Kinopedagogy as Non-Conservative Education and Time as the Abode of Humans

This paper takes its cue from Biesta’s (2013) call for a “time out” in educational theory, understood as the need to take leave of the modern discourse on education, ultimately rooted in a progressive-developmental view of time. I dub the latter “cosmopolitan” in reference to Popkewitz’s (2008) concept of cosmopolitanism as a cultural thesis presiding over school reform in modernity. I will argue that thinking of education after progress does not imply any complete ‘time out’ but requires going beyond this specific form of cosmopolitanism. Following Nail’s (2015a, 2015b) proposal of a “migrant cosmopolitanism” and a kinopolitics, I will speculate on a ‘kinopedagogy,’ in which the notion of movement plays a crucial role, as an alternative to the modern regime of the relationships obtaining between education and time. I will address the question of time and movement by marshalling some tenets of a contemporary Italian philosopher, Aldo Masullo. Pivoting on Aristotle’s (Phys, IV, 11, 219a) view of time as the arithmos kinēseōs (= number/rhythmus of movement) as well as on the Greek distinction between εθος (“habit,” “custom”) and ηθος (“abode” and, then, “character”), he invites us to distinguish between “reactive” and “active ethics.” The former boils down to a strategy of protection against genuine novelty and the “ek-static” (Phys, IV, 13, 222b, 15) destabilizing character of time, through the introduction of subjects “into some system of stable and internalized rules of behaviour, [...] a system of repetitions («habits» [εθη]»)” (Masullo, 1995, p. 122). The latter is “the care to situate the human being in her/his ‘abode’” and time - understood as the rhythmus of movement and “the sense of destabilization” (p. 125) - is the genuine abode of the human being. Active ethics “does not deliver the human being as a prisoner to the εθος but it liberates her/him for the access to the ηθος” in that it “preserves the human being in her/his original non-conservativeness [inconservatività], in the irreducible «inquietude» of her/his aching or desiring time” (p. 126). Thus, kinopedagogy recontextualizes the meaning of ‘progressive’ in terms of the aforementioned ‘non-conservativeness’ as the main feature of time as “ek-static.” ‘Progressive’ education is the care to allow all of us as ‘migrants’ to live actively in the abode of our ek-static and unpredictable condition and in our mutually touching distances rather than imprisoning ourselves in a taken for granted εθος, cosmopolitan, inclusive and progressive though it may be.