🌐 Inhabiting worlds attentively

This article is also available in French.

ATTENTION

Tim Ingold: ‘Sit still and pay attention!’ How often has the overbearing adult, be they a parent or a teacher, commanded the errant child with such words as these? From the adult’s perspective, attention and activity pull in opposite directions: the more of one, the less of the other, and vice versa. At the pathological end of the spectrum, the increasingly common clinical diagnosis of ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) inversely links the two, coupling deficiency of attention with excess of activity. Yet from this perspective, the child’s attention is the flipside of the adult’s intention. The adult has a message to deliver, and is desirous that it should strike home on its juvenile target. But if the target is restless, and keeps moving about, there’s a risk the arrow might miss its mark. The child, in this scenario, is construed as the patient, the disciplined subject of adult operations.

Yet the restless child is far from inattentive. Quite to the contrary, they are all eyes and ears, sniffy noses and twitchy fingers, alert to every disturbance of the sensory milieu —of light, sound, smell and feeling— in which they are immersed. But this is attention of a different kind. It lies not in the tranquilization of the patient but in the activation of the senses. Such attention escapes the dichotomy between agent and patient, with the adult on one side and the child on the other. It rather goes down the middle, as a stream between its banks, in the activities of watching, listening, sniffing and fingering in which the child’s very existence is borne along. Here, attention and activity are not inversely proportional but mutually implicated: there cannot be one without the other. As adults, then, rather than shutting down or pathologizing the current, it behoves us to join in.

Jan Masschelein: Attention is not static but always ‘on the move’. It has no end point, and cannot be possessed. For the child, the movement begins anew each time. A young child picks up a twig, discovers the leaves, the stem, swings it, waves it, throws it, taps with it, makes a hole in the ground with it, tries to draw lines or letters with it. The twig can become an arrow or a conductor’s baton. The twig thus undergoes many transformations, but these belong neither to the twig nor to the child; they appear as possibilities in the middle.  Attention is focused not on what is, but on the imminent, on the cusp of becoming.

Let us also turn our attention towards teachers and educators, and think for a moment about their own ways of paying attention to children —how they truly ‘see’ the child.  From a pedagogic point of view —bearing in mind that the pedagogue did not stand to face the child, but was the one who took them along by the hand on their way to school— paying attention to the child during their childhood, ‘seeing’ them, is always indirect. As Carolien Hermans says, a direct gaze forces the child into presence; they are seen, and recognized, as they are. Directly addressing the child forces ‘I’ and ‘this child’ to come to the fore, while the world fades into the background. Yet it is important to both of them that they are not addressed directly —that is, in terms of their being ‘who they are’— but indirectly, in terms of their becoming, and that the world remains in the foreground.  When we say that it is important to really see a child or student, we do not mean recognizing their identity, who he or she is, but rather perceiving them in their becoming, and thus also giving them the space to step back and, in a sense, to be and to remain invisible. This is the freedom of being in movement, of being attentive. As Hermans further states, for the pedagogic teacher, the one who pays attention to the child, standing in front of the class should also involve a certain flexibility and not be a defining attitude. It should offer the possibility of becoming. Addressing the child, you would not say: ‘I recognize you; you are so and so. Therefore, …’. Pedagogic attention is not attention to the children as they are, but attention to everything that gives them space to become, everything around the child, the milieu, the world.

We inhabit childhood when we feel it is not too late to begin. Childhood is the time of beginnings.

