On wounds, incompleteness, and conviviality: Notes on counter-actualising the conditions of the contemporary

Abstract

For Bernard Stiegler ‘the question of philosophy is first of all that of action’ (p.7). By extending this statement to philosophy of education, I consider the possibilities of action in education in responding to the conditions of the contemporary. These conditions, which have come to be discussed and dissected with reference to such terms as Anthropocene (Stoermer, Crutzen), Capitalocene (Moore), Plantationocene (Haraway), hold unprecedented and mostly devastating consequences for all life. To consider possibilities for action within the field of education to the conditions of the contemporary, I read Walter Mignolo’s concept of the colonial wound together with Gilles Deleuze’s conceptualisation of the wound. Based on this reading, I argue for the conditions of the contemporary to be understood as a wound in both Mignolo’s and Deleuze’s sense. Conceptualising it as such in turn allows me to ask how we might counter-actualise the wounds of the contemporary. In other words, how might we be worthy of the wound-event and respond in an affirmative yet critical manner to it within the field of education, and in so doing generate new possibilities of (educational) life. To consider what one such possibility of counter-actualisation might entail, I propose that education be informed by the notion of incompleteness, as expressed in the concept of conviviality. I conclude by reflecting on implications of counter-actualising the wound of the contemporary in relation to education if we were to activate the concepts of incompleteness and conviviality and pursue a different aesthetics of (educational) life.

Keywords:

• Anthropocene
• colonial wound
• counter-actualisation
• conviviality

Conceptualising the conditions of the contemporary

How might we conceptualise the contemporary? For how we conceptualise it, creates the realm of possibilities for responding to it. Achille Mbembe (2017) avers that the peculiar moment of the present does not, as yet, have a proper name, although naming the present is significant since it signals both the form and the process that any response could take. Mbembe continues to argue that notwithstanding the particular response taken, what is evident, is that we live in a time of planetary entanglement. This entanglement is characterised by ‘multiple durées made up of discontinuities, reversals, inertias, and swings that overlay one another, interpenetrate one another, and envelope one another’ (Mbembe, 2001, p. 14). Planetary entanglement is manifest, for example, in the ever-increasing intensification and acceleration of the mass movement of people, biota, technologies, and ideas across the globe (see also Chakrabarty, 2021; Mbembe, 2021a). Yet, despite (and because of) this entanglement, there exists a general breakdown in sociality since it is often ‘wrought from a common, though often coercive and confrontational, experience’ (Nuttall, 2009, p. 9). This is if one takes sociality to refer to fellowship (from the Latin sociālitās), companionship, and allyship (from socius). This sociality should, furthermore, not be understood to refer to relations between humans only, but as expressing the modality of living with others, human and more-than-human. This breakdown is evident in increasing strategies of enclosure, contraction, control, and monetization that are unfolding on micro and macro scales. This then is the conditions of the contemporary; a ‘dialectic of entanglement and separation’ (Mbembe, 2021b, p. 8) with and intensification of the quantity and quality of planetary interconnections on the one hand, and a general breakdown in sociality, on the other hand. At this moment in time, humanity arguably finds itself at a precipice, where the continuation of life-as-is may result not only in the ever increasing frequency of occurrences of existential threats to humans and more-than-human communities due to anthropogenic actions that exceed planetary boundaries (Merz et al., 2023), but also in large parts of the earth becoming uninhabitable in the near future (Chakrabarty, 2021). At this moment then, a pressing concern generally, as well as in the context of education, is how we might inhabit the earth ‘anew and share as equitably as possible a planet whose life-support system has been so severely damaged by human activities and that is in dire need of repair’ (Mbembe, 2021b, p. 11).

