The Necessity of an Immanent Pedagogy of In|difference in the Shadow of the Anthropocene

Abstract

Life can be theorised actively (liveliness) or passively, or as entangled. What does this mean for pedagogy within the Anthropocene? This essay speculatively develops the concept immanent pedagogy of in|difference to explore such a question. This involves an engagement with various expressions of new materialisms, presenting a case as to how the passivity of an indifferent life needs to be recognised to mitigate the excessive claims of life from personalist modernist instrumentalism to neo-Darwinian accounts.

Akokisa River Pedagogies

“…Faz opens up the River as an ‘aisthetic phenomenon’ prior to aesthetics, and restages the Akokisa as an unknowable, ‘becoming‐process’ emerging from a void or an ‘excluded middle of an aisthetic‐affective encounter’ (jagodzinski 2021, 160). Before perceiving and interpreting, the body responds at the neurological level through shifts in the affect and ‘the body's motor capacities’ (Snaza 2019, 110).…”

“…Human attempts at sense‐making or conscious cognition of events are deferred, capturing only ‘“afterwardsness” of thinking/feeling’ through belated reason and delayed fictionalisation of the materiality of events that have already occurred (Carstens 2020, 78). It is as if our minds cultivate expertise in filtering out the uncanny that might surprise us out of our perceptual passivity, stupefaction, and anthropocentric hubris, preferring instead to leave any knowledge generation spurred by the uncanny at the quantum levels for fear of facing our impotence (jagodzinski 2021, 2022).…”

“…When encountering such confounding elemental intimacies, Cohen (2018) recommends proceeding with ‘an ethics of wonder and cautious regard’ (305) so that the uncanny, instead of signalling conscious withdrawal, moves us to indwell such inconceivability. This uncanny pedagogy attends to the processes of aesthetics underway related to assemblages, composing affective ‘maps of physical sensations, matter, and force, rather than representational forms’ (jagodzinski 2021, 155).…”

Quantum Creativity: Afracting New Materialism in the Anthropocene

“… 4. On the use of in|difference as a bifurcated entangled word (difference and indifference), see jagodzinski (2021b). …”