CHILDHOOD

T. I.: That humans grow, in strength and stature, is a fact of life. We were all children once. But to assign all who are in the earlier years of growing up to a determinate condition of being, and to call it childhood, is quite another matter. This condition, whose parameters are laid down by society, above all in its institutions of education, defines the child quite differently, not as a person of diminutive size yet insatiable curiosity, but as a non-adult, on the other side of a divide between majority and minority. So too with adults. It is one thing to observe of one-time children how they have grown, not just in size but in wisdom and maturity, thanks to their increasing years of experience, but another thing altogether to confer upon them the status of majority. Those of the major and the minor confront one another across the divide, with adults, in the majority, both confirming children in their minority status and appointing themselves to the educational task of raising them out of it. We can see this enacted in the traditional school classroom, where the teacher stands to face the ranks of seated pupils. But when adult and child grow older together, walking the same ways of life, and perhaps even holding hands, their stance towards one another is not of confrontation. It is rather a stance of companionship in which both, facing in the same direction, also share the same vistas ahead. In the dialogue of wisdom and curiosity, both have the possibility to be transformed.

J. M.: The Mozambiquan poet Mia Couto writes that being old is not an age, not a chronologically defined phase, but a feeling of tiredness, while being a child is also not about age, but is a time ‘when it is not too late’. Not too late to begin, as Walter Kohan adds. Thus, we inhabit childhood when we feel it is not too late to begin. Childhood is the time of beginnings. From Afro-indigenous people in Brazil, Kohan further learned to see time not as moving chronologically from means to end, or start to finish, but as always rebeginning in the durational present. As a form of inhabiting the present, childhood goes from beginning to middle to beginning again. And it might be in the encounter with beginnings, as minor gestures —the unexpected question of a child, the twinkling eye of an older woman noticing she can still sing a new, difficult song— that we who feel tired by what happens in and to the world can find the energy in ourselves to begin, and begin again.

Maybe we could also think of a second childhood, in becoming a student. This, too, is not about age. Perhaps it is about feeling that it is never too late to begin, even while also feeling somewhat beholden to reality. We are, in this sense, obliged and grateful, perhaps even seduced and indebted, but never compelled, constrained, or forced. Reality beckons, inviting us to further engage in the adventure of encounter. This feeling, of being able to begin and rebegin with, is both enlivening and rejuvenating.

Whereas knowledge closes around things, experience is always opening to them. It is this openness that is so characteristic of the perceptual disposition of the child, and so threatening to the adult.

EXPERIENCE

T. I.: Life is an improvisation. We have to work things out as we go along. This is as true for grown-ups as it is for children. There is a difference, however, in so far as grown-ups can fall back on short-cuts or rules of thumb, already learned, which enable them to bypass much of the exploratory work, often masquerading as play, with which children are principally preoccupied. To an extent, this allows the more experienced to close up, to work on the assumption that they already know what they are dealing with, and what the appropriate response should be. Yet this experience can only be acquired by initially meeting the world on its own terms, without any prior categorization or presupposition. As the ex- in ‘experience’ indicates, it is a matter of reaching out for things, of making yourself present to them, just as they present themselves to you. Whereas knowledge closes around things, experience is always opening to them. It is this openness that is so characteristic of the perceptual disposition of the child, and so threatening to the adult who has gone to such lengths to build a protective wall against the vicissitudes of what they tend to call the ‘outside world’. They would like to keep their children safe inside these walls. Yet they can do so only be denying youngsters the very experience that would enable them to come to terms with things as they are. That’s why there can be such a tension between adjacent generations, even as they go through life together.

