people are seeking out places of horror and death as their travel destinations. Stone is the executive director of the Institute for Dark Tourism Research at University of Central

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Lancashire, England, and has written extensively on the topic of dark tourism. At its very core, dark tourism can be defined as “the act of travel to sites associated with death, suffering and the seemingly macabre” (Stone 2006: 146). Other researchers of the trend have also proposed formal definitions of the phenomenon. Thus, for instance, according to P. E. Tarlow “dark tourism” is defined as “visitations to places where tragedies or historically noteworthy death has occurred and that continue to impact our lives” (Tarlow 2005: 48). On A. V. Seaton’s account, dark tourism can be defined as “travel to location wholly, or partially, motivated by the desire for actual or symbolic encounters with death, particularly, but not exclusively, violent death” (Seaton 1996: 15). Thus, the “dark” in “dark tourism” is meant to semantically connote suffering, tragedy and, ultimately, death understood as central quality criteria of vacation sought by the growing crowd of dark tourists. Stone has developed what he calls “a rather ‘fluid spectrum of intensity’ whereby particular sites may be conceivably ‘darker’ than others” (Stone 2006: 146), and I intend to make use of this spectrum in the present context of dark pedagogy in order to develop a spectrum that can be used to assess the degree of dark intensity of various educational activities. Stone’s spectrum is intended to exhibit the “varying ‘degrees’ or ‘shades’ of intensity of darkness” (Stone 2006: 157) that every excursion of dark tourism involves. On the left-hand side of the spectrum we find the kinds of tourism that takes place at sites that “are of death and suffering”, whereas on the right-hand side we find tourism that takes place at sites that are only “associated with death and suffering” (Stone 2006: 151). From dark to darkest we are dealing with actual sites of death and suffering, and from light to lightest we “only” deal with more or less curated sites that are associated with death and suffering, and for the most part in the mode of representation (aesthetic, theatrical, textual). Stone’s original version of the spectrum looks like this (Stone 2006: 151) (Fig. 6.1): According to Stone’s criteria or variables for assessing the particular shade of darkness of a site of dark tourism, placing a specific site of dark tourism on the spectrum presupposes insight into the site’s degree of education vs. entertainment orientation, history vs. heritage focus, authenticity of product presentation, location authenticity, temporal nearness of event(s), purposefulness of site and infrastructure. Stone qualifies these criteria or variables by stating that even though “the ‘blackest’ form of tourism may be difficult to locate” it is analytically useful to consider those sites of dark tourism “darker” that

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Fig. 6.1  Stone’s dark tourism spectrum (2006)

are “non-purposeful, that is, the original intent of the site was not to attract visitors and as such provides a comparably limited tourism infrastructure” (Stone 2006: 152). As an example of a site belonging to the darkest end of the dark tourism spectrum, Stone himself mentions the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, which was not originally build with the purpose of later serving as a destination for dark tourists with the desire to encounter death and mass suffering

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(Stone 2006: 157). Even though somewhat good infrastructure has now been built to support dark tourists’ interest in visiting the concentration camp, there can be no doubt that Auschwitz-Birkenau is primarily (if not totally) education-oriented, history-centric and an actual site of death and suffering. The location is also totally authentic as well as the tourist “product” as such. Thus, according to the logic of Stone’s spectrum, it belongs to the darker/darkest end of the spectrum. In contrast to a real and well-preserved concentration camp a museum like Topography of Terror in Berlin “only” represents the death and suffering of past events in an artificially curated manner. Even though the education value is potentially high, a site like Topography of Terror lacks the degree of both location authenticity and unpurposefulness needed in order to qualify to be placed at the darker or darkest end of the dark tourism spectrum. It remains a site primarily (if not totally) associated with death and suffering. (See also Peter Hohenhaus’ own grading system, which he calls the “darkometer”, at his website www.dark-tourism.com. The darkometer ranges from 1 to 10 and is divided into four intervals. A 1–3 rating is given to the “mildly dark” sites and 10 to the very rare sites that manifest “the very deepest darkest of the dark”, as he himself puts it.) In order to illustrate the analytical value of Stone’s dark tourism spectrum in the context of dark pedagogy I will now go through a short case description and see how the case fits into the spectrum from darkest to lightest practice of dark pedagogy. In 2014 the scientific director Bengt Holst and his team of zookeepers at Copenhagen Zoo in Denmark decided to euthanize and publicly dissect the young giraffe known as “Marius”—the former in order to take care of the (internationally distributed) gene pool in the total giraffe population and due to space limitations and the latter for educational purposes. This decision and the actions implied by it gave rise to a highly emotional and intense debate on an international scale. Copenhagen Zoo and Bengt Holst in particular underwent a veritable shitstorm, and Holst gave loads of interviews to both Danish and international media in the wake of the ensuing controversy. In a now widely distributed and well-known interview with the journalist Matt Frei of the British Channel 4, Holst defended his decision and the actions of Copenhagen Zoo in relation to the giraffe, and repeatedly stressed that the public dissection had served honourable educational purposes and was not to be understood as a blunt exhibition of gore. When pressed by Frei to concede that when the kids that witnessed the dissection of the giraffe as well as the lions subsequently feasting on

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its flesh had been “freaked out” and that “the whole thing [was] cruel”, Holst calmly responded that it had not freaked the children out, and that to use the giraffe meat for feeding the lions is “not cruel, it’s natural”. Holst further elaborated his answer when stating the following: “Why protect them [i.e. the school children] from real life? I mean, I think school children can actually learn a lot from seeing this and learn a lot [about] what marvellous animal a giraffe is”. Frei also suggested that the school children that attended the open autopsy had “looked really quite horrified” and that none of them had been thinking about scientific facts insinuating that the learning outcome of the dissections had been insignificant. Holst then responded that Frei “should have been there” and emphasized that the children were “very interested” and “asked a lot of questions” and that the vet had answered their questions in return. Frei also questioned Holst whether he thought that “by doing it like this” Copenhagen Zoo was “educating the public in the right way”, to which Holst affirmatively answered the following: “Well, we think it is. And actually when seen from the results of today I am not only pretty sure, I am very much sure that this is very well, because we had a lot of public watching the autopsy […] and they go away from the zoo with a fascination of animals, not only the ones on the savannah, but also the inside of a giraffe, which is very good”. As the interview progressed towards its end Frei confronted Holst with the fact that a zoo is an artificial setting insinuating that therefore the human zookeepers have a special moral responsibility for the zoo animals. Holst simply conceded this basic fact without, however, accepting the supposed special moral responsibility for the individual animals, and went on to answer the following: “We don’t say: ‘We are nature’. We are as close to nature as we can get under these circumstances, but we try to show the public what [an] animal is and what animal wonders are and in all its aspects. And not a Disney-world, not a Bambi-world, but the real life, and in real life lions eat meat and meat comes, among others, from giraffes” (cf. Holst [2014]). I would like to suggest that Bengt Holst and his fellow zookeepers at Copenhagen Zoo, who carried out the public dissection of the giraffe and the live instructional commentary and Q&A with the audience on the biological, evolutionary and anatomical aspects of giraffes, can be seen as dark pedagogues. Through their vivid display of the lives of animals they popularize natural scientific insights into the nature of life itself, i.e. life as it unfolds beyond and irrespective of human interests, political perspectives and societal practices. By engaging in the zoo’s

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staged teaching (feeding, guided tours, dissections, etc.), children as well as adults confront nonhuman lifeforms and ways of being that are different from human beings. The fascination of animals that Holst talks about in the quote above—implicitly mirroring the didactical ideals of Morton (“fascination”, “appreciation”, “solidarity”) and Bogost (“wonder”)— signals that he and his fellow colleagues at Copenhagen Zoo have as a shared ambition that the learning outcome of witnessing and partially participating in a dissection of an animal cannot be reduced to the acquisition of scientific facts. Becoming fascinated by nonhuman lifeforms has to do with emotional investment, relational affectivity and the ability to make good use of one’s imagination in order for proper interspecies sympathy to bloom. In a 2017 interview with the Danish media Zetland, Holst elaborated his understanding of the pedagogical value of working with the promotion of interspecies fascination and not just fact-based learning: As institutions we have a very important task in promoting what I call the realistic view of nature. Where the animals have a value as the animals they are, and not as the animals that we can turn them into with the values we read into them. […] If we can facilitate fascination in people by the whole story of the zebra, including the rough part that implies that some of them die as food for the lions, then I believe that we can – if we are good – contribute to expand the conditions for what people accept as natural. (Holst in Pedersen 2017)

Holst’s expression of his and Copenhagen Zoo’s didactical self-understanding is very much in accord with our overall conception of dark pedagogy: To promote a “realistic” view of nature and to pedagogically strive to deconstruct the still widespread “disneyfication” of nonhuman animals. Disneyfication entails that we cheer for the “cute” and relatable animals (e.g. giraffes and dogs) and do not care about “ugly” and unrelatable animals (e.g. worms and beetles), however important for environmental health they may be from an ecological perspective. Now, let us return to Stone’s dark tourism spectrum and see if we can place the public dissection of a giraffe in a zoo, accompanied by an informative lecture and live commentary on what goes on, on the spectrum. To begin with, it is clear that the specific site in the zoo where the dissection of the actual animal takes places is a site of death and not just associated with death. The giraffe was actually killed and dissected in the

