The Only Way is Ethics (Part 2)

Jon Nicholls, Thomas Tallis School

As promised, here is part two of a blog about subjectification in (photography) education, in response to the ideas of Gert Biesta. As I mentioned in the first part of this blog post, Biesta's ideas are sophisticated and carefully argued and I don't pretend to grasp every nuance. I really do encourage you to read them yourselves, in the original. Nevertheless, I'd like to refer to a few ideas here in order to suggest that we photography teachers have a special duty to consider the ethical dimensions of our practice.

Note: Unless otherwise stated, all the quotations are from Gert Biesta's World Centred Education, Routledge 2022

Biesta offers a stark reminder about what's at stake here. In the race to the top of the league tables and ever greater competition between schools, students are at risk of being made the objects of various interventions:

We are too quickly drawn into monitoring and measuring the learning itself, looking for the interventions that will produce the desired learning outcomes, trying to control the whole machinery, and thus easily lose sight of the fact that children and young people are human beings who face the challenge of living their own life, and of trying to live it well.

This argument might sound, to some ears, like the kind of typical view of a die-hard 1970s 'progressive', an "enemy of promise". I'm sure you are familiar with this kind of dismissive put-down which features prominently in many Twitter debates. Biesta is keen to side-step the traditional vs progressive binary. He is a defender of teaching and schools and although his ideas are informed by many progressive thinkers, my own sense is that his theoretical standpoint isn't so easily pigeon-holed. If we might be tempted to consider the quotation above as a bit 'soft' or too 'child-centred' (insert your own EduTwitter put-down here), he is quick to remind us of the historical context:

[...] we still live in the shadow of "Auschwitz" ... because it has shown us that the systematic objectification of (other) human beings is a real possibility with disastrous consequences.

He contrasts democracy with populism. In the "impulse society" we are told repeatedly that we can have whatever we want. ​

Unlike populism, the very point of democracy is that you cannot always get what you want.

​If one of education's primary goals is to ensure that something like Auschwitz never happens again, it must undermine, disrupt and challenge the objectification of young people, and promote subjectification. In order to illustrate the meaning of the (rather odd) word 'subjectification', Biesta refers to the Parks/Eichmann paradox.

The Parks/Eichmann Paradox

In 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus, defying the driver's authority to assign her seat. In his 1961 trial, Adolf Eichmann, architect of the mass deportation of Jews and others to the Nazi extermination camps, denied responsibility for the consequences of his actions using the argument that he was just following orders. Which of these people, asks Biesta, was the best student - the defiant Parks whose action initiated the Montgomery Bus Boycott, or the compliant Eichmann, who carried out his orders precisely and efficiently? Which person has been more successfully educated?

Rosa Parks booking photo following her February 1956 arrest © Alabama Department of Archives

Adolf Eichmann at trial in 1961. Israel government press office via Wikimedia Commons

Rosa Parks chose to resist what she considered to be an unjust situation. Adolf Eichmann removes himself as subject from the equation when he delegates the responsibility for his actions. He fails to show up as an "I" when he claims to be just following orders. Biesta argues that this paradox illustrates precisely why learning (qualification) and development (socialisation) is not enough. What will I do with what I have learned and how I have developed when it matters, when I am faced with the question "Hey, you there, where are you?"

Turning our attention to photography education, how might we open ourselves up to a more balanced view of the purposes of our lessons so that we can find more space for subjectification. Biesta, and others, provide us with several clues about how this might be achieved.

Sabiha Çimen - Asya plays with pet birds in the teachers’ room, Rize, 2018

On framing

There's been plenty of heated debate about the role of knowledge in education. This has prompted some interesting responses from visual arts educators - additional Art History classes, for example. It's a bit of straw person argument in the sense that no-one (I know) is advocating for a knowledge poor curriculum. The issue though is that knowledge isn't enough if it doesn't make sense to the student. As others like Michael Young have argued, knowledge is powerful if it challenges or extends what is already known. Powerful knowledge is disruptive. It is the world calling to the student, but not a world they are necessarily familiar with. The teacher's role is therefore to stage encounters with this new knowledge and to help students step into the frame of that knowledge so that it can make sense. Teachers live in this frame and it's easy to forget what it's like to be outside it. Biesta uses the example of his confusion during maths lessons and his frustrated teacher exclaiming "But can't you see it?" Each student may need a personal invitation, a key with which to unlock the door and appear in the frame.

The difficult work of teaching, therefore, is not that of providing students with knowledge - which makes the current insistence that schools should focus on "knowledge" a bit silly - but is that of pulling students 'inside' the frame within which such knowledge begins to make sense [...] It is precisely this latter act of "pulling" that goes fundamentally beyond all the sense-making that students can do, up to the point where they encounter something new, something radically "beyond" their own horizon of understanding.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya - Drop Scene (0X5A9913), 2021

The PhotoPedagogy contribution to this effort takes the form of Threshold Concepts. These ideas about photography are intentionally troublesome. I often use the analogy of an attic or jumble sale. An invitation is made to cross the threshold into a space that is full of potentially fascinating stuff. There are few labels or sign posts to get started but it's up to the student to rummage around and find something they perhaps didn't even know they were looking for. 

On not knowing

The eye should learn to listen before it looks.
-- Robert Frank

This is one of my favourite photographer quotations because I find it both beautiful and intensely puzzling. As David Campany and Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa have reminded us recently, photographs are indeterminate and ambiguous. They promise to tell us something about reality but really only show us the light bouncing off a surface. There is something radically open about photographs, almost despite how they look. Perhaps the attitude needed by photographers, then, is a parallel openness, a willingness to be affected. Robert Frank seems to suggest that we might start by listening, very carefully, to what the world wants from us.

