This paper attempts to reassess the educational affordances of digital screens, at a time when their educational impact has become incontournable, but is also increasingly growing suspicion. To bypass the redundancies of overly critical theoretical approaches, the paper foregrounds the subjectifying potentialities of the screen’s elusive technological ‘plasticity’. After the introduction, in which some pedagogical misgivings about the digital screen are addressed, we turn to Marie-José Mondzain’s historico-philosophical genealogy of iconoclasm. Trying to make sense of the aesthetic-political ambivalence that shrouded (...) the icon’s screenic agency within a Christian ‘economy of salvation’, and which climaxed in a politics of strictly economic equivalency, we concur with Peter Szendy that this ambivalence still haunts the icon’s contemporary heirs. By pedagogically re-reading Szendy’s alternative account of ‘iconomy’ we are subsequently led to make a case for exceeding neoliberal screening politics through an affirmation of the digital screen’s radical plasticity. Along with Yves Citton, we suggest, in our conclusion, that this post-critical affirmation calls for an ‘iconomical’ practice of care-ful experiments with the screen’s dynamic technologies. Instead of combating or adapting to its aesthetically dazzling algorithms, educational practices are required that allow these algorithmic quantities to qualitatively differentiate the uses that educands make of them. (shrink)

In this paper I try to 'rethink' consistency as an educational quality for the 3rd millennium, following Italo Calvino's choice to take it up in his lecture series Memos for the Next Millennium, and despite the fact that the (final) lecture devoted to this quality remained unwritten. After reflecting on how consistency already plays a certain role in Calvino's other lectures, I expand on the specific educational implications of this role's unresolved ambivalence, in order to argue that this ambivalence, properly (...) understood, might be fully constitutive of the educational significance of consistency. To achieve such an understanding I turn to Gilles Deleuze and his concept of style as a 'practice' of consistency. Not only does a stylistic understanding of consistency offer interesting possibilities for a more constructive approach to the said ambivalence—between consistency as static stability and dynamic keeping-together- but as such it also speaks to a number of issues that are directly and fundamentally educational in nature. (shrink)

In this paper we discuss the musical work of classical composer Benjamin Britten as a lasting legacy for public music education. Our starting point is the contemporary urgency to rethink both public music education in general, and the public-educational significance of Western classical music in particular, in the face of the dual threats posed by anti-educational tendencies of “functionalization” and “hobbyfication.” Relating this situation to concerns already voiced by Britten in his time, we consider in what ways aspects of Britten’s (...) musical work can be shown to reveal a highly original, post-critical answer to these threats. While his pedagogical musings remain riddled with ambiguities, which readily invite critical deconstruction, our paper argues for the more affirmative option of reconceptualizing these ambiguities as constitutive tensions of a public-educational love for (classical) music. To gauge the practical implications of such a post-critical music-educational love, we analyze the concrete case of the Aldeburgh Festival, perhaps Britten’s most full-fledged effort to reclaim music as a public affair. Thinking about this case, we reflect on how Britten’s legacy could lastingly impinge on the publicness of Western classical music, as well as on ongoing and future practices of public music education in general. (shrink)

This paper primarily aims at conceptualizing a new philosophical approach to literature education, one that we—in the vein of certain pedagogical trends—propose to call “thing-centered”. Point of departure is the ongoing confrontation with a two-sided educational problem: on the one hand, the confrontation with the steady decline of younger generations’ engagements with ‘classical’ literature; on the other hand, that with the unsatisfactory answers which either accept this development, in light of the world’s irresistible digitization, or try overcoming it through a (...) more student-centered, ‘biographical’ appropriation of literature. Beyond the more immediate didactical difficulties which this two-fold problem poses, we ask ourselves the question whether it is not time for a more fundamental renewal of our understanding of literature’s contemporary educational significance. In answering this question, for which we turn to such diverse authors as Rousseau, Deleuze and Calvino, it is argued that if education is to continue its care for both classical literacy and literary classics—and not so much against as in relation to ascending digital literacies—a more radically immanent, thing-centered perspective is likely to prove the most sustainable, in the sense of enabling truly new, ‘care-ful’ literary-educational practices to emerge. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this paper we explore the possibility of rethinking the concept of emotional intelligence within the context of education. By developing a pedagogical dialogue with Michel Henry’s phenomenology of incarnation, we try to move beyond existing models of emotional intelligence by shifting the emphasis from the intellectual significance of emotion to a more original incarnate affectivity within intelligence, understood as lived sense-making. We claim that this ontological and ontogenetic perspective on emotion puts it at the heart of education. Yet only (...) because it evokes an understanding of education which is expressly non-functionalist: a disruptive, even dreadful event that marks the threshold and tension between what Henry terms Life and World. More than simply learning us to manage our emotions or recognize the value of experiences, emotional intelligence is about the very making of World out of Life, a Life that is at once radically subjective and communal. (shrink)

Ever since its publication in 1947, Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus,1 his last major novel, has triggered many discussions and scholarly analyses. Evidently, the fictitious life story of Adrian Leverkühn, the genius composer who strikes an unsavory bargain with the devil, abounds in literary artifice and ingenuity, drawing to that end from a nigh bottomless reservoir of extremely variegated cultural references.2 Leaving out strictly literary analyses, most critical attention for Mann's version of the Faust myth is centered on its politico-aesthetical motifs—its (...) allegedly strong Nietzschean-Adornian bias.3 This is understandable, not only considering Mann's vocal interest in these philosophical traditions but also... (shrink)

Abstract:In this paper we reconceptualize general music education as a "classical music education," departing from speculative reflection on the notion of conducting. We constitute this notion as an interpretative axis connecting, on the one hand, a different perspective on what classical music might mean in the context of general education, and, on the other hand, a more dynamic, techno-ecological concept of both music and education. This paper develops these connections by thinking along with a concrete specimen of classical music in (...) the strict sense, Mahler's First Symphony, in order to show exactly how thinking about such works may actually take on an aspect that is classical in a more properly general educational sense. Beyond a dichotomy between aesthetical and praxial appraisals of the classical musical work, with their exclusive emphases on intelligible form and socio-critical praxis respectively, our idea of classical music education implies a dynamic (re)conducting of the works. Through practices of (re)conducting, music education can treat works, not as static monuments of eternal beauty or instances of socio-historical criticality, but as catalysts of self-differentiating, transhuman musical experiences—of playing, listening, composing, and thinking—in which human, instrumental, and other techno-ecological agencies mutually transform each other. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this article I venture the hypothesis that music confronts education with the possibility to think violence in ways that are both inherently educational and radically affirmative. Beginning with a reflection on a poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, which emphatically evokes the violence within the genesis of music, I then move in a different direction in the second section, which surveys how extant (music-) educational has thematized violence so far. Concluding that this thematization, notwithstanding many nuances, invariably implies a (...) negative validation of violence, I devote the third section to a search for more affirmative concepts of educational violence. Eventually, this culminates in a return to the issue of a possibly intrinsic, positive relation between violence and music education. I first discuss this possibility more generally, connecting the discussed affirmative concepts of violence to the antipodal music-educational ideas of Plato and Nietzsche. Finally, in the last section, returning to Browning’s poem, I specify it by reclaiming the particular violence of music’s instrumental aspects for music education. (shrink)