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zoo, and it is the real animal that is used to illustrate and exemplify the content of the public “spectacle”. This alone tells us that we are on the left-hand side of the spectrum, that is, we are concerned with a phenomenon that is to be classified as the either dark, darker or darkest kind of pedagogy. The public dissection is also very much oriented towards education purposes even though it makes good use of the vivid aesthetics of the presence of the animal corpse that might (otherwise) be associated with an orientation towards entertainment. However, due to the educational content and focus of the public presentation the aesthetic means used in this regard remain oriented towards educational purposes and away from entertainment purposes. When it comes to the degree of perceived authenticity of the events taking place at the site one must concede that the public presentation involves a real giraffe that has really been killed and is really being dissected in front of the eyes of the audience in attendance. In regard to the location or non-location authenticity it seems to be the case with the open autopsy of the giraffe that we are dealing with a both/and situation. The killing and dissection of the giraffe do not take place in the giraffe’s otherwise natural habitat. On the contrary, the giraffe has been placed in an artificial environment only partially simulating the parameters of its “home” on the African savannah. However, the death and dissection of the animal do actually take place in the zoo which adds to the authenticity of the location with respect to the nature of the events in question. The site of the dissection is temporally very near the death that has taken place, which is yet another supportive factor for placing the public dissection in one of the categories on the left-hand side of the spectrum. The public dissection understood as the supplied “product” has been purposefully devised and the infrastructure surrounding the site of the dissection has very much been purposefully planned and developed in order to support a high number of visitors. These two factors pull the placement of the public dissection towards the right-hand side of the spectrum and away from the end pole of the left-hand side. All in all, and as an example of dark pedagogy, I would suggest placing the public dissection of a giraffe accompanied by an instructional lecture and dialogical Q&A in the category of “darker” pedagogy. Five out of Stone’s nine criteria for the determination of the shade of darkness point in the direction of the left-hand side of the spectrum, whereas two point to the middle of the spectrum and, finally, two point in the direction of the right-hand side of the spectrum. One might argue, therefore, that

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the pedagogical practice of Copenhagen Zoo has a darkness value of 67% (6 out of 9) and a lightness-value of 33% (3 out of 9). Returning to Hohenhaus’ idiosyncratic “darkometer” we end up with a rating of 7 which places Copenhagen Zoo’s dark pedagogical practice in the third out of Hohenhaus’ four shades of darkness. He characterizes the sites that receive this rating in the following way: “[T]hese are the really dark places, some of which may be too dark for some dispositions. These are sites you should come emotionally prepared for (which also means intellectually prepared, of course – you should know beforehand what you’re letting yourself in for)” (cf. Hohenhaus’ website www.dark-tourism.com). Dark pedagogy involves dusky teachings and obscure rituals that it is, in principle, difficult if at all possible, to determine the exact outcome of. Undertaking excursions in the spirit of dark tourism is to enter unknown realms where the nonhuman appears and comes to the fore in a relatively more apparent manner than is usually the case. Whether it is in the guise of abject artefacts of executed humans in killing fields or concentration camps or it appears as arid landscapes of massive deforestation and loss of biodiversity—or, as we have seen, manifested as a public autopsy of a giraffe accompanied by an instructional lecture—confronting that which is otherwise and for the most part hidden away and not talked about enables dark pedagogues to initiate pupils or students in the horrors of the planet and the violent consequences for the biosphere of our cultural activities and societal industriousness. Human beings’ steely machinic prevalence over the softer organic nature of life on Earth offers countless opportunities for dark pedagogy to unfold both within and outside of institutionalized education settings. Sites of ecological catastrophes and past (as well as current) industriously unsustainable endeavours of human production allow for otherwise undisclosed phenomena to step forth and appear more vividly before the eyes of school children, high school adolescents or adult university students. Dark pedagogical teachers in the Anthropocene will have to take upon themselves the roles of guides and expedition leaders in addition to their role of the sympathetic and knowledgeable ambassador of their various and respective disciplinary fields. And they do well to stay (at least somewhat) calm and collected throughout the excursions like Lovecraft’s professor Dyer in his At the Mountains of Madness (cf. Chapter 3 on Insanity in Part I).

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Destination Slaughterhouse In what follows I have tried to enliven some of the central aspects of dark pedagogy that we have developed in this book. I have done so by means of a piece of autoethnography drawing on my memories of a school excursion back in primary school. The telling of the tale should be understood as a construction that tries to do justice to my actual experiences but that is also informed by a richness of analytical categories that came to later and is now brought to constitute an important interpretive drive in my retrospective narration. This implicit conceptual richness, informing the literary exposition of the school excursion, serves the purpose of heightening the sensibilities of the perspective of narration. I have written the story, in other words, from the perspective of my (current) grown-up self, and I have tried to do so in a spirit of loyalty towards my former modes of pre-teen experiencing. I have created an “impressionistic” narrative (Baarts 2015: 176–177; van Maanen 2011) that tries to affectively perform rather than conceptually explain the potential practical implications of dark pedagogy. Thus, I leave it up to the reader to make up his/her own mind concerning the dark pedagogical aspects of the account, and I will not try to overdetermine the hermeneutic outcome of reading the tale. I will, however, end the story by reflecting, briefly, on what I myself take to be (some of) the dark pedagogical meaning of the school excursion and the implications for teaching and learning in the Anthropocene. You are more than welcome to keep Stone’s criteria for placing sites of excursion on the spectrum of darkness in mind, and try, after reading the tale, to analytically place the school excursion on the spectrum. Still to this day I remember. I remember the pressing heat and the vapour. I remember the wet smell of meat. I remember the piercing sound of power tools. Back in seventh grade some of my teachers had arranged a school excursion to the local slaughterhouse, Delika, in my hometown Hammel in Jutland, Denmark. The year was 1999. My classmates and I had been talking about the excursion for days, and a lot of us were quite excited. Excited that we were to go on a trip to a slaughterhouse, but also simply because we had to physically be somewhere else than in our everyday classroom surroundings. For most kids that is usually in itself exciting, and so it was for us.

134  J. A. LYSGAARD ET AL. Our teachers had briefed us about the purpose and expected content of the excursion before we left school and got on our way to the slaughterhouse. We arrived before noon, and in so far as I remember correctly, we spent an hour, or two at the most, inside the belly of the industrial complex populated by men, machines and dismembered animals. We all had to wear full body paper suits as well as hairnets and blue plastic covers for our shoes to rule out the risk that unwanted bacteria were brought into the food factory that could possibly contaminate the raw cuts being processed. Pedagogically speaking, taking on this armour against microbes functioned as a kind of rite of initiation. All of a sudden, we all looked different than we usually did, and we did so together as a collective of no longer so individual individuals. Our uniforms’ aesthetic levelling of our physical differences tacitly communicated that we were “in it together”, that our learning experience was an essentially collective experience. The male tour guide led us around the local plant and told us about the various machines, their function and how they were to be handled by professional staff. One of the first stops on our tour was a room that featured large cattle carcasses hanging on steely hooks suspended in chains from the ceiling. Almost imperceptibly, the hollowed-out cows swung calmly from side to side. Our tour guide pointed at one of the hovering bodies and told us that soon it would be cut up and turned into beef and minced meat. Most of us walked around slowly with watchful eyes trying to see past the gore of it all. One of the boys was fooling around, simulating that he shot a classmate in the head with a captive bolt pistol. They both laughed, but one of our teachers quickly told them to stop their nonsense and pay attention to our guide’s exposition. We then left the cattle room and entered another. We witnessed the effective dismemberment of pigs by use of a light chain saw like tool handled with a solid two-hand grip. The hoof of a pig fell to the floor with a thud. The guide told us about the safety precautions that had informed the decision to implement tools that could only be handled with both hands at once. “Now, our workers here get to keep their fingers. Clever, right?”, he said with a grin. We then entered a room with tall metal booths for the smoking of mackerel. The stench was almost suffocating for our unaccustomed noses. Due to the room’s high level of humidity it felt like the smell of fish seeped into our bodies through all facial openings. I remember seeing several of my classmates trying to turn away their faces and holding the ends of their sweatshirt sleeves up in front of their nostrils. Some stood still and

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breathed through their mouths with a focussed look in their eyes. One of our accompanying teachers asked them whether they were okay or not. One of the girls started to cry quietly. The teacher then decided to escort the unwell and discouraged pupils out of the factory in order to exempt them from the remaining parts of the tour. The rest of us continued. The tour guide now told us about the making of the slaughterhouse’s local specialty: the Hammel salami. We were shown one of the workers processing grinded pig meat, stuffing it into slim sheaths of intestine. Then he tied a knot at the end of the sheath once it had been stuffed with the proper amount of meat. At that point the salami sausage was approxi­ mately 40-50 cm. long and 7-10 cm. thick. The worker then pulled a tight white net of cloth over the salami and tied another knot at the end so that the meat in the sausage casing would pop out in semispheres through the strings of the net. The peculiar, bulging shape was apparently part of the gastronomic attraction of the local salami specialty. There were hundreds of ripening salamis hanging in metal frames all around the room like odd growths belonging to a distant and hitherto unknown flora. We might all have seen them before at the local butcher’s shop, but none of us had encountered them in their raw state until now. After the tour guide’s proud presentation of the making of the Hammel salami we proceeded to explore the adjoining room dedicated to an altogether different singular purpose. In the end, what my classmates and I witnessed to take place in that room today stands out from among the many works in my gallery of memories from the day of the slaughterhouse school excursion. When we exited the salami room, we came into a narrow hall with two doors to our right and a door at the very end directly in front of us. Shiny white tiles covered the walls, their glassy surface clearly visible in the aseptic light from the fluorescent tubes above our heads. The tour guide swung open the first door on our right and we entered. The three first adjectives that spring to my mind when I think about what we encountered in this room are “grey”, “overcooked” and “damp”. Behind what looked like a bright metal operation table stood a man in a floor-length, mint green rubber apron. He greeted us as we came in and he seemed friendly. His hands wore long gloves in the same rubbery material and colour as the apron. To his right-hand side, stood a large dumpster in light grey plastic, and the vapour from its steamy hot contents were clearly visible from where we stood. What could it be? To his left-hand side stood a similar dumpster of equal size which seemed to be empty. The