J. M.: Those who invited us to these reflections suggest seeing childhood as helping us to find our way in the world to come. If it could be characterized as a form of inhabiting worlds attentively, of seeing, perceiving or meeting things on their own terms, as an emigration of the senses towards …, as moving in the in-between of inter-est, called out in the middle, and if it is this openness that is so characteristic of the perceptual disposition of the child (the poet William Blake called it ‘perception without doors’, then we must not forget that for adults, it takes a real effort to re-apprehend the world in a ‘childish’ or ‘child-like’ way. One way to approach this effort is as a curriculum, literally a running course of study.  Study is taken here as a particular way to pay attention: not only moved by curiositas as a desire for experience, but also driven by and requiring or soliciting studiositas, loving devotion as the Latin word says, knowledge filled with love, and hence with a certain reticence and respect. Studium actually means to ‘regard’, that is to observe (in the sense of taking into account, as in ‘observing the rules’) and to take care, to devote yourself and be committed, engaged. Maybe one could say that studium is not just a quest for knowledge for its own sake, but for knowledge as encounter, as finding oneself in the presence of someone or something. Studium is about a desire not only to receive, but also to give —to give time and effort to something outside of oneself, to pay attention. It is not about having and meeting needs, but about being and becoming ‘inter-ested’.  One could say that students —those engaged in studium— exist in the interest, the in-between, and what calls them into existence is not just experience but work, effort, exercise. Derived from the Latin ex (‘out’) plus arceo (‘enclosed, imprisoned’), exercise is beginning and rebeginning, generating a kind of freedom in the field of forces that would otherwise hold one captive.

The idea of school has its origins in a freedom that comes with childhood: the freedom of being ‘undefined’ and without destination.

FREEDOM

T. I.: Every child, we often say, should be free to fulfil their potential, to become the sort of person they are destined to be. School should be the place where they can discover what this destiny is, and acquire the credentials to realise it. The freedom of childhood, in this scenario, lies in the opportunity to choose between a range of options which are nevertheless already set by society. And as the child matures, this range is progressively narrowed. Born with the potential to live any number of kinds of life, they end up living only one. Paradoxically, however, this story of narrowing down is told alongside another, of opening up. In this latter story, education frees the child from the shackles of ignorance into which they are born, equipping them with the resources to enter the domain of public life as free citizens, who can make their own choices. Perhaps it is a matter of first deciding which game to play, and then using your wits to play it. But that life’s freedom should be reduced to gaming, and the purpose of education to securing a competitive advantage, shows just how far the discourses of personal development have been hollowed out by the logic of the market. For the market offers only a counterfeit freedom. Real freedom inheres not in the capacity to choose, but in the possibility to be, to exist. And it is exercised not in outsmarting one’s competitors but in the joy of lifting each other up. This lift, far from using up potential in its conversion to material reward, brings about its perpetual replenishment.

J. M.: We seldom find the notions of pedagogy, or of school, combined in the same sentence with the notion of freedom. These terms are often associated with its opposite: power, direction or even domination.  Yet the idea of school has its origins in a freedom that comes with childhood: the freedom of being ‘undefined’ and without destination. This pedagogic freedom is not political (with regard to power or authority); it is not juridical (in terms of rights); and it is not economic (in the choice of means and ends). Pedagogic freedom simply means that human beings have no predetermined natural or social destination or shape, and that pedagogy brings human beings into a situation where they are, or become able, with others, to give shape and direction to their destination or form. This always passes through schoolwork, which makes available and engages with grammars of worlds and invites students into a milieu or middle-place of formative encounter. Just as grammars, having no direction, allow and enable many directions, so meeting with grammatized worlds affords a kind of decentralization. No one and nothing —whether teacher, student, or world— can claim the centre. That is why students, teachers and worlds can meet in the milieu, transform and be transformed, establish new relations with self, others, worlds. School, when it is not de-schooled, is the gift of free time, the very place where the undefined work of freedom takes shape.

Ethics and politics, by contrast, always involve the defined work of freedom. They impart urgency and direction by projecting a predefined and compelling ethical or political horizon. For that reason, it would be wrong to interpret the turn to childhood as an ethical or political stance. To do so would, in effect, convert childhood into an adult dream, into the adult project of defining schoolwork.

For now, each generation would stake its claim to the present by turning its back on a past that is no longer seen to hold any promise for the future.

