In this paper, we build on the work of Magnússon and Rytzler (2022) by reading Didaktik (as a pedagogy of higher education) with Latour’s (2013) An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence (AIME). We position Didaktik as a form of an educational mode of existence [EDU] (Tummons, 2021) which intersects and intertwines with other modes of existence characterising the modern world (politics, religion, technology, fiction, and so on). Through examination of the ‘crossings’ between [EDU] and other modes of existence, we consider how pedagogy(ies) of higher education may formulate/disrupt modern existence. Our purpose is not to evaluate higher education pedagogy, but rather to offer opportunity for (re)consideration of how pedagogy and modern existence relate. In this sense, we continue in the manner of AIME, which seeks understanding of existence from the perspective of how it is pluralistically generated, patterned, taken up and perpetuated. This approach may be used as the basis for questioning and change: from deep description of the constitutive workings of the modern world can come reassembling, restoration (Pignarre, 2021).

In this paper we use a Didaktik-AIME perspective to theoretically interrogate two central concerns to higher education pedagogy. The first, that subject-based educational practices, even if offering students opportunity to openly deliberate concepts, are rooted in relational, associational orderings originating from the continuous past and habits of subject disciplines (Latour, 2013; Nespor, 1995). The practices of scientists, politicians, theologians. Of moral laws, fictionalised desires, differential democracies. Through repetition, even in the differences and hiatuses created by cognizant educators seeking alterity, higher education begins students’ journey into certain modes of existence. Higher education becomes a reifying cog in the engine-room of the political, social and moral world we inhabit.

Secondly, there is the challenge made to universities by society: a utopian challenge to solve societal and political problems whilst also giving ‘qualification’ to exist within society in certain realms and ways. This is an instrumentalization of education, in which education is set the challenge of shaping the future society through the shaping of its future citizens. However, this “making of human kinds” (Popkewitz, 2018) is increasingly formulated in terms of fixed occupational categories and professions, qualifications and competencies connoted with these, rather than in terms of emancipation, Bildung, or the potential of the younger generations to ‘bring something new’ to the table.

Within these two challenges, the task for education is both to pass something on and to affect change at the same time. Whilst it is perhaps impossible to break free of the circuitous nature of existence (we might, pace Foucault (1983), say that we are only ever inside the ideologies we study), we can perhaps aim to question our own speech impediments (Latour, 2013); to lay bare the prosopopoeaic ways in which higher education articulates the student subject and resultant effects of subjective destitution (Žižek, 2023), in which the relationship between the self and the world is made present in deep feeling. This can be done by approaching education as one of several domains of co-existence (Benner, 2005) that, considered together, allow educationalists to step both inside and outside of ‘traditions’ that are ingrained in subject-based disciplines. We propose a theoretical approach to examining how these particular habits [examined in the HAB mode of existence in AIME] of the mode of education (imagined as Didaktik) may be discerned in moments where they act in crossings or plaitings (Gilbert, 2020) with other modes; modes prevalent in the teaching of certain subjects at the level of higher education.

We provide a theoretical exploration of Didaktik with AIME. We first explore Didaktik as “a transparent theoretical apparatus, which both acknowledges and makes visible the relational and content-focused dimensions of university teaching at the same time as it contains an idea of becoming a human being in the nexus between the past and the future.” (Magnússon and Ryztler, 2022: 141). We further this work by exploring the plurality of existence inherent to Didaktik through this nexus: a complex web of entangled associations which can be viewed as a constant ‘commoning’ of sense (Stengers, 2023); a negotiation of the self and others, of the self and the world. Part of this commoning, we argue, is engagement with (and continuation/alteration of) social habits (denoted [HAB] in AIME), which form the ‘institutions’ and ways of thinking/being in the world (politics, technology, faith, fiction, form, and so on). Through education-focused activity [EDU] ‘crossed’ with other modes, repetition and hiatuses may both disassemble and continue recognisable (yet temporary) social institutions/modes of existence through which we sense reality. In this way, [EDU-other] crossings may continue/disrupt modes which become ways of talking about, positioning oneself towards, and discerning ‘truth’ within the world. By approaching Didaktik through AIME, we offer a way to examine how things are ‘put on the table’ in higher education; how attention is brought to the world, establishing/challenging modes of existence. We consider, by way of example, some of the modes higher education is wrapped/ trapped within and how continuation/breaks with modes might transmute the student subject. Through discussion of these examples, we provide a framework through which to explore the ways that ‘truth’ is determined and negotiated within HE; how [EDU] structures, continues or disrupts the ‘speech impediments’ of the modern world (Latour, 2013). In so doing, we also offer a way to discern the slipperiest of modes: ‘education’. What tonalities and veridictions, asks Tummons (2021), can we associate with education? Connecting to Benner’s (2015) theory, [EDU] is based upon principles which constitute the character of the domain in itself - what is educational about education. We consider the principle of Bildsamkeit: connecting the idea that educational activities are centred around interventions in the individual’s self-activity, with the (AIME) sense that [EDU-other] crossings formulate possible trajectories by which the individual can reach out in the world; the student may develop/transform accordingly through such crossings (a specific Bildsamkeit of an educational intervention/situation).

We argue that if the university is a space where things can be ‘put on the table’ (Masschelein and Simons, 2012) and “studied outside of their natural context, their conventional meanings, and their “worldly” status” (Magnússon and Rytzler, 2022: 140), then higher education has potential to disrupt and form differently the modes of existence which structure the modern world. The modes—or ‘speech impediments’ (Latour, 2013)—that pervade existence, and through which sense is made of reality may be reimagined. For this to happen, we argue that there is need for collaborative charting of how education, across diverse domains, nurtures individuals in relation to existing societal institutions, and outside of these. The significance of this theoretical endeavour lies in a pressing need to not simply continue the past in the future, but to create possibility for difference through constant space for dissensus. If we are supporting students in becoming as a person together with others (Biesta, 2021; Ingold, 2017; Rytzler, 2017), through finding what is common and exploring difference (discontinuities which perpetuate continuity and give shape to the individual within a group), how do we do this without accidentally bringing attention to the qualities that we have internalised as socially important? How do we as educators make our own cultures unfamiliar to ourselves; re-strange accepted values, modes of speech, act and thought, to break chains of prejudice or reason that we have succumbed to? This endeavour is challenging, but fitting to higher education: the university as a “specific mode of habitation, makes it possible to slow down reasoning around things that make common sense ruminate” (Schildermans, 2019: 164). Examining Didaktik through AIME offers opportunity for democratic re-negotiation of modes of existence; an affordance of pondering the mechanisms turning the cogs between self, education and society.

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