136  J. A. LYSGAARD ET AL. tour guide now told us to take a good look at what the man was doing and that we should try to guess what it was that he was handling. Our eyes opened wide, and for a second, we almost forgot about the damp air and the strong stench of overcooked meat that entered and left our pre-teen lungs as we breathed and exhaled. From the steaming dumpster on his right-hand side the man now grabbed a long and muscular piece of meat. It seemed heavy and supple in his hand. He then placed the grey sinewy mass on the table in front of him and with a knife he cut loose its outer layer. With two fingers he peeled off the skin in quick, successive wrenches. Once all of the skin had come off he threw it into a blue bin bag behind him and dumped the remaining piece of meat into the dumpster on his left-hand side. The tour guide now asked us if anyone could guess what it was that the man had just flayed. One of my classmates eagerly raised her finger and promptly produced the correct answer: cow tongues. “Yes, that’s correct.”, answered the tour guide with acknowledgement in his voice, “And do you like cow tongue?” As a collective response my classmates and I answered our guide in unison as a spontaneous choir of repulsion: “Nooooo!” He laughed at our childish response and then proceeded: “Okay now, let’s move on to the large production hall where the packaging of our cold cuts takes place. Come along this way”. I glanced back at the cow tongue peeler one last time before we left his lonely chamber behind and pressed forward. I will probably never forget that room’s remarkable atmosphere and its peculiar attunement of my state of mind. And for that I am truly grateful. The slaughterhouse excursion had endowed my classmates and I with a privileged insight into one of the many otherwise closed off and unfamiliar sites where ordinary yet seldomly seen things take place. Things that our society is deeply dependent on and collectively supportive of. Our first-hand encounters with regular slaughterhouse procedures had given us empirically grounded knowledge about how we, as a society, treat our nonhuman kin and what, on a certain level, actually goes on in a standard slaughterhouse on an everyday basis. What we wanted to do with this privileged insight, we all had to decide for ourselves. During the debriefing session outside of the food factory our teachers told us to talk with one another on our way back to the school. They encouraged us to share with each other what we took to be the most exciting and thought-provoking sight of the day. None of our teachers were proactively preaching vegetarianism or advocating animal rights legislation,

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and they were not either trying to normalize or trivialize the intensity of our shared experiences. Back in class they simply facilitated a constructive, empathetic and fact-based dialogue between us concerning what we had experienced at the food plant. The revelation of otherwise undisclosed matters had made a lasting impression on most if not all of us however we chose to translate this impression into matters of practical, ethical and/ or existential concern. Perhaps the school excursion later made some of my classmates decide that they never wanted to enter the trade of hard physical labour. Perhaps some wanted to train as a veterinarian. Perhaps someone ended up as an analytical employee at the Danish Veterinary and Food Administration. Who knows? Personally, I chose to become an ovolacto-vegetarian at the age of 18 before leaving high school, and I have stuck to this diet ever since—with a couple of intermediate years as a vegan. The main reasons for my choice were initially considerations concerning animal welfare and animal rights, but they have since been supplemented by concerns for global warming and personal health as well. To what extent the school excursion back in seventh grade played a decisive role in my choice, I cannot say with certainty, but what I can say is that it affectively provoked all of us to react in more or less existentially crucial ways.

Visiting affectively intense sites where conceptually well-known, but ­sensually foreign things take place can be seen as a concrete pedagogical initiative that follows from the central Bildung ideals of dark pedagogy. “Face the strange in our vicinity”, “confront the unknown in our midst” and “combat society’s collective denial” can be said to be dark pedagogical imperatives. As a teacher to dare to point out the psychological taboos of contemporary society and to make one’s pupils and students grapple with especially environmental and ecological issues, is to demonstrate a will to dark pedagogical practice. To let one’s pupils and students experience that the natural world demands of them that they develop both courage and strength of character required to face up to reality in the Anthropocene epoch, that is to engage in dark pedagogy. To underscore, in this way, the inevitable latent aspects of ecological socialization and environmental subjectification involved in any learning process of qualification is also to practice the arts of dark pedagogy. As educators to ensure that processes of identity development and character formation are the driving aspects of learning is also among the central demands of dark pedagogy. Teachers of dark pedagogy strive to make pupils’ or students’ acquisition of qualifications resonate with their implicit socialization and subjectification processes. The list of descriptions of dark

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pedagogy could well be extended in the light of my autoethnographic story about my seventh-grade school excursion, but I will leave it to the reader him-/herself to formulate more characterizations of dark pedagogical practices and to place the school excursion on the dark pedagogy spectrum. As I said in the introduction to the retrospective narrative: To overdetermine the hermeneutic outcome of the tale would only defeat the purpose of telling it in the first place.

Conclusion We have now seen how speculative realism and OOO can be used to rethink didactical ideals and pedagogical practices. In my attempt to formulate and qualify the notions of “Anthropocene didactics” and “nonhuman curriculum” I have gone through the examples of the public dissection and the school excursion as two instantiations of dark pedagogical practice. The great outdoors holds many potentials in store for and many resources yet to be tapped by teachers and school leaders in both primary, secondary and tertiary education. Fascination, appreciation, solidarity and wonder are among the key concepts that can meaningfully be used as a point of departure for rethinking didactics and pedagogy in the Anthropocene epoch. As I have shown, dark pedagogy explicitly sides with the Bildung tradition within didactical and pedagogical research and theory, and it attributes more educational value to ethically and existentially formative modes of teaching than to more fact-based modes of learning bound to pre-determined curricula. To situate educational activities at sites that enable, support and facilitate teachers’ initiation of pupils and students into more or less secret and arcane knowledge of otherwise sealed off areas of cultural societies and natural environments, is to venture into the realms of dark pedagogical practices that have more in common with performance art than with the activities that go into easily recognizable classroom teaching—it is, in other words, to venture into the vast openness and nonhuman nature of the great outdoors. In the beginning of his seminal After Finitude, Meillassoux introduces this notion of “the great outdoors” to signal the loss of the pre-modern absolute so characteristic of philosophers such as Locke, Spinoza and Leibniz (Meillassoux 2009: 7). The didactical and pedagogical potentials of speculative realism and OOO might now be summarized by creatively paraphrasing the passage from Meillassoux’s book where he first introduces the concept of the great outdoors:

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For it could be that contemporary teachers have lost the great outdoors, the absolute outside of pre-modern educators: that outside which was not relative to us, and which was given as indifferent to its own givenness to be what it is, existing in itself regardless of whether we taught it or not; that outside which students and teachers could explore together with the legitimate feeling of being on foreign territory – of being entirely elsewhere. (Based on Meillassoux 2009: 7)

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140  J. A. LYSGAARD ET AL. Harman, G. (2018). Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything. London: Penguin. Heidegger, M. (2002 [1950]). Off the Beaten Track. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holst, B. (2014, February 9). Bengt Holst on Killing a Giraffe at Copenhagen Zoo. Channel 4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENnNNVOEDZ4. Accessed on 3 April 2019. IPCC. (2018). Summary for Policymakers of IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C Approved by Governments. https://www.ipcc.ch/news_ and_events/pr_181008_P48_spm.shtml. Accessed on 17 October 2018. Jakobi, A. P., & Martens, K. (2010). Expanding and Intensifying Governance: The OECD in Education Policy. In K. Martens & A. P. Jakobi (Eds.), Mechanisms of OECD Governance (s. 163–179). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jeffries, S. (2017). Humankind by Timothy Morton Review—No More Leftist Defeatism, Everything Is Connected. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/23/humankind-solidarity-with-nonhuman-people-by-timothy-morton-review?CMP=twt_books_b-gdnbooks. Accessed on 14 December 2018. Katznelson, N., Sørensen, N. U., & Illeris, K. (Ed.). (2018). Understanding Learning and Motivation in Youth: Challenging Policy and Practice. London: Routledge. Klein, N. (2014). This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. London: Penguin Books. Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York : Columbia University Press. Laugesen, M. H.-L. (2016). Den antropocæne tidsalders metafysik: Om den spekulative realismes kritiske potentiale. Gränsløs, 7, 43–56. Lembcke, S. (2010). Musikfaget I læreruddannelsen. In F. V. Nielsen (Ed.), Musikfaget i undervisning og uddannelse: Status og perspektiv 2010. Copenhagen: Danmarks Pædagogiske Universitetsskole. Malm, A. (2016). Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. London and New York: Verso. Mau, S. (2017). Kapitalens stratigrafiske signaturer. Eftertryk. www.eftertrykket.dk/2017/05/01/kapitalens-stratigrafiske-signaturer. Accessed on 17 November 2018. Meillassoux, Q. (2009). After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. London: Continuum. Morton, T. (2013). Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Morton, T. (2017). Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People. New York: Verso Books. Morton, T. (2018). Being Ecological. London: Penguin.

