Studying with the Internet: Giorgio Agamben, Education, and New Digital Technologies

Abstract

This paper provides an analysis of the educational use of the Internet and of digital technologies that is neither pessimistic nor optimistic, that is neither critical nor post-critical. Turning to Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben's comments on studying and its relationship to the technology of the blank writing tablet, the authors argue that digital devises are a radical transformation in our relationship to the technologies of reading and writing. Traditionally, the scholar was able to experience his or her potentiality to communicate through writing via the blankness of the writing tablet. Yet, according to Agamben, such blankness has become inaccessible in the digital age, where the screen is always full of content. Here the authors argue that Agamben is correct in his diagnosis, yet his own theory of communicability (as the experience of our ability to and not to communicate this or that specific message) offers up a way to redeem the educational use of digital devices. It is precisely the overflowing saturation of communications on the Internet which produces a new kind of blankness. It is this blankness which should thus become the focus of a studious form of media literacy-one that is not critical or post-critical so much as pre-critical (in that it contemplates the very potentiality for communication as such).

Digital technologies, big data and ideological (neoliberal) fantasies

“…If we want to support democracy in education we need our freedom to imagine things otherwise (including ourselves and others), our freedom to question things without condition (Larsen, 2019) and our freedom to profane things (to make them inoperative) by releasing them from their normal uses (Agamben, 1993). If we are free to use digital technologies and big data in non-instrumental and mechanical ways and to play with them in new/other ways, we may use them to construct different forms of democratic spaces that we should not be without (Lewis & Alirezabeigi, 2018).…”

“…argue that we need to free ourselves from the ways in which digital technologies are used to monitor, regulate and produce numerical data about students' (learning) behaviour, progress and results in school. We, therefore, must set such technologies free from their proper uses and places in education and discuss whether they should and can be used otherwise (Agamben, 2009;Lewis & Alirezabeigi, 2018). If this is to be possible, however, we must be aware of the ways in which digital technologies regulate the distribution of the sensible, as elaborated in the next section.…”

Pedir más a la Universidad en línea. ¿Podemos pensar juntos estando separados por una pantalla?

“…The main problematic issue about the digital screen that commands our attention relentlessly was theorised by Agamben (2017) as a lack of potentiality: whereas a blank page is a place to rest our eyes and imagine potential words, the digital screen is always full of signs. The digital screen is always full "always already possessed of and by an infinity of icons, toolbars, links, windows, and so on" (Lewis & Alirezabeigi, 2018) which makes any experience of potentiality (or "blankness" as Lewis and Alirezabeigi put it) hard to achieve in practice. Without potentiality, there is no thinking, as Agamben (2017) reminds us.…”

The pedagogical style of matters of study: experimenting with artistic-scientific interventions in times of corona lockdown

“…In general, it might be observed that students felt quite ‘disoriented’ in their queries, either because of the sheer abundance of materials (not in the least due to the pandemic’s enormous digital exposure), and/or out of inexperience with sustained and methodical practices of reflexive aesthetic appreciation (cf. Lewis & Alirezabeigi, 2018 ). Surely differences remained between students who had just randomly picked interventions popping up after a basic “corona + art” query, and others who admitted having found their intervention as the Google-generated outcome of a pre-formulated thematic focus (e.g.…”