Formative Autonomy: The Arts as an Agôn of Difference

• In Event: Education's Autonomy

Abstract

1. Objectives
This paper aims to discuss how (i) as a form of knowing-by-doing (Vico 1988), the arts embody an understanding of autonomy (Rancière 2009; Adorno 1999) that is inherently formative and plural (Anon 2021; Anon & Anon 2020); where (ii) the arts in education provide a horizon of struggle where the experience of diversity—through, amongst other, race, class, gender, creed, sexuality, language and culture (hooks 2009, Baldwin 2010)—becomes an agôn of difference and authorship (Rose 1992, Anon 2009; 2018, Greene 1978).

2. Theoretical framework
With art and education being valued in their formative, autonomous and plural qualities, this paper brings together a theoretical framework which moves away from the certainties customarily found in constructivist approaches to education. Following from a notion on form as a living organism endowed by its own legality (Pareyson 1960), this paper draws from a wealth of artistic, philosophical and educational perspectives that capture the notion of a formative autonomy by means of what human beings invent and achieve through that what is given to and by them and what they seek to do with this givenness (Anon 2021).

3. Mode of inquiry
The method of inquiry is drawn from the juncture of inquiries drawn from (a) arts practice (b) art theory & literary criticism; and (c) philosophy and theory of education.

4. Data sources, materials
Exemplars of practice and inquiry will be as follows: (a) arts practice: Elio Petri (film), Lorraine Hansberry (theatre/literature), Benny Andrews (visual arts); (b) art theory & literary criticism: James Baldwin (2010) (novelist and literary theorist), Jacques Rancière (2009) (philosopher), bell hooks (2009) (critical and cultural theorist); and (c) philosophy and theory of education: Ivan Illich (on disestablishment and contingency), Maxine Greene (2001) (aesthetics education), John Dewey (art and experience), Theodor W. Adorno (art’s autonomy), Luigi Pareyson (1960) (the ontology of knowledge).

5. Conclusions
Within several established perspectives of schooling, the relationship between art and education still portends a contractual existence that (a) fails to recognize and fulfil the potentials of the arts’ formative autonomy, and (b) proscribes the arts from playing their role as an agôn of diversity. This paper will explore how art’s agonistic potentials could be fulfilled; where diversity is not just a recognition of plurality, but a formative occasion for a dynamic understanding of autonomy as a form of continuous struggle.

6. Scholarly significance of the study or work
In the space of the arts in education, formative autonomy is a condition of difference that cannot remain confined to a number of self-initiated pedagogical possibilities that are simply reduced to constructivist learner-centered ecologies. This paper’s significance comes from its recognition that as a horizon of pluralities the arts in education must be recognized within identifiable intrinsic laws that can only inhere in the immanent possibilities that they bring.
Just as form remains key to art, and the formative to education, this paper will propose a radically different notion of autonomy in education: that of a convivial space (an agôn) within which we play the plural condition of the contingent self.

Author

• John Baldacchino, University of Wisconsin - Madison