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Moutsios, S. (2010). Power, Politics and Transnational Policy-Making in Education. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 8(1), s. 121–141. Nielsen, F. V. (2005). Didactology as a Field of Theory and Research in Music Education. Philosophy of Music Education Review, 13(1), 5–19. Nielsen, F. V. (2007). Fagdidaktikkens kernefaglighed. In K. Schnack (Ed.), Didaktik på kryds og tværs. København: Danmarks Pædagogiske Universitets Forlag. Nietzsche, F. (2005). Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pedersen, M. C. (2017). “Vi står stærkere nu end før”: Tre år efter giraf-kontroversen fortæller zoo-direktøren om dens betydning. Zetland (21 July 2019). https://www.zetland.dk/historie/semEVQXv-aoV3ME1j-27222. Accessed on 3 April 2019. Piltz, C. (2019). Auf in Verderben. Spiegel (10), pp. 42–45. Saari, S. (2017). A Dark Education: Place Based Pedagogy in a World of Hyperobjects.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MasMdHcQyM. Accessed on 14 December 2018. Saari, A., & Mullen, J. (2018). Dark Places: Environmental Education Research in a World of Hyperobjects. Environmental Education Research, 1–13. Schneiderman, J. S. (2017). The Anthropocene Controversy. In R. Grusin (Ed.), Anthropocene Feminism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Seaton, A. V. (1996). Guided by the Dark: From Thanatopsis to Thanatourism. Journal of Heritage Studies, 2(4), 234–244. Steffen, W., Broadgate, W., Deutsch, L., Gaffney, O., & Ludwig, C. (2015). The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration. The Anthropocene Review, 2(1), 81–98. Steffen, W., Crutzen, P., & McNeill, J. R. (2007). The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature? AMBIO, 36(8), 614–622. Steffen, W., Grinevald, J., Crutzen, P., & McNeill, J. R. (2011). The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, 369, 842–867. Stone, P. (2006). A Dark Tourism Spectrum: Towards a Typology of Death and Macabre Related Tourist Sites, Attractions and Exhibitions. Tourism, 54(2), 145–160. Tarlow, P. E. (2005). Dark Tourism: The Appealing ‘Dark Side’ of Tourism and More. In M. Novelli (Ed.), Niche Tourism: Contemporary Issues, Trends and Cases. Amsterdam: Elsevier. van Maanen, J. (2011). Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography (2nd ed.). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Weber, M. (2019). Den Europawahlkampf bestimme ich, nicht Viktor Orbán. Spiegel (10), pp. 28–30. Zalasiewicz, J., Williams, M., Haywood, A., & Ellis, M. (2011). The Anthropocene: A New Epoch of Geological Time? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, 369, 835–841.

CHAPTER 7

A Pedagogy of Vulnerability Stefan Bengtsson

Abstract  This chapter aims to provide a tentative outline of a pedagogy of vulnerability. Building upon the consideration of the educative potential of death, a pedagogy of vulnerability is to explore in what way education might relate to the vulnerability of the learner. A pedagogy is to be outlined that is engaging with the anticipation of a future self and its death as a form of self-realization. Drawing on the work of Timothy Morton, vulnerability and anticipation are related to aesthetic encounters of beauty in education, as a form of engaging with a queer and open essence of an absent self that is still to come. This self is, however, not autonomous and a unit, but rather inter-objective. Accordingly, the self is vulnerable in the sense that it requires something else to be itself. The experience of beauty, as the little death of education, is an aesthetical encounter between two objects rendering a pedagogy of vulnerability an ecological pedagogy.

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Keywords  Dark pedagogy · Vulnerability · Death Aesthetic · Mourning · Anticipation · Queer

· Morton ·

Introduction to the Chapter This chapter seeks to explore in an educational setting the discussion of death as relating to the vulnerability of the self as learner (see chapter on death). More precisely, it seeks to provide some entry points for approaching the question of: What does vulnerability mean for education? I will engage with this question by returning to some of the central issues concerning the self and its vulnerability raised in the chapter on death.

Reopening the Gap To start with, I reinstall the notion of a distinct self as a starting point for education. Thus, the learner is a self, it is not simply an expression of the social as a whole. Yet, the self as the learner has two dimensions. There is the self of apprehension and the self as essence. I here argue for a similar split between sensible and real object as it has been put forward by object-oriented ontology (OOO) (Harman 2011). Following OOO, I try to re-approach the gap between phenomenon (things as they appear) and noumenon (things in themselves) that, as I stated in the chapter on death, can be seen to have been closed in educational thought that follows, first, Kant’s transcendental idealism and then, second, and finally closing down the gap, Hegel’s absolute idealism. As I argued, it is the closure and erasure of the gap between phenomenon and noumenon that can be seen to have erased the possibility of thinking the vulnerability of the self in education. Thus, in order to allow for a thinking and feeling of this vulnerability, there has to be a gap be reopened between a self as it appears and a self as essence. By reopening this gap and by committing myself to a notion of essence, the conception of a pedagogy of vulnerability shares similar intentions with post-humanist approaches in education that focus on relationality, embodiment and the effort to provide non-humans with agency and to level the ontological playing field and to introduce a flat ontology (cf. Ceder 2016; Malou 2016; Snaza and Weaver 2013).

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Specifically, a pedagogy of vulnerability engages in this levelling attempt by lowering the status of the human subject by pointing out its vulnerability (see the chapter on death), seeing the human subject as an object that operates under the same ontological conditions as other objects. Any object attains the status of a self. I use here the notion of self rather than that of person, as I see the notion of self to a lesser degree to hinge on demands of personhood. To clarify, I see the notion of person to entail a difference to non-persons that feeds the object/subject distinction (Morton 2013a). Thus, the notion of self appealed to by me feeds primarily on the notion of being a distinct entity. This distinct character has been highlighted in the context of death, as relating to Heidegger’s notion of death as relating to the ownmost. Hence, a pedagogy of vulnerability engages with the question: How is it that a self as object is learning? We might say that the particular ways that different objects learn are different, yet, operate under the same condition of vulnerability. Consequently, in accordance with OOO, I expand the gap between a self as it appears and its essence not only to a distinction between human subjects and the realm of objects. Thus, what was called nature or objects lacking spirit is not a fully transparent realm to itself. A pedagogy of vulnerability holds that this withdrawnness of its essence is a condition for any object, while the way this withdrawn object appears to itself and other objects varies from object to object. A pedagogy of vulnerability acknowledges that it is relative to an anthropomorphic outlook; I am a human object apprehending other objects. Yet, it aims to provide a radically non-anthropocentric account of what it means to be a learning object or rather self. To be a learning self is to be vulnerable. The learning self, attains, thus, in my reconception a status of object, that is partially apparent to that self and partially withdrawn. Thus, this author is a self, so is a piece of DNA or the city of Bangkok. How, DNA, Bangkok, or I apprehend our selves are however different. We are, however, all vulnerable in a sense that we can become aware that we are interconnected and interdependent. Bangkok might not be itself without me, similar to that I am not myself without this particular piece of DNA. How, this author apprehends and, what form of learning can be seen to be taking place about this piece of DNA or Bangkok, is however relative to him being, both, a human and himself. I, as a human, am anthropomorphizing and there is no way around it. However, a pedagogy of vulnerability is radically non-anthropocentric in the way that it does not aim to focus solemnly on how, for example, Bangkok is apprehended by humans.

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To illustrate in the context of education, a pedagogy of vulnerability is not a pedagogy that confines itself to an identity politics of appearances as things might appear to a human learner. That is to say, learning is not about uncovering a true self as defined by what I am as a human. I argued in the chapter on death, that such an approach is characteristic of the understanding of the learner as it emerged in the Enlightenment. In its focus on the human ability to reason, learning is seen as to uncover my nature as human. A pedagogy of vulnerability is exactly radically non-anthropocentric in the way that it argues that any self is not able to access its true essence, neither Bangkok, RNA, nor me the author. As a result, a pedagogy of vulnerability can be seen to be concerned and focusing on how any self relates to the absence of access to its true essence, yet, anticipates that essence in its being towards death.