Robert Frank - Detroit, 1955

Hearing is entirely dependent on sound that comes from outside. We can't intend it. It requires a different kind of attentiveness than the other senses, a certain amount of vulnerability and openness to what will be given to us. What we hear will be a surprise to us, not something we can intentionally control.

​The sense of smell is invoked by photographer Peter Fraser to describe his (almost uncontrollable) receptivity to both external and internal stimuli:

It’s almost as if there’s a smell in the air and I’m being forewarned that a moment is approaching so I need to have the camera ready. In a sense, I never set out to do anything other than make myself available to allow that moment where there is an upsurge of energy from the unconscious mind into the conscious mind which is the moment when I know I have to make a photograph.
​-- Peter Fraser

How can we, therefore, encourage our students to hear (or smell) with their eyes, adopting a radical openness to the world and its gifts, allowing themselves to be affected? Knowing only gets you so far. A state of not knowing is also vital for those of us who wish to be the subjects of our own lives.

On resistance

Henry Wessel - from Incidents, 2012

If democracy is to be defended and strengthened, Biesta argues, education should be concerned with freedom. But this is not the 'freedom' of the Libertarian market. We must learn to come into relationship with our desires, to test whether other people and the world with its limited resources can tolerate them. Are our desires desirable? Biesta calls this a 'grown up' way of living in and with the world, as opposed to an 'infantile' or 'ego-logical' relationship. He reminds us that this is not a matter of age. Young people are capable of being 'grown up' in this way, just as some adults remain 'infantile' in relation to their desires. Both the world and, more specifically, other people provide resistance. The job of visual arts teachers, therefore, is to encourage students to acknowledge and meet this resistance. 

The educational significance of the arts, and perhaps the educational urgency of the arts, lies in art education beyond expressivism and creativity [...] Art is the dialogue of human beings with the world, art is the exploration and transformation of our desires so that they can become a positive force for the ways in which we seek to exist in the world in grown-up ways. And that is where we may find the educative power of the arts
-- Gert Biesta, Art, Artists and Pedagogy, 2017

We may want to impose our will on the materials with which we work - a lump of clay, a blank sheet of paper, a camera etc. These materials will inevitably resist our intentions and we will need to adjust accordingly. Despite appearances, things are not inert. They may push back against our desire to manipulate them. For young people, this resistance can be frustrating and dispiriting. As teachers, we can support students to understand that things are not without their own agency. This ecological attitude supposes that we are all bound together in a constantly shifting network of relationships. 

When you’re photographing and you’re walking through the world, something catches you, you notice something. You’re connecting with it and you’re responding to it. You’re basically saying “Yes” to it. You’re saying “Yes, it’s interesting.” You’re kind of like a free agent between your instinct, your anticipation and your intelligence and those things keep moving back and forth in a very fluid way while you’re photographing and that experience is really pleasurable. It’s really exciting and it’s the reason that I photograph. That and the way photographs look. The way they describe the world.
​-- Henry Wessel

On pointing

Biesta's concern with the form of teaching leads him to conclude that its fundamental educational gesture is that of pointing. When we point we show something to someone. We redirect someone's attention, turning their gaze towards the world. Crucially, pointing is beautiful because it is not about control. "Hey you, look there!" is an attempt to redirect the gaze but it does not force the student to do as we wish. It is an open gesture, it opens the world to the student and, potentially, opens the student to the world. The world, however, is not a "playground for the student's desires". Whatever freedom is generated by our pointing is the freedom to exist as subject 'in' and 'with' the world in a grown-up way.

Ai Weiwei – Study of Perspective, Trump Tower, New York City, USA, 2017

When we point our cameras at the world, there is an implied redirection of the viewer's gaze. We are saying "Hey you, look there." But this gesture of pointing goes in two directions. We gesture out to the world and the world gestures back at us. The world exists in its own right. It is real. It does not exist simply to be an object for us. It resists us, "puts limits on what we can do with it, what we can want from it and how we can make sense of it." Because photography puts us into direct relationship with the world (the world, after all, is already full, not a blank page or canvas on which we can project our desires) it can speak to us if we are paying attention. As photography teachers, we can help to nurture this sensitivity in our students so that they recognise when the world might be calling to them, asking them a question. This is a subjectifying moment or event.

On risk

The significance of pointing [...] is that it doesn't force the student into anything, but appeals to his or her freedom and, in a sense, reminds the student of his or her own freedom. Precisely because of this, precisely because the freedom of the student is at stake and, more specifically, because the freedom of the student is called upon, the work of teaching is without guarantees.

So much of current educational discourse (perhaps influenced by the learning sciences) seems focused on the removal of risk from the educational equation. And yet, when we remove risk we take away what is educational. We diminish the agency of our students to refuse, to walk away, to resist, to become subjects of their own lives. Biesta refers to this as "the beautiful risk of education". Schools need to provide the time and space for students to work through the question of their own freedom - what is the world (social and natural) asking from me? Teachers need to provide them with support and sustenance so that they can stay with this question. There is no way to control how students will respond when the world calls to them. The risk of subjectification needs to be shared and this is a test of the strength of a democracy.

[...] without subjectification education runs the risk of becoming the "management of objects".

Aaron Siskind - Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation, 1953-1961

Teaching is as mysterious and ineffable to me now as it was when I started 32 years ago. The same is true for photography and I suppose that's why both endeavours are so fascinating to me. If you've got this far, thank you for your patience. I hope I have provided you with some food for thought and a little sustenance for the year ahead.