In developing my argument to consider how we might inhabit the earth anew, and how this might find expression within the context of education, I lay the conditions of the contemporary on two planes. The first plane explores the breakdown of sociality as a consequence of coloniality (Maldonado-Torres, 2007; Quijano, 2007), and as expressed in the ‘topologies of globalization’ (Tuck & McKenzie, 2015, p. 28). In this regard, I specifically consider the concept of the colonial wound proposed by Walter Mignolo (2005, 2021). The second plane concerns planetary entanglement as expressed in the unfolding socio-ecological crises associated with climate change, global warming, and ecological collapse. For Deborah Bird Rose (2011, p. 28) ‘[s]pecies, ecosystems, habitats, relationships, and connections that sustain the web of life on Earth become “collateral casualties” in the rush of consumption’. Thus, at this moment, instead of opening ourselves up to the world and recognising our interdependence and entanglement with it, we continue to be caught up in the illusion of anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism (Carstens & Gray, 2023; Cielemęcka & Daigle, 2019; Kruger, 2021; Plumwood, 2009). In the wake of this, what is left are the deathly places of the contemporary. Zones of nonbeing and ontological erasure (Fanon, 2008; see also Hook, 2020; Maldonado-Torres, 2007) to which the human and more-than-human victims of coloniality are bound, and to which all, will progressively become bounded as climate change and socio-ecological collapse continue to accelerate. I discuss this aspect, climate change and socio-ecological collapse, on the second plane by drawing on Deleuze’s (2004) conceptualisation of the wound.

Conceptualising the unfolding ecological collapse associated with climate change and global warming in terms of the Deleuzean wound and reading it together with the breakdown in sociality expressed in the colonial wound, I argue, create generative possibilities for responding to conditions of the contemporary. This is the case since conceptualising it as such allow us to ask how we might counter-actualise it. In other words, how might we be worthy of the wounds of the contemporary by responding to it in a manner that creates new possibilities of educational) life (cf. Deleuze (2004). To consider what one such possibility of counter-actualisation might entail, I explore the concepts of incompleteness and conviviality. For this, I turn to the African archive through the works of Francis Nyamnjoh and Achille Mbembe and the Caribbean archive through the work of Édouard Glissant. I conclude by reflecting on implications of counter-actualising the wounds of the contemporary in relation to education writ large if we are to activate the concepts of incompleteness and conviviality and pursue a different aesthetics of (educational) life.

The wounds of the contemporary

The colonial wound

The continuing consequences of the entanglement of modernity, European colonialism and the enlightenment have been highlighted by both global South and North scholars (Agathangelou & Killian, 2021; Jackson, 2021; Kruger, 2021; Mignolo, 2005, 2007; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013; Quijano, 2007; Yusoff, 2019). This entanglement, which functions through the matrices of the power, knowledge, and being, has universalised Eurocentric ways of being and knowing. This is described as coloniality and is the first plane on which I sketch the conditions of the contemporary. Mignolo (2021) avers that coloniality has sought, and continues, to erase ontologies, aesthetics, and epistemologies of certain parts of the world while at the same time universalising the ontologies, aesthetics, and epistemologies of the Anglo-European world. It is this process of erasure that has as consequence the colonial wound. The colonial wound is both physical and epistemic/aesthetic. Where the physical wound is experienced as a consequence of the coloniality of power, the epistemic/aesthetic wound manifests as dehumanisation. Yet is it precisely such dehumanisation which in turn is used to justify the deployment of violence and the infliction of the physical wound (Mignolo, 2021). In conceptualising the colonial wound, Mignolo (2005) draws on the insights of Frantz Fanon and the way in which the grammar of colonisation dehumanised the colonised by recasting relations in terms of domination and submission. In this regard, and to paraphrase Aimé Césaire (2000), coloniality, as a process of the reinvention of the other, demands thingification, whereby the ‘Other’s subjectivity and agency’ is obliterated, and the Other as interpellated subject, is turned into an empty signifier (Azeez, 2015, footnote 1). Through this process, a ‘common humanity’ is created that is intolerant of difference (McKittrick, 2015); an ‘Anthropos [that] is fundamentally at odds with itself’ (Saldanha, 2020, p. 14). Mignolo (2005, p. 8) states:

The wretched are defined by the colonial wound, and the colonial wound, physical and/or psychological, is a consequence of racism, the hegemonic discourse that questions the humanity of all those who do not belong to the locus of enunciation (and the geo-politics of knowledge) of those who assign the standards of classification and assign to themselves the right to classify.