Identity Politics of a Pedagogy for a Future Self As a consequence of this withdrawnness of the essence of the self, a pedagogy of vulnerability entails a weird identity politics. It embraces learning that engages with the essence of the learning self, yet, as I argued in the chapter on death, this essence is withdrawn and displaced into a future, a future of the great or final death of the self, when the real self is cancelled out and can no longer differ from its apprehension. Thus, a pedagogy of vulnerability entails an identity politics where there is no resting point for that self engaging in that politics of the self given that it does not have access to what it is. There is no self that an identity politics of the self can lean against as a basis for critique in education. As that self is also open there can be no appeal to an “ought” for learning nor education as there is no access to an absolute fulfilment of myself that I might appeal to as basis of my identity politics. Instead, a pedagogy of vulnerability and its identity politics engages with that tension between my apprehension of my self by the self, including memories, experiences and that feeling of becoming aware that this self that I thought I am is something else. Thinking cannot exhaust this process of a feeling of becoming aware of a difference between my apprehension of myself and what I am. The concept of insanity highlights something particular about the self, that is the experience of insanity highlights to the self the disproportion in the synthesis of its creation as a unitary self. However, there can also be seen to be a possibility of becoming aware of the power of the spirit

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(Geist) that is upholding the unity of that self. Yet, it is not the “goodness of God” that I here appeal to when referring to that spectral entity that I become aware of but instead, I am referring to the future self. Instead of a monotheistic god, I see the future self as a form of personal Jesus as that spectral entity guiding a pedagogy of vulnerability. There is, to use Heidegger’s terminology, an anticipation of that future self. That personal Jesus might remind us like Hamlet that “time is out of joint”, that our apprehension of ourselves is not as it should be. Hence, I am appealing to a form of spectrality that is part of a hauntology (Derrida 1993; Fisher 2014). Yet, it is not a hauntology of the past but that of the future. This future, is a future realizing itself, or rather it is a “future that is simply the present, stretched out further” (Morton 2016: 1). As with the future, this present is open, and so is the real self of the self apprehending. This identity politics of a pedagogy of vulnerability is essentially queer. That is to say, the disproportion experienced by the apprehending self relates to the queerness of the future self, its essence. What I am becoming aware of is that what I am disrupts binary constructions of my apparent being (cf. Fuss 1991: 1). There is in this sense a disproportion that renders synthesis impossible; yet, in the moment of death the synthesis takes place, my own-most becomes realized yet the real self ceases to exist. It is as if we have a ghostly access to that ownmost, not able to apprehend it but to anticipate it in the form of experiencing its queerness, which in its queerness disrupts my apparent construction of what I am.

The Self as Monster? How then should we understand this queerness of the self in terms of identity? Is this self monstrous and in its monstrosity the source of horror of education? Lewis and Kahn (2010: ix) can be interpreted to argue so when they argue for the “ontological priority of the monstrous, of the contamination, and indetermination”. This monstrosity is, for them, due to the “imaginative disorganisation of categories and subject roles” (Lewis and Kahn 2010: x). In the conception of this ontological priority of the monstrous they draw on process philosophy (Massumi 2002) to understand these processes of disorganization. In arguing for Massumi’s thinking feeling they seem to return to a notion of “unfolding” that one might assume to be congruent with my a queerness of the future self. They quote Massumi in length on this point:

148  J. A. LYSGAARD ET AL. The mutual envelopment of thought and sensation, as they arrive together, pre-what they will have become, just beginning to unfold from the unfelt and unthinkable outside: of process, transformation in itself. (Massumi 2002: 134)

But, the future self I am talking about is not a self in “process”, constantly “transforming” from the outside, becoming. It is interconnected with other selfs, but it is not a relational self, a self that becomes in relation to an outside in process, where that process is determined by a universal temporality. The problem, with such a monstrous self would be exactly its indeterminacy, as it would be indistinguishable as an entity— look at me I am blob of selfs. Given an ontological priority of indetermination and contamination, I would also like to raise the issue how blobby me/everything could be monstrous? Wouldn’t this monstrosity be a secondary ascribed property to an indeterminate entity? Indeterminacy, as understood in terms of a fully relational self, is not compatible with the queerness of the self that I am here arguing for. What this queerness instead points to is a break of my apprehension of my essence with the law of non-contradiction. I am breaking in my anticipation of my future self with this law as this essence of my self seems to be, both, itself and not itself. I tried to argue for this position in our examination of Kant’s notion of pure or originary apperception. Against the background our break with the law of non-contradiction, the example of the imperative of not to think of a polar bear aimed to highlight how the unity of the thinking self might not have been a synthetic one. It was, both, my thought and not my thought. The thinking and as a consequence also the I, can be seen to be not fully transparent to self. What we can be seen to get a feel for when we are reminded of the thought of the polar bear, is the queerness of that thought. I am not fully able to determine if it was my thought or not my thought. What I refer to by the queerness of the self is a form of resonance or anticipation of the future self by a self apprehending. This anticipation or resonance takes the form of an emotional resonance, a source that I cannot fully ping on my cognitive radar but that has an emotional resonance. It is a resonance that produces a feeling of myself being queer, a resonance that is elusive and that disturbs my attempts to provide identity to that self as not contradictory. By queer I do refer to exactly this disruption of dualistic conception of self by a seemingly contradictory state of myself. It is a self feeling unknown even by itself.

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Yet, it is still a self feeling unknown, not some all encompassing blob entity. Hence, in my conception of vulnerability there is a distinct self that is a particular self. To restate our definition of the self, a self is both itself and not itself. I am Stefan, not Jonas. There is a distinct Stefan-self. Stefan, Jonas and Martin are not expressions of a singular blob of being but they are separate selfs. This determinacy or separability of selfs can be shown by arguing that I have Stefan-qualities that are not the same as Jonas- or Martin-qualities. However, these qualities of Stefan are larger than any possible appearance of these qualities to Jonas, Martin or even Stefan. What I am trying to account for is the infinite recess of qualities of the self that disrupt or queer any apprehension of them. What I am arguing for is a translation of the by OOO put forward withdrawnness of real objects to the context of the learner as self, as introduced at the beginning of this chapter. The way in which the essence of the self withdraws is here by me conceived by appealing to the work of Morton (2010, 2013a, 2015, 2017). What Morton is interpreted to offer is a way of thinking and feeling, or rather the feel of thinking the infinite of qualities that are recessed. With regards to a pedagogy of vulnerability this means that the learner is conceived as a distinct self. Yet, it is a self that is not autonomous but interconnected with other objects or rather selves. It is this interconnectedness that we can become aware of the feel of thinking. We can become aware of this feeling of thinking and interconnectedness in the experience of beauty. I will utilize Morton’s (2013b, 2015) notion of beauty as death in order to explore the feel of thinking that is involved when the self engages with its future self.

Beauty as the Horror of the Self Morton (2015) grounds his notion of beauty as death in Kant’s conception of the beauty experience. As Morton (2015: 151), I open up the discussion of beauty by quoting Kant (1790: 76): That object the form of which (not the material aspect of its representation, as sensation) in mere reflection on it (without any intention of acquiring a concept from it) is judged as the ground of a pleasure in the representation of such an object – with its representation this pleasure is also judged to be necessarily combined, consequently not merely for the subject who apprehends this form but for everyone who judges at all. The object is then called beautiful.

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Morton (2015: 151) highlights how Kant’s notion of beauty relates to the feel of thinking, “a feeling that is not directed at a particular object of thought, but is rather directed by thought itself”. Further, the feel of thinking reveals something in the object itself, “as if I were magically capable of grasping the thing-in-itself, what in the thing is distinctly itself - not its data, its phenomena” (ibid.). Thus, the object in-it-self or the withdrawn real object exerts a force upon me, a force that resonates something in me that is prior to experiencing or thinking that object. Beauty relates, hence, to the interconnection between objects. It is a connection that does not require a transcendental thinking subject for that object to emerge. Thus, the beauty experience is not fully mine. It is not an experience brought about by a thinking subject. It is another object, as Kant states above, that is the ground of this experience of beauty. This in turn, “gives me evidence in my inner space that at least one other thing, a ‘not-me’, exists” (Morton 2015: 153). As Morton highlights, this refutes the assumption of solipsism. I might here refer to epistemological solipsism that holds that nothing outside one’s own mind can be known. The experience of beauty undermines this epistemological claim, as in the experience of beauty, which as Kant puts it, is based in an object that I am apprehending. As a result, this feel of thinking beauty, has metaphysical implications as the object of beauty is prior to any subject apprehending it. It is not “palpably ‘there’ for some subject” (ibid.). It is, in this sense of not palpably being “there”, not locatable as referring to spatial distance. Rather, it simply pops up or resonates in the inner space of my self. What I interpret Morton to highlight in the context of the discussion of the self, is the essence of that self is withdrawn, yet the apprehending self does not stand in a singular relation of correspondence to “its” withdrawn self. It is exactly the plurality of connections or interconnectedness that the beauty experience highlights. The existence of a self implies that it cannot singularly relate to a withdrawn self. That is, to exist and to experience requires me to experience that at least one other thing exists in my inner space as Morton puts it (ibid.). Thus, other objects that constitute the self, as the not-self, are required for its existence as a distinct self. The experience of the little death of education, as the becoming aware of the non-consciousness of one’s self, can hence be seen as occurring in the beauty experience. The beauty experience is this little death of education. It is as a resonance of another object in my inner space, provoking

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the feel of thinking myself in its queerness. Queerness relates in this sense not simply to a resonance of future myself to myself. This resonance entails also some other object (not-me). Let us examine this thought more closely by considering Morton’s conception of the beauty experience as death: On this view, the destruction of a thing is simply the way in which the zone emitted by a thing is somehow able to tune or resonate with another thing in such a way that the inner contradiction at the heart of a thing (the gap between what it is and how it appears, again irreducible and not specifiable in advance) is amplified, such that the thing ‘shudders’ and shatters. (Morton 2015: 153)

The feel of thinking “resonates” with other objects as selves. Thus, the feel of thinking refers to a membrane between thinking and feeling, where this membrane is susceptible to the influence of other objects or selves. Other objects as selves are exerting a force upon us, a force that operates in aesthetics (ibid.). These aesthetics are essentially queer, always between pleasure and pain or relish and disgust. They are however also horrific, as aesthetics and the feel of thinking kills. Hence, the ability of aesthetics to kill relates to the vulnerability of the learning self, that can be seen to engage in the beauty experience in the realization of its own death. Anticipation of the future self, as an engagement with the queerness of that self strives towards the erasure of the gap between what it is and what it appears to be. Self-realization is a goal in the pedagogy of vulnerability, but one that is not coinciding with freedom and emancipation but with death. Once, the self is realized, that is the self has no longer a future self, it shudders and shatters as Morton puts it above. Think of the Tacoma Narrows bridge shuddering and shattering in its beauty experience of the wind hitting it. The wind can in this interpretation be seen as to amplify the gap between the bridges essence and its appearance causing it to shatter and collapse. We might say that the bridge learned something about itself, or anticipated itself in the beauty experience of the wind, thereby fully realizing itself and its extinction. Accordingly, we might argue that the secret of a pedagogy of vulnerability is that the most beautiful and frightening thing for you might be your essence, your future self.