GENERATION

T. I.: Modernity has brought about a fundamental reversal in the relations between generations. In pre-modern times, descendants would follow in the footsteps of their ancestors, facing in the same direction as they. It was the responsibility of elders to introduce youngsters into old ways, which they in turn had learned from their forebears when they were young. Not that the pre-modern family was without its tensions. There was an inevitable friction between adjacent generations, as they rubbed along together, albeit tempered by the care and affection lavished on grandchildren by their grandparents. Unlike the latter, parents could be domineering, controlling, sometimes even violent towards their children. After all, the very concept of domination (from the Latin domus, ‘house’) had its origin in the home. But with the onset of the modern era, the conflict of generations has taken a different turn. For now, each generation would stake its claim to the present by turning its back on a past that is no longer seen to hold any promise for the future. It is instead imagined as a state of affairs to be superseded. And the future, by the same token, appears to be advancing on the present, threatening imminent takeover. For the generation of the present, then, the conflict is between the vision of the future it holds for its offspring, moulded in its own image, and the determination of the latter to replace it with a vision of their own. It lies not in an impatience to take over the reins of power but in the rejection of one design for living, with its means and ends, technologies and aspirations, in favour of another.

J. M.: I follow you, Tim, when you suggest, elsewhere, that we might better switch focus from generations to generation, since whereas the concept of generations (in the plural) conjures up the image of layers piled on top of one another, generation refers to a process that carries on. However, I think the  change of generations you refer to above also requires us to acknowledge a ‘time of generations’. This time neither carries on nor piles up, but is immanent in a present that is not so much a bridge between past and future as a springboard to nowhere. It is a time of beginnings. ‘To begin’, after all, is a verb not of process but of interruption and freedom. In the time of beginnings, the present can work back on the past (as in forgiving, allowing for a re-beginning), or forward on the future in a non-causal way (as in promising). This is a time wherein what was learned from the elders can be forgotten by the children, but also in which what was forgotten by the elders (after they had learned it from their ancestors) can be taken up again by the children. This time of generations is not irreversible time, but the time of ‘begotten’ (created) children, not as wonders of the world, but as wonders in the world, as a plurality of begotten beginners. And the time of education, and especially school-time, is then about welcoming and allowing beginnings to find a place, accepting the implied contingency, and hence also accepting that beginners can radically question the given in unpredictable directions. Parallel to an undefined hope, a hope without destination, isn’t there always a deep fear of the coming generation actually becoming a new generation, directly or indirectly questioning what grown-ups value and take for granted?

To free up pedagogic space for childhood as becoming and beginning, while recognizing its vulnerability, we might want to shield it from the projects and dreams of adults.

PRESENT/PRESENCE

T. I.: ‘To understand the things that people say and do, we need to embed them in their social, cultural and historical context’. So commonplace is this advice, characteristically offered by seasoned ethnographers to novices in the field, that we are inclined to forget how problematic it is. Placing interpretation before presence, it counsels us never to treat the deeds and words of others at face value, never to pay attention to them for what they are, but to see them rather as expressions of their time and place. Understanding them thus effectively neutralises their force, and any challenge they might present to our own self-assurance. People say and do these things, you tell yourself, simply because of who they are. Once interpreted and explained, they can be deposited in the archive, under the category of the already understood, ticked off and accounted for. But it is exactly the same with children. There is no more effective way for adults to dampen the force of their presence than by telling the child —who only wants to be noticed, and to be taken seriously in what they have to do or say— that ‘of course, we quite understand’. It is not that we should deliberately misunderstand the child. It is rather that we should not understand them, forcing us into a reappraisal that is potentially transformative for both of us. It is through the recognition of each other’s presence, rather than through the denial of interpretation, that generations can go along together, hand in hand, in the renewal of their ways of life.

J. M.: Many forces, including policies, discourses and material technologies, attempt to capture our form of being in the world, both as teachers and educators and as students. But they do so as part of a project of displacement, to a future construed in terms of production, results, aims and objectives, hence also implying that the meaning lies in and at the end. To resist this project means inhabiting the present as the time of childhood. One way to do this is to make school in the sense of generating ‘free time’ (scholé): time not coopted by the regimes of the household or of labour, but devoted to the work of study and exercise. With this time of unending and multiple beginnings, the idea of an ending, or of travelling towards an end (such as from questions to answers, or from needs to satisfactions), can be suspended.  We can instead travel in the present —not in the sense of forgetting about the past or the future in favour of an exclusive focus on the immediate satisfaction of ‘now’, but rather by remaining in the midst of what is pre-sented, in the field of presence.

