Due to the legacy of Western modernity (e.g., hierarchical power and market capitalism), education is burdened by an ideology of supremacy and haunted by “imperialist amnesia” (Kapoor, 2020, P. 12). Inspired by the writings of Agamben (1998) and Mignolo (2011), we ask: What are the challenges and possibilities of thinking in new ways, that is, beyond a Western socio-symbolic order?

Despite various forms of critique education is still assumed to be ‘a place’, both metaphorically and literally, in which thoughtful consideration about ourselves, others, and the world can be nurtured.

In (un)conscious ways, however, education can be “a reiteration, indeed a celebration, of the limits to thought and of the impossibility of moving beyond those limits” (Collet­-Sabé and Ball, 2022, p. 2). Education can (re)produce certain aesthetical perceptions that can make it difficult to transcend our intellectual, emotional, and sensory horizons of experience (Rüsselbæk Hansen and Phelan, 2019). Of course, education can encourage us to think and comprehend things in new ways. But if we (educators and students) are ‘caught’ in a socio-symbolic (Western) order, we may only be able to think and perceive someone/something that (only) makes sense within this order. Witness, for example, the following reflection of a Canadian student returning from a trip to Nicaragua:

"With government corruption and civil war, Nicaragua has now become the poorest     country in Central America, wracked with social problems and oftentimes with little   hope for growth or change […] I wanted to bring out the fairy dust, sprinkle it all over the place and free them of their misfortune, be it disability, violence, poverty or illiteracy. […] I wished I could pocket some of their optimism in times of personal despair […] Not all of Nicaragua is bleak. Central America is big on relaxation and taking it easy. […] I am a little closer to discovering the true me, and I would return to those same chicken buses, heat waves and unreliable water sources in a heartbeat." (Benham Rennick & Desjardins, 2013 in Andreotti, 2016, pp. 16-18)

The student exhibits a “projective empathy that forecloses the connections between privilege and underprivilege” (Andreotti, 2016, p. 115) and “reproduce[s] a Canadian-centric global imaginary that does not engage with the invisible complicity of modern/colonial institutions and subjectivities in the creation of inequalities” (p. 115). As social entrepreneur, the student assumes their right to dispense knowledge, skills and values thought to be of universal worth and “to use the community as a resource for personal growth and accumulation of symbolic capital” (p. 115).

The epistemological attitude mirrored in the student’s reflection is that “we go out to the world in order to comprehend it, which literally means to grasp it in its totality, and thus end up with a world of objects outside of us, where we are in the centre and the world is ‘out there’ … for us” (Biesta, 2021, p. 97). The self’s horizon of experience – a “hermeneutic monism” (Benhabib, 1992, p. 228) – dominates the situation disavowing the presence of the other.

The vignette underscores the need for students – repositioned as social critics – to learn to distance themselves from their Western legacy and to think in new ways about themselves, others, and the world. Social criticism requires “epistemic delinking” (Mignolo, 2011, p. 139), a decolonial project which involves both uncovering the particular origins of universal claims to truth and the symbolic violence inherent in “the categories of thought and logic” (p. 116) that sustain Western colonialism. Paradoxically, the Western modern legacy can be the starting point to criticize it; it can be used, as it were, against itself.

To be educational (Biesta, 2017), ‘epistemic delinking’ (Mignolo, 2011, p. 139) must enable engagement not only with the intellectual, emotional and sensory horizons of experience that constitute its potential to “interrupt the being-for and with-oneself” (p. 17), but also with language itself. When we invite students to recount their experiences, we witness the way in which language connects as well as separates us. As a recodification of experience, language inserts us into a series of social and legal categories such as oppressed/privileged or poor/rich. It is not only that these categories are abstract but that their political content can blind us to who we ‘are’ or might ‘be’ if all predicates and attributes were stripped away (de la Durantaye, 2009). As Agamben (1999) writes: “the presuppositional structure of language is the very structure of tradition; we presuppose, pass on, and thereby – according to the double sense of the word tradio – betray the thing itself in language” (p. 35). This state of affairs poses immense challenges when we consider how, as educators, we can engage with students about their experiences without falling into exclusions and violence, attributing forms to each other via language (de la Durantaye, 2009). For Agamben (1999), it is at the moment just before signification that there exists an instance of openness and potentiality. It is on the threshold between the thing and its signification that “the luminous spiral of the possible” (pp. 254 -257) is found. Curiously, it could be educational to refuse language by suspending signification. But how to do so? One intriguing way that Agamben addresses the challenge of language is through the concept of whatever – itself “a strange and estranged concept” (Motha, 2012, p. 142). Whatever signifies a liminal space “between the poles of the abstract structure of language and its real manifestation, the universal and the particular, the potential and the actual” (Kishik, 2012, p. 83). A whatever being assumes a mood or strategy of someone who exists on the fringes of a profession [e.g., substitute teacher] or a society [e.g., immigrant], those “who constantly move between multiple vocations or identities….” (p. 79), an ‘absent’ presence, as it were. As a result of their positioning, the whatever being, is freed, temporarily, from the weight of habitual thought and feeling, becoming conscious that language both conveys and betrays the traditions that shape one’s thinking and living (Phelan and Rüsselbæk Hansen, 2021).

The educative point here is not to eradicate particular categories of thought by transcending them BUT to recognize that no category is sacred and that the ethical task is to profane language, play with it, examine it, render it inoperative in one’s life, but without trying to resolve the immense challenges it poses, once and for all (Kishik, 2012). What if we invite students to temporarily take on a whatever state of mind (by stripping away all those prior influences) and to wonder what would the whatever being that remains (the remnant) say about its experience? What kinds of questions might a whatever being ask? What kind of being would speak of ‘fairy dust’? What does it mean to be ‘the poorest country’? In foregrounding ‘growth, what is cast in the background? What is rendered invisible when we assume ‘competition’ among states? In raising such questions, how might narratives of experience be (re)told? What would this mean for co-existing with different others, colonized and colonizer? None of this is to suggest that experience can be read from nowhere. Recognizing and attempting to disrupt the (Western) socio-symbolic order, even slightly, by playing with it, enables students to consider realities that have been rendered invisible. Being touched by what has been rendered absent in one’s language constitutes “an entirely different encounter with the world … one where the world comes to us, gives itself to us, surprises us” (Biesta, 2021, p. 97). These moments – events – “capture the contradictions that bind the speaker to the situation” (Grumet, 2015, p. 238), generating many questions about what it means to be touched by and represent an experience, rendering the ‘impossible possible,’ and momentarily dislodging us from ordinary western life (Ruti, 2012). The possible consequences of such educational provocations will be illustrated and discussed.

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