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A Pedagogy of the Aesthetics of the Feel of Thinking What a pedagogy of vulnerability is concerned with is not a right way of engaging with aesthetics of feel of thinking but an openness towards the feelings that experiences can provoke. Thus, it aims to remain engaged with anticipation, where anticipation refers to the “possibility of understanding one’s ownmost and extreme potentiality-of-being, that is, as the possibility of authentic existence” (Heidegger 1927: 263). Anticipation relates to the disposition of a self towards its extreme potentiality-of-being, or, what I have labelled future self. As this future self defies the law of non-contradiction, it defies dualistic conceptions. This engagement with the future self might, however, provoke responses to the feel of thinking that are enforced by logics that aim to uphold notions of purity, such as the law of non-contradiction. I might have learned to respond to the queerness of my anticipated future self by shutting down that anticipation. I might feel, based on the idea of purity, appalled by what I encounter. I might feel that I should be something else, or rather one thing or the other. In such responses to anticipation, that want to erase the contradiction at play, there is a judgment involved as well as a reduction of the arbitrariness and excess of that what I partially become aware of in my feel of thinking myself. To be precise, there would be a judgement that clings to the law of non-contradiction—I can not be that! Oh my god, am I really that? What that judgement does is to “close down” before the encountered queerness of the self. It entails a disposition that denies the possibility of realizing of one’s ownmost and extreme potentiality-of-being. It retracts from the horror of the self, it denies the queerness of the future self. The self retracts from the feel of thinking, and denies the gap between an appearance it wants to maintain and the essence of the self it anticipated. As a form of defence mechanism, the self portrays itself as a closed loop, erasing the future self from that loop. This response pattern aims to maintain purity and sanity, denying the queerness and weirdness of the self. In addition, this defence mechanism can be seen to have informed Hegelian dialectics and in turn, formed educational responses ranging from Deweyan notions of education to Freirean critical pedagogy. This disposition in education feeds on dialectics and in particular on the promise of sublation, as the promise of a negation of the negation at a future point and in relation to a whole. Denial feeds upon the promise

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of sublation, that is it clings to appeals to the negation of the negation as often encountered in forms of greater holism. What we encounter here is good old monotheism, or the promise of the “goodness of god”, as faith in the power of spirit/Geist. In this disposition, the self denies its queerness and the self orients itself outwards towards the whole that is greater than itself. To put it differently, in order to fully understand myself and to negate the encountered queerness of that self (my inner contradiction), I have to look beyond it, towards the whole and then from the horizon in order to see how I am already part of that whole that is greater than all its parts. Education plays here the role of guarantor of the establishment of that whole. Education is the effort to negate my experienced inner contradiction and as a project it feeds on the promise of my synthesis into a whole. I argue this disposition and appeal to that promise is central to the understanding of the role of education in Durkheim’s notion of society, Dewey’s notion of public, or Freire’s notion of cultural synthesis. A disposition of the self that feeds upon this greater holism is dangerous, and I argue counter to ecological thought. It is dangerous, as it might lead to fascism, once we bring the idea of race and purity into that conception of the whole. In this case, the race as whole in its purity would allow me to negate the feeling of my queerness. Me being part of a race would allow me to negate that queerness based on me being part of a pure, whole race. It is also dangerous as it is feeding contemporary anthropocentrism in and through education. Think for a moment about the previously discussed conception of pure apperception as associated with the human transcendental subject, the synthetic unity of “I think” that is a privilege of the human subject. The notion of purity can be seen to be slipping back into educational thought when we see how the rational learner of the Enlightenment is constituted against the notion of the non-human, that which is less human or closer to nature. This disposition towards an encountered queerness of the self can be seen to consist of a number of techniques that Morton (2016: 47) labels subroutines of a dangerous algorithm. These techniques are: (a) eliminate contradictions and anomaly, (b) establish boundaries between the human and the non-human, and (c) maximize existence over and above any quality of existence. An alternate disposition that engages with beauty and anticipation of one’s ownmost and extreme potentiality-of-being, begins, I argue, with amplifying contradictions by openly exploring and engaging in aesthetics

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of one’s queerness. It starts with engaging with the resonance of at least one other object at my inner core. This requires a technique of opening up boundaries that aim to differentiate and maintain purity and autonomy of these entities defined by these boundaries. How can this technique be carried out in thinking? It can be done by abandoning the dialectical appeal to sublation and the negation of the negation in learning. Instead we install an alternate form of holism, a lesser form, where the whole is less than it parts (Morton 2017). This lesser form of holism is rather to engage with contradictions and anomaly than to try to eliminate it. Let us return to the example of Stefan, Jonas and Martin as separate selves. In a lesser form of holism, Stefan, Jonas and Martin are part of a whole, called humanity. Yet, they are more than that the whole, three (Stefan, Jonas and Martin) vs. one (humanity) to be precise. Further, Stefan, Jonas and Martin qualities are greater than the qualities of humanity. While humanity as an object and whole consists among others of Stefan, Jonas and Martin wholes, these wholes themselves are subscended by other objects and qualities. In order to start thinking contradictions and weird selves drawing on a lesser form of holism, I might think of Stefan as being part of a whole called humanity, yet, as a whole, Stefan is subscended by an seemingly infinite number of parts. Stefan’s self is open to the extent that the self is subscended as well as the whole that Stefan is part of is subscended by Stefan. Stefan as self is open to the extent that there is no top or bottom object that would determine what Stefan is. The self as subscended whole is in this sense also non-determinable in its relation to wholes that it is part of, for example humanity. What anticipation engages with is exactly the “possibility of understanding one’s ownmost and extreme potentiality-of-being, that is, as the possibility of authentic existence” (Heidegger 1927: 263), where anticipation is understood as relating to selves as wholes, that are less than its parts. Such an understanding demands of understanding to break with the law of non-contradiction, just in the sense that the self can be seen as between boundaries, as queer. A disposition of openness to that queerness and that acknowledges the queerness of authentic existence requires in turn, a feel of thinking that is interconnected with other objects, as in the case of beauty. The feel of beauty, relates to the other objects in my inner space that I attune to. As we have refuted solipsism, it is possible to feel the resonance of other objects in my inner space. Me existing and based on my feel of thinking, I have to acknowledge that I, as a self, am interconnected with

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other objects existing and feeling. What I am addressing is the by Morton (2016: 47) highlighted dangerous subroutine of maximizing existence over and above any quality of existence. What a pedagogy of vulnerability highlights, is just how my existence is interdependent on the existence of other objects. It is the inner contradiction, that there are non-mes constituting me, that is the very condition of my existence as a self. Further, as the future me is not apparent to myself, things exist and constitute me are not yet apparent to myself. To put it differently, a pedagogy of vulnerability acknowledges that a self is not fully capable to know and apprehend its conditions of existing. I am not aware of all the non-me in my inner space. The feel of thinking is still to reveal these objects in my closest proximity. Vulnerability relates to this fact of being exposed to and reverberating back the vulnerability of other objects in proximity. My conception of vulnerability is in a number of ways compatible with Butler’s (2004) notion of vulnerability, who also states that the existence and vulnerability of the self is tied up with that of “others”. It is not as if an “I” exists independently over here and then simply loses a “you” over there, especially if the attachment to “you” is part of what composes who “I” am. If I lose you, under these conditions, then I not only mourn the loss, but I become inscrutable to myself. Who “am” I, without you? When we lose some of these ties by which we are constituted, we do not know who we are or what to do. On one level, I think I have lost “you” only to discover that “I” have gone missing as well. At another level, perhaps what I have lost “in” you, that for which I have no ready vocabulary, is a relationality that is composed neither exclusively of myself nor you, but is to be conceived as the tie by which those terms are differentiated and related. (Butler 2004: 22)

As with Butler, I hold that the self is somewhat opaque, or has “gone missing”. Yet, I share a certain uneasiness, when it comes to the inclusivity of politics involved when speaking of “others”. While Butler (2004: 33f.) makes an argument for the spectral character of others, neither alive nor dead, her argument for mourning and grief can be seen to feed on a notion of “visibility” of the other: To grieve, and to make grief itself into a resource for politics, is not to be resigned to inaction, but it may be understood as the slow process by which we develop a point of identification with suffering itself. The disorientation of grief-“Who have I become?” or, indeed, “What is left of me?”