This present, of school as scholé, is an enacted utopia. Utopia is not postponed to another time —it is not an ‘end’— but experienced in the present. It is a miraculous present in which you experience yourself as being a child again, as a condition not of ignorance or oppression but of being able to begin —to begin with something of the world. In this interstitial condition, where the opposition between past and future is suspended, one can emerge or become as a new body, moving in the middle. Here, unbecoming is always part of becoming, implying duration. It is a utopia enacted and inhabited every time a teacher truly says to the child: ‘try, try again, try this’ —a small, banal, but nevertheless emblematic expression we still often hear at school. It is an invitation that interrupts all kinds of imperatives and gestures of definition or prohibition (‘it’s not for you’), and creates a different time, in which one is drawn into the present, in which the forces of the past are held in abeyance and one is addressed on the basis of one’s abilities. It creates a minimal crack, implying a certain invisibility, an entry into a different time-space in which, if you accept the invitation, you can act without consequences, try, and try again.

In the world of the child, relationship is not interaction but correspondence.

RELATION/ENCOUNTER

T. I.: Perhaps the difference between the adult and the child is less of age than of emphasis.  Breathe the word ‘adult’ and it conjures a world of beings and things that are already formed, already settled out from the movements of their formation. When we speak of relations in such a world, they are always between —between this person and that, between this thing and that, between this person and that thing. From these relations are constructed institutions, artefacts, forms of work. But you only have to say the world ‘child’ to conjure a very different world, a world of becoming, in which everyone and everything is not yet formed but suspended in the movement of their formation. This is a world not of solid bodies but of fluid processes, from which persons and things have, as it were, to be ‘made out’. How then can they relate to one another? It might be helpful to picture every participant in this world as the line of its own movement and becoming, rather like a melodic line in a musical composition —except that in real life, the music is not already composed but always composing itself as it goes along. These lines are not so much connected up as twisted around one another as they venture forth in each other’s company, answering to one another as they go. In this sense, they correspond. In the world of the child, relationship is not interaction but correspondence.

J. M.: Truly formative encounters restructure perceptions, sensibilities and habits of thinking. They shape a more sensitive and receptive body which is reconfigured and enriched in sensitivity and receptivity. One could maybe say that this shaping is tantamount to ‘forming childhood’. Such aesthetic individuation is not about the production of the unique, but rather binds every emergent body to and with others and the matter at hand, in a collective and shared configuration of the not yet defined. In a formative encounter, the singularity of the matter —along with the way it matters or begins to matter, the way it invites— doesn’t predate the encounter but becomes salient in the encounter itself. There is no a priori knowledge, such as on the side of the teachers, of what could appear as this singularity. A true encounter has an affective, perceptive, semantic individuating effect which is itself also affected by past encounters. And even if certain conditions, for sure, might foster such formative encounters, there is no recipe for bringing them about.

A pedagogy of response-ability, then, would position attention to ever-emergent difference ahead of standardised measures of attainment. As everyone has their own experience to bring to the table, in the conversation of response-able voices, all can participate in the common task of lifting each other up.