The colonial wound is born from the operation of difference, expressed as the necessary negation of the Other, whether human or other-than-human, and as made plain in practices of classification, discrimination, and marginalisation. The colonial wound is also invoked through the exclusionary notion of a homogenising Totality found within the coloniality of being and knowledge that does not give recognition to ontological or epistemic heterogeneity (Quijano, 2007), but ‘negates, exclude, occlude the difference and the possibility of other totalities’ (Mignolo, 2007, p. 451). Arguably the processes of thingification and negation are only possible if the Other is conceptualised as being completely knowable, unchangeable, and fixed; in a sense, utterly comprehensible and transparent.

Although the colonial wound is inflicted epistemically its effects manifest on the ontological and aesthetic level. Thus, the colonial wound ‘transforms a person’s sensing, believing, and emotioning’ (Mignolo, 2021, p. 9). This means that the colonial wound restricts one’s praxes of living and possibilities for entering into relation with others. It thus fundamentally ontological in that it limits how one might be and become. This is the case, since a wounded body, ‘is altered and diminished in its potentialities for knowing, sensing, and being’ (Mignolo, 2021, p. 10). Importantly, the diminishing of potentiality is not only restricted to individual bodies but extends to whole communities. Thus, it is not personal histories and experiences that provoke the colonial wound, but the systemic history of coloniality that precedes one and that will continue after one’s death. The colonial wound is thus at the same time personal, being experienced intensively on the individual level, as well as communal, manifesting in the realms of the social and the shared imaginaries that communities hold.

To resist coloniality and the consequential colonial wound, we need to identify when, where, and how to delink from the hegemony of Totality. This is done, avers Mignolo (2021), by engaging in communal praxes of healing that involves us rather than I and that requires epistemic and aesthesic (being, sensing, emotioning) reconstitution. Such praxes should necessarily entail ontological and epistemological disobedience not ‘in isolation from a dominant world, but in spite of it, in defiance of it, in the face of it’ (Burman, 2016, p. 71). In this sense, delinking as communal praxes of healing is at once an undoing and a redoing that encompasses ontological and epistemic re-membering, re-assembling and re-generation. As such, it allows for existing anew, and to ultimately engage in a different aesthetics of life (Mignolo, 2021; Mignolo & Walsh, 2018; Quijano, 2007). Given this, communal praxes of healing cannot be couched in a notion of universality or Totality, but rather emergence from a commitment to heterogeneity and pluriversality. This is the case given that ‘the variations in and different intensities of experiencing colonial differences engender varieties and different intensities of colonial wounds [emphasis in original]’ (Mignolo, 2021, p. 540). Importantly, not only is it recognised that historical process of colonialism and continuing coloniality are key contributors to climate change and ecological collapse, but that the unfolding ecological crises further contribute to the differentiation of how the colonial wound is experienced, since it manifests differently and with different intensities among different communities (Agathangelou & Killian, 2021; Kruger, 2021; Saldanha, 2020). Having discussed the colonial wound, I next turn to Deleuze’s conceptualisation of the wound which I present as a second plane on which I lay the conditions of the contemporary.

Deleuze’s wound and its counter-actualisation

In Pure immanence: Essays on a Life Deleuze (2001, pp. 31–32) writes:

A wound is incarnated or actualized in a state of things or of life; but it is itself a pure virtuality on the plane of immanence that leads us into a life. My wound existed before me: not a transcendence of the wound as higher actuality, but its immanence as a virtuality always within a milieu (plane or field).

In a Deleuzean sense the wound signals ‘a rare event and a form of destiny’ (Williams, 2008, p. 12) that becomes actualised in a life and in a particular state of affairs. From this perspective, the wound is a deep-seated factor that is ‘generative of individuating paths’ (Kruger, 2020, p. 536), whether this be in positive or negative ways. Deleuze (2004) understands the wound to be synonymous with the event. For him ‘the event is always produced by bodies which collide, lacerate each other or interpenetrate…’ (Deleuze & Parnet, 1987, p. 64). It is thus, in following Stagoll (2010), the ‘instantaneous production intrinsic to interactions between various kinds of forces’ (p. 89). Yet, the event always overflows that which is produced, and as a virtuality, signals the potential immanent within a milieu that allows for the capacity to affect and be affected. The wound, as event, concerns in other words that which ‘produces and conditions that which does comes about’ (Reynolds, 2007, p. 150) rather than that which is. Since the wound ‘eludes its own actualisation in everything that happens’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 156) it follows that it is ‘always and at the same time something which has just happened and something which is about to happen; never something which is happening’ (Deleuze, 2004, p. 73).