156  J. A. LYSGAARD ET AL. “What is it in the Other that I have lost?”- posits the “I” in the mode of unknowingness. But this can be a point of departure for a new understanding if the narcissistic preoccupation of melancholia can be moved into a consideration of the vulnerability of others. Then we might critically evaluate and oppose the conditions under which certain human lives are more vulnerable than others, and thus certain human lives are more grievable than others. (Butler 2004: 30)

What I refer to as a problematic visibility of the other relates to Butler’s ambition to posit the “I in a mode of unknowingness”. Is this other knowable? Is vulnerability and grief dependent on a particular object, an other that I grieve for in its absence as a non-existence? While I share Butler’s (2004: 20f.) concern for interchangeability of objects in mourning, Butler’s apparent anthropocentric notion of mourning of “another human being” can be problematic in the sense that it can be seen to reinforce a metaphysics of presence, where mourning relates to presences becoming absent. This metaphysics of presence in Butler’s notion of mourning feeds the by Morton (2016: 47) problematized subroutine of thinking in which we maximize existence over and above any quality of existence. As long as something simply exists, there is no loss and hence no need for mourning. My notion of vulnerability differs here from Butler’s notion of mourning significantly, as I argue that existence cannot be thought as presence or absence. Consequently, grieve or rather sadness requires of us let go of the idea of mourning for a particular object. The emotional resonance of sadness of another object, might be produced by an object the existence of which I might not be aware of. Hence, I argue for a vulnerability of the self that is rather an ontological attunement to other objects as things in-them-selves. As with the beauty experience, vulnerability does not relate to object phenomena but to real objects, objects that might not be present to me. The experience of sadness relates to my understanding of vulnerability, where sadness reverberates back the vulnerability of other objects in proximity. Hence, a pedagogy of vulnerability does not confine itself to mourning a phenomenon of loss, but aims to relate to the ontological reverberation of the vulnerability of me/other objects. To feel sad is to have overcome distance, a differentiation between my feeling and that of another object. To be exposed and to let yourself be exposed is just to feel sadness and then to relate to that sadness by engaging with qualities of existence,

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or rather happiness of existence. The problem of narcissism, as raised by Butler in the quote above, can be seen to implode in a pedagogy of vulnerability as my sadness and my happiness are no longer thought in terms of solipsism, they are no longer strictly speaking my feelings.

Summary An education based on a pedagogy of vulnerability engages with what it means to be exposed, that is it engages with the feel of thinking the moebius strip of being a self. While I was only able to hint some of the characteristics of a pedagogy of vulnerability, I aimed to define a foundation for an educational outlook. This outlook can be summarized into the following dispositions. The curricular outlook of a pedagogy of vulnerability focuses on the horror of the self, that is an engagement with the realization of a future self. Methodologically a pedagogy of vulnerability entails an aesthetic engagement with the contradictions of the self of the learner. The curricular outlook needs to be open, as the future self is open as well as the playful engagement with the aesthetics of the self. It is defined by a curriculum of anticipation of a non-determined future, that, however, is realized in a present engagement with aesthetic modes of expression. Didactically, a pedagogy of vulnerability requires a mutual fostering of exposure, of letting yourself be exposed to yourself and other selves. The ecological aim of a pedagogy of vulnerability is paradox, as its conception of self is. It fosters greater inter-objective enjoyment as well as well as the utmost realization of the potentiality of the being of a self. Yet, is horrific in the sense that it, once it has achieved the extreme potentiality-of-being, it entails the death of the self as learner. Self-realization might be scarier than you might have thought.

References Butler, J. (2004). Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London and New York: Verso. Ceder, S. (2016). Cutting Through Water: Towards a Posthuman Theory of Educational Relationality. Lund: Lund University. Derrida, J. (1993). Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (2006th ed.). London and New York: Routledge. Fisher, M. (2014). Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures. Winchester and Washington: Zero Books.

158  J. A. LYSGAARD ET AL. Fuss, D. (1991). Inside/Out. In D. Fuss (Ed.), Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories (pp. 1–10). New York and London: Routledge. Harman, G. (2011). The Quadruple Object. Alresford: Zero Books. Heidegger, M. (1927). Sein und zeit (1967th ed.). Tübingen: Max Niewmeyer Verlag. Kant, I. (1790). Critique of the Power of Judgment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lewis, T. E., & Kahn, R. (2010). Education Out of Bounds: Reimagining Cultural Studies for a Posthuman Age. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Malou, J. (2016). At analysere med Barad: At tænke med (u)mulige tænkere. Copenhagen: Nyt fra Samfundsvidenskaberne. Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Morton, T. (2010). The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Morton, T. (2013a). Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Morton, T. (2013b). Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press. http://doi.org/10.3998/ohp.13106496.0001.001. Morton, T. (2015). Beauty Is Death. In M. O’Neill, M. Sandy, & S. Wootton (Eds.), The Persistence of Beauty: Victorians to Moderns (pp. 151–190). London: Pickering & Chatto. Morton, T. (2016). Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. New York: Columbia University Press. Morton, T. (2017). Humankind. London and New York: Verso. Snaza, N., & Weaver, J. (Eds.). (2013). Posthumanism and Educational Research. New York: Routledge.

Index

A Abjects, 115, 120, 132 Absence of myself to myself, 72 Absence of self, 64, 72, 81 Absolute self, 70, 76 Acceleration, 9, 104, 106, 107 Actualization, 68, 75, 77, 78, 80 Aesthetic experiences, 79 Aesthetics, 65, 80, 131, 151–153 Aesthetics of the self, 157 Alternative facts, 25, 26 Anthropocene, 3, 5–7, 9–11, 15–17, 38, 44, 61, 104–107, 109, 112, 113, 115–118, 120, 122, 124, 132, 133, 137, 138 Anthropocentric, 16, 59, 64, 90, 91, 95, 108, 119, 124, 156 Anthropomorphic, 145 Anticipate, 77, 80, 146, 147, 151, 152 Anticipation, 78, 147, 148, 151–154, 157 Anticipation of a potentiality, 78 Anticipation of death, 78

Anxiety, 64, 66, 68, 70–72, 116 Apartheid, 32 Appreciation, 108, 120, 121, 130, 138 Apprehension, 72, 79, 81, 144, 146–149 Authentic-being, 74 Authentic-being-towards-death, 74 Authentic self, 74 Autoethnography, 104, 133 Autonomous, 41, 80, 82, 114, 117, 149 Autonomy, 4, 49, 64, 66, 67, 69–72, 76, 78, 120, 124, 154 Autonomy of the thinking self, 71 B Beauty, 32, 79–81, 149–151, 153, 154, 156 Being exposed, 155 Being-towards-death, 77, 78 Bengtsen, Søren, 111, 112 Bennett, Jane, 4, 113

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 J. A. Lysgaard et al., Dark Pedagogy, Palgrave Studies in Education and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19933-3

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160  Index Biesta, Gert, 15, 33, 88, 91, 92, 104, 109, 110, 113, 118, 119, 121, 122 Big data, 26 Bildung, 7, 9, 15, 16, 32, 33, 70, 90, 110 Biosphere, 11, 41, 105, 106, 108, 118, 132 Bogost, Ian, 99, 121–123, 130 Brassier, R., 4, 35, 73–77, 89, 91–94, 100 C Chronocentric, 95 Civilization and its Discontents, 27 Climate, 2–4, 7, 29, 33, 38, 39, 42, 43, 61, 94, 105, 106 Climate change, 2, 8, 9, 24, 27, 28, 32, 34, 38, 52, 88, 89, 91, 99, 104 Concentration camp, 125, 127, 128, 132 Copenhagen, 2 Copenhagen Zoo, 128–130, 132 Correlationism, 31, 89, 113 Cosmic pessimism, 4, 46, 54 Curriculum, 30, 32, 34, 111, 114, 118, 121, 124, 138, 157 D Dark-depressing, 34, 97, 99 Dark ecology, 12, 34, 116, 117, 119 Dark education, 115, 117 Darkness, 6, 7, 9–16, 35, 79, 100, 125, 126, 132, 133 Darkometer, 128, 132 Dark pedagogy, 2, 3, 5–7, 9, 10, 12–17, 38, 44, 66, 88–90, 92–96, 99, 104, 109, 113, 116–120, 122, 124–126, 128, 130–133, 137, 138

Dark sweet, 34 Dark tourism, 124–128, 130, 132 Death, 8, 9, 13, 17, 28, 51, 54, 61, 64–66, 69, 72–75, 77–82, 92–94, 96, 97, 100, 125–128, 130, 131, 144–147, 149, 151, 157 Death of the other, 65, 72 Deleuze, Gilles, 12, 13 Denial, 8, 9, 13, 16, 17, 24–30, 32– 35, 73, 77, 81, 88, 89, 91–100, 116, 137, 152 Denial in Education, 30 Denialism, 24, 29, 34, 35, 100 Dewey, John, 26, 32, 33 Didactics, 104, 109, 111, 112, 118, 138 Didactology, 111 Didaktik, 15, 16 Disneyfication, 130 Displaced, 28, 70, 81, 116, 146 Dunkel, 11, 13–15 Dunkelheit, 11, 13 E Ecological thought, 65, 80, 98, 153 Ecology, 3, 14, 17, 98, 105, 118 Education, 3–7, 9 Education for beauty, 80 An education for death, 75, 80 Emotional resonance, 64, 72, 81, 148, 156 Enlightenment, 9–11, 26, 33, 64, 66–72, 75, 81, 88, 91, 93, 146, 153 Enlightenment subject, 64, 66–69, 75, 76 Epoch, 11, 12, 15, 38, 44, 54, 61, 105, 106, 113, 116, 122, 124, 137, 138 Essence, 9, 41, 44, 80, 81, 144–152 Ethnocentric, 90, 95 Excess, 4, 31, 33, 34, 57, 114, 152