RESPONSE-ABILITY

T. I.: Mainstream education is committed to rationality, and to the defeat of ignorance. The voice of reason, transcending all variations of experience, holds out the democratic promise of equal knowledge for all. But in a regime of pedagogy committed to raising everyone to the same level, difference can only manifest itself as deficit, requiring special measures for its correction. Children, in such a regime, are bound to appear as beings of lesser worth, by comparison with adults. But what if adult and child, instead of facing one another across the gulf between knowledge and ignorance, were to go along together, in the schoolroom, in a spirit of companionship? What if they could correspond? This would be to privilege a different voice, not of reason but of response-ability. This is a voice of one’s own that nevertheless only comes forth in soliciting others to respond, in theirs. Here, as in a conversation, or in musical polyphony, every voice continually emerges in and through its joining with, and differentiating itself from, the voices of others. A pedagogy of response-ability, then, would position attention to ever-emergent difference ahead of standardised measures of attainment. As everyone has their own experience to bring to the table, in the conversation of response-able voices, all can participate in the common task of lifting each other up.

J. M.: Response-ability is not, in the first place, a moral or ethical category but a pedagogic one. It means becoming more sensible, and hence more affectable. It has to do with learning to perceive distinctions that matter to the matter at hand, where perceiving is about not just knowing but being moved, effectuated, put into motion by other entities, human or nonhuman. It is about the observation and registration of affective intensities, of forces that make us move or do something, or prevent us from doing something. Response-ability as a way of perceiving is not to be confused with a ‘naturally’ childish disposition; it is closer to what, earlier, I called ‘second childhood’ or ‘studenthood’. It involves artificial setups, and work that makes both the body increasingly sensitive to distinctions, and worlds ever more talkative and interesting. They enable us, to taste the world, so to speak, and in so doing, to work on our ability to notice distinctions that matter, or in a word, to study. Studying is not just learning by doing, but learning by working and experimenting; it is about, for example, taking notes, making comments, naming and renaming. This work is sustained through various artificial setups which materialize the effort, concentration, focus and discipline needed, on the one hand, to resist what we could call the automation of looking, reading, listening and feeling and, on the other hand, to realize a certain attention and presence of mind that makes us response-able.

VULNERABILITY/WEAKNESS

T. I.: Knowledge is power. Every increment of knowledge adds a stone to the castle we erect around ourselves, offering a redoubt from the assaults of a potentially hostile world, and a launchpad for attack. But people who hole themselves up in castles tend to pay little attention to what is going on beyond their walls, and learn from it even less. Truly to pay attention means dropping your defences, allowing others into your presence so that they can be encountered directly. It is to welcome them with open arms, not to overpower them or beat them off. It is to watch and listen, and to feel. This is what children do, unless prevented by their adult guardians. They are preternaturally curious. And from curiosity comes wisdom. Could children be wiser even than more knowledgeable adults? It often seems so. Their very curiosity leaves them exposed and vulnerable, but thanks to this they notice things that grown-ups don’t. Yet the quest for wisdom, since it means abandoning the safety of defensive positions, is inherently risky. For a world founded on care and coexistence rather than strife and competition, however, it is surely a risk worth taking. For only the wisdom born of vulnerability can speak truth to power.

J. M.: To free up pedagogic space for childhood as becoming and beginning, while recognizing its vulnerability, we might want to shield it from the projects and dreams of adults. We might try to offer ‘pedagogic protection’, beyond the anxious focus on visibility and control, against the forces of social definition. Going to school is already an emancipation from the expectations and pressures of family life. But today, it is also an emancipation from the multifarious social expectations and forces that, increasingly through digital media, influence the daily lives of children and young people. These are the customized, algorithm-driven, influencer-propagated and commercially initiated forces which demand perpetual availability, visibility and profiling. Such forces leave neither time nor space for children or young people to experience the possibility of becoming, to dwell on themselves and their worlds while remaining to some extent invisible, in the background of the world’s coming into presence. Instead, the constant pressure to assert their being, by defining themselves as who they are, as ‘being so-and-so’, forces them to step into the foreground while relegating the world to the background. Nowadays, perhaps, pedagogic emancipation means above all an emancipation from the enormity of these social pressures, by entering a place that very deliberately, albeit temporarily, does its best to keep them at bay by arranging an exciting ‘inside’, an inside that leads you out through formative encounters.