A Philosophical Archaeology of the Text in the University Lecture

Author(s):

Lavinia Marin(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2016

Network:

13. Philosophy of Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

13 SES 09 A, Text, Film, the Public

Paper Session

Time:

2016-08-25

13:30-15:00

Room:

NM-F104

Chair:

Sharon Todd

Contribution

The aim of this investigation is to answer the question “What is the place of the text in the university lecture?” by describing the pedagogical relation between the text and the lecture. It seems that the relation between the text and the university was fundamental ever since the beginnings of the first medieval universities; according to Ivan Illich, the discovery of the text as a certain layout on the page in the 12^th century was essential in the emergence of the university as a particular pedagogical form (Illich 1991). How the text functions in the university lecture has been studied extensively, most recently by Norm Friesen through an analysis of the trans-medial character of the lecture. According to Friesen (2011), in the first medieval universities the text was taken to be the source of uncontested knowledge whereas the lecture was a way of orally communicating the knowledge from the book; in this relation the Master was always secondary to the book, superseded by the authority of the text. This relation was inverted during the Enlightenment when the lecturer became more important than the text; the text was merely the pretext of delivering a charismatic, almost dramaturgical performance – as the famous example of Fichte illustrates; finally, in the modern age, the lecture came to be conceived as a "hermeneutic speech act" (Friesen 2011, p.100) through which a "written tradition is brought back [...] into the living present of conversation" (Gadamer 2004, p. 362); in this instance the text is subsumed to the interpretation of the lecturer even if the text remains centre stage.

If we take the relation text-lecture as fundamental for the university, the following question arises: what happens when the text is not immediately present in the university lecture? What kind of lecture is enacted when the lecturer is not commenting directly on a text? For example, if we ignore the humanities-oriented lecture and focus instead on the lectures in the hard sciences, in what ways are these types of lectures (still) university events? To find out, we will analyse several historical case studies of non-humanistic lectures: a botany lecture by Karl von Linnaeus, an anatomy lecture by Frederik Ruysch, and a physics lecture by Richard Feynman. These examples are famous enough to have become paradigmatic university events. The final aim is to reconstruct archaeologically the paradigm of the text as a mediatic form of thinking in order to arrive at an educational understanding the university lecture through the specific modes of thinking it makes possible.

Method

We will start by analysing the descriptions of historical case-studies of famous lectures where the text was not explicitly present: Karl von Linnaeus's walks in the forest, the anatomy lessons of Frederik Ruysch, and Richard Feynman's physics lectures. In the analysis of these case studies, we will use the method of philosophical archaeology outlined by Giorgio Agamben in The Signature of All Things (2009) by looking specifically for what could function as the paradigm of the text in the university lecture. We take our notion of paradigm from Agamben as “a singular object that, standing equally for all others of the same class, defines the intelligibility of the group of which it is a part and which, at the same time, it constitutes.” (Agamben 2009, p. 17) Here we explicitly want to distance ourselves from notions of text advanced by famous theorists such as Barthes, Derrida or Rheinberger, and this is why we use the notion of the text-as-paradigm in order to show how a certain structure of the text has survived in all ages of the university and hence we do not need to circumscribe it to a certain historical period. Such an anti-chronological notion of the text can be uncovered only through the method of philosophical archaeology which looks for the arche, understood as that which could give meaning to the whole history of the university by looking backwards, from the present to the past (Agamben 2009, p. 110). After arriving at a structural description of the text as paradigm, we will use this notion in order to make explicit how the text-as-paradigm functions in the university lecture, by drawing the connections between text, students and lecturer; this will enable us to explain how the text makes possible the specific pedagogical form of the university understood as a gathering around a matter of concern (Simons & Masschelein 2007).

Expected Outcomes

The aim is to contribute to the philosophical and media analysis of the relation between text and lecturing by investigating the non-humanistic types of lectures where the text is absent physically from the lecture hall, and then tracing archaeologically the text-as-paradigm towards which all the speech-acts of the lecturer and also all the tacit expectations of the students converge. Our work continues on the path opened by Norm Friesen but adds a further philosophical dimension to his media approach. The expected outcome is to arrive at a pedagogical description of the particular functions of the text in the university lecture as a paradigm which gives meaning to seemingly unrelated lecture practices. This description will help us outline the specific nexus of relations between lecturer and students which takes place during the university lecture from a pedagogical perspective.

References

Agamben, G. (2009). The signature of all things: On method. ; translated by Luca D'Isanto with Kevin Attell. New York: Zone. Gadamer, H.-G., Weinsheimer, J., & Marshall, D. G. (2004). Truth and method (2nd, rev. ed. / translation revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall). Continuum impacts. London, New York: Continuum. Friesen, N. (2011). The Lecture as a Transmedial Pedagogical Form: A Historical Analysis. Educational Researcher, 40(3), 95–102. Friesen, N., & Roth, W. M. (2014). The Anatomy Lecture Then and Now: A Foucauldian Analysis. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 46(10), 1111-1129. Illich, I. (1991, September). Text and University: On the Idea and History of a Unique Institution. University of Bremen, Bremen. Kooijmans, L. (2011). Death Defied: The Anatomy Lessons of Frederik Ruysch. Brill. Rheinberger, H.-J. (2014). ‘For all that gives rise to an inscription in general’. Radical Philosophy. (187), 9–14. Retrieved from https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/for-all-that-gives-rise-to-an-inscription-in-general Simons, M., & Masschelein, J.. (2007). Chapter 10: Only Love for the Truth Can Save Us: Truth-Telling at the (World)university?. Counterpoints, 292, 139–161. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/42979097

Author Information

Lavinia Marin (presenting / submitting)

KU Leuven/ Laboratory for Education and Society/ Doctoral School in Educational Sciences, Belgium

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