Index

Excursion, 61, 72, 98, 104, 112, 124–126, 132–138 Exposed, 51, 96, 156, 157 Exposure, 8, 157 Extinction, 2, 3, 7, 9, 10, 38, 74, 75, 91–93, 100, 117, 151 F Fascination, 5, 117, 120, 121, 129, 130, 138 Fear, 49, 61, 69, 72 Finitude, 4, 7, 55, 79, 104 Flat ontology, 90, 114, 144 Freud, Anna, 24 Freud, Sigmund, 24, 27 Future self, 68, 147–149, 151, 152, 157 G Giraffe, 104, 112, 128–132 Global warming, 3, 5, 7–11, 24, 25, 27, 28, 38, 42, 44, 55, 91, 99, 104, 116–118, 137 Grundtvig, N.F.S., 15 H Haraway, Donna, 4, 12, 13, 113 Hauntology, 147 Heidegger, Martin, 6, 55, 73, 74, 76–78, 80, 107, 108, 145, 147, 152, 154 Herbart, Johann Friedrich, 15 HIV and AIDS, 24 Hohenhaus, Peter, 125, 128, 132 Holocaust, 24, 125 Holocene, 106 Holst, Bengt, 128–130 Horror, 4–11, 16, 25, 38, 48–50, 55, 56, 58, 66, 117, 125, 132, 147

  161

Horror of the self, 65, 68, 152, 157 Hygge, 14 Hyperobjects, 12, 28, 29, 32, 34, 55, 98, 115–117 I Individual, 6, 8, 12, 17, 24–31, 33– 35, 66, 68, 73, 91–95, 99, 112, 117, 119–122, 124, 129, 134 individuation, 73, 121, 122 Infinite recess of qualities of the self, 149 Insanity, 5, 8, 9, 14, 17, 38, 39, 42–45, 48, 56, 61, 67, 71, 88, 89, 93–98, 100, 124, 132, 146 Interconnectedness, 149, 150 Interdependent, 80, 81, 145, 155 Inter-objective enjoyment, 157 Invulnerable, 64, 66, 69, 82 IPCC, 28, 104, 108 K Klafki, Wolfgang, 15, 33, 91, 92 L Lacan, Jacques, 29 The learner as a living subject, 66 Learner as a thinking self, 66 Limit, 9, 25, 27, 31, 33, 35, 73, 74, 78, 79, 81, 95, 97, 104 Little death, 69, 78, 81, 150 Little death in education, 69 Little death of education, 81, 150 Loop, 33, 71, 72, 78, 80, 90, 152 Loophole, 68–72, 81 Loophole in the autonomy of the subject, 68 Loop of self, 78 Loss, 11, 12, 29, 34, 53, 65, 107, 116, 132, 138, 155, 156

162  Index Lovecraft, Howard Philips, 5–8, 10, 14, 15, 25, 38, 46–51, 53–59, 61, 65, 66, 71, 124, 132 M Machine, 107, 134 Marx, Karl, 107 Maturity, 67, 69, 72 Mbeki, Thabo, 24, 29 Meillassoux, Quentin, 31, 51, 55, 73, 89, 94, 100, 113, 138, 139 Metaphysics of presence, 156 Möbius strip, 96, 97 Möebious, 29, 33 Möebius strip, 27, 35 Monsters, 5, 6, 8, 14, 15, 47, 80 Montessori, Maria, 15 Morton, Timothy, 4, 10, 12, 13, 28, 34, 55, 59–61, 73, 78–81, 90, 96–98, 106, 107, 115–121, 145, 147, 149–151, 153–156 N Narcissism, 74, 77, 157 Narrative, 5, 6, 9, 10, 15, 26, 28, 29, 35, 38, 48, 51, 55, 59, 61, 66, 91–93, 99, 100, 133, 138 Nature, 4, 9–11, 13, 15, 17, 28, 32– 34, 38, 41, 46–50, 53–55, 58–60, 68, 69, 74–77, 79, 90, 92, 98, 105, 112–114, 120, 129–132, 138, 145, 146, 153 Nielsen, Frede V., 111, 112 Nietzsche, F., 8, 44, 46, 106 Nihilism, 74, 75, 89, 91 Non-consciousness, 78, 150 Non-cynical pedagogy, 89

Nonhuman, 4–13, 16, 17, 38, 42, 46, 48–50, 55–58, 60, 106, 107, 109, 114, 118–122, 124, 130, 132, 136, 138, 153 Non-topical perspective on death, 65 Norway, 32 O Object-oriented ontology (OOO), 4, 12, 13, 25, 31, 33, 34, 38, 55, 59, 78, 80, 95, 98, 104, 113, 114, 122, 138, 144, 145, 149 OECD, 106, 110 Opaqueness of the self, 76 Open, 13, 32, 34, 49, 50, 54, 64, 65, 78, 80, 88, 91, 92, 98–100, 125, 129, 131, 135, 146, 147, 149, 154, 157 Openness, 122, 138, 152, 154 Openness of self, 79 Original intuition, 70 P Pedagogy, 3, 5, 13, 15, 17, 30, 54, 60, 80, 88, 90–92, 94, 97, 99, 104, 109, 112, 115, 131, 138, 144– 147, 149, 151, 152, 155–157 Personal Jesus, 147 Personhood, 145 Planet, 3, 7, 11, 12, 27, 45, 46, 51, 54, 60, 61, 75, 89, 94, 95, 100, 104, 105, 107, 109, 116, 119, 132 Possibility, 9, 51, 65, 68, 69, 73, 74, 77–79, 81, 89, 91, 94, 95, 97, 99, 100, 108, 118, 119, 144, 146, 152, 154 Post-human age, 5

Index

Potentiality, 14, 78, 79, 88, 89, 157 Potentiality-of-being, 73, 78, 152– 154, 157 A presence of absence, 79 Presence of absence of self, 72 A priori synthetic thinking, 67 Proximity, 81, 155, 156 Psychoanalysis, 30, 31, 98 Pupils, 16, 30, 93, 110, 112, 119, 124, 132, 135, 137, 138 Pure or originary apperception, 66, 148 Purity, 152–154 Q Qualification, 104, 110, 113, 118, 137 Queer, 147–149, 151, 154 Queerness of authentic existence, 154 Queerness of the self, 147, 148, 152, 153 Qvortrup, Ane, 111, 112 R Rift, 48, 80, 81 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 15, 26 S Sadness, 156, 157 Säffström, Carl Anders, 30 Self, 8, 9, 14, 16, 64–67, 69, 70, 72, 74, 76–81, 115, 122, 133, 144–157 Self as subscended whole, 154 Self-governing, 71, 72 Simultaneous past and future of thinking, 68 Slaughterhouse, 104, 112, 133–136 Socialization, 113

  163

Solidarity, 12, 108, 119–121, 130, 138 Spectrum, 88, 92, 96, 125–128, 130, 131, 133, 138 Speculative materialism, 4 Speculative realism, 4, 5, 13, 25, 31, 33, 55, 73, 80, 89, 90, 94, 97, 99, 104, 113, 138 Status of the self, 72 Stone, Philip, 125–128, 131, 133 Strange, 2, 5, 7, 11, 14, 46, 50, 53, 55, 81, 97–99, 115–117, 122, 137 Strangers, 98, 117 Students, 3, 16, 30, 43, 49, 58, 93, 110, 112, 113, 118–124, 132, 137–139 Subjectification, 104, 110, 113, 121, 122, 124, 137 Surplus of self, 79 Sustainability, 3–5, 9, 65, 88–90, 97, 99, 104, 105, 109 T Teacher, 15, 30, 61, 110, 112, 115, 123, 132–139 Terraforming, 105 Tests, 27, 95, 110, 111, 113 Thinking of death, 14, 64 Thinking subject, 67, 68, 70–72, 76, 150 Truth, 10, 13, 16, 26, 27, 47, 56, 57, 89, 90, 92–95, 100, 122 Twilight self, 79 U Unheimlich, 11, 15, 116 Uniformity of thought and self, 67 Unity, 64, 66, 67, 70, 76, 78

164  Index Unity of consciousness, 66 Unity of the self, 70, 72 V Visibility, 108, 155, 156 von Humboldt, Wilhelm, 15 Vulnerability, 17, 55, 69, 73, 78–82, 144–147, 149, 151, 152, 155–157 W Watt, James, 107 Weber, Manfred, 124, 125 Weird identity politics, 146 Weirdness, 7, 54, 80, 92, 96, 97, 116 Weirdness of the self, 152 Wicked problems, 26–29, 32, 89

Will to nothingness, 74, 75, 80 Withdrawn, 31, 32, 34, 35, 70–72, 78, 89, 90, 95, 97, 99, 108, 114, 145, 146, 149, 150 Wonder, 56, 60, 99, 122–124, 129, 130, 138 World, 2, 5–7, 9, 10, 14, 24–27, 29, 32–35, 39, 40, 42, 45–47, 50–53, 56, 59, 74, 89, 91, 96, 98, 99, 105, 107–110, 114, 115, 117, 118, 121, 137 World-for-us, 46, 47, 53, 88, 92, 96 World-without-us, 38, 46–49, 53–56, 92, 95, 96 Z Zalasiewicz, Jan, 105 Ziehe, Thomas, 15