Conceptualising the wound as a virtuality immanent to a milieu suggests that: 1) it does not express an empirical occurrence as actualised in the state of affairs, and 2) it should not be associated with the time of Chronos; time as linear, historical and ‘composed of a series of interlocking presents’ (Reynolds, 2007, p. 147). Rather, the wound is conceptualised as temporal and transcendental (Reynolds, 2007). As temporal, it is associated with the time of Aion, time subdivided ‘endlessly into the past and the future, and the event that likewise never actually occurs in the present’ (Reynolds, 2007, p. 147). Aion can be understood, then, as immanent potentiality, as pure reserve, and the guarantee of an open future. As transcendental, the wound exists in the field of the virtual that is associated with experimentation, creativity, and potentiality, rather than in the field of the actual associated with the state of affairs. The relationship between Aion and Chronos should, however, not be understood in terms of being oppositional. These temporalities are instead interconnected and complementary and allows for the process of becoming to emerge from the interplay between them. This interrelatedness of Aion and Chronos is pointed to in What is philosophy? where Deleuze and Guattari (1994) aver that all events are doubled between two planes that exists in what might be considered a relation of reciprocal determinism, that of the virtual and Aion and the actual and Chronos. As such, although a historical event may become effectuated in a particular lived state of affairs (actual), the wound-event (virtual) is pure reserve and irreducible to such actualisations although it is immanent to them.

For Patton (2006) working with the different temporalities of Aion and Chronos allows for exploring ‘complexity that is often imperceptible from the point of view of ordinary time… [and] enables us to make sense of the internal structure and complexity of events’ (p. 120). Thus, the interplay of the different temporalities of Aion and Chronos allows one to consider the lived experiences (chronological narratives) of individualised subjects and social collectives as manifest in the actual state of affairs while simultaneously placing these narratives within the context of events that produced and conditioned that which came about, and that which will outlive us. For Dick and Müller (2021) this is important since it gives one the opportunity to become equal to the event and in so doing to become worthy of what happens to oneself. To be worthy of the event means to trouble a common-sense understanding of causality, while also providing one ‘with thinking tools for living and thinking through uncertain times’ (Dick & Müller, 2021, p. 32). It is, in this sense, that you are born to embody the wound (‘My wound existed before me, I was born to embody it’ (Deleuze, 2004, p. 148)). The notion that one must embody the wound does not mean that one desires it, but rather that one wills something in that which does occur (Schreel, 2014, p. 103); something not yet, but yet-to-come. This is a salient but important aspect of Deleuze’s conceptualisation of the wound.

Climate change and associated ecological collapse can be understood to belong simultaneously to the time of Chonos and Aion. As a phenomenon actualised in the current state of affairs and unfolding in the context of measurable time frames and historical periods, it belongs to the time of Chronos. Yet, simultaneously it belongs to the time of Aion, as duration, intensity, and that which conditions the present. Conceptualising climate change and ecological collapse as a Deleuzean wound, I argue, is generative in two aspects. Firstly, it enables one to avoid the reductionism inherent to either climate doomism (the position that any mitigation actions to address climate change is too late or too little), or climate solutionism that discourages engaging with the complexity of climate change and how we might be complicit in it (Lamb et al., 2020; Stein et al., 2023). If we conceptualise climate change and ecological collapse as a wound in the Deleuzean sense, it enables us to render visible the ‘wicked’ problems and complexities thereof by moving back and forth between the actualised state of affairs and the virtuality of the wound-event. This oscillation allows for mapping the forces and flows that have become viscous in the present in the state of affairs, as well as those forces and flows from which the state of affairs emerge and is conditioned by. Secondly, the temporal interplay between Aion and Chronos that characterises the wound-event allows one to creatively work with the ‘time-scapes’ mismatch (Machin, 2019) that exists between climate change and ecological collapse, on the one hand, and the psychological and societal factors that contribute to humans struggling to respond to events characterised by temporal and spatial distance (Pahl et al., 2014), on the other hand. The difficulty of thinking at different scales simultaneously, what Machin (2019) refers to as the uncanny knots of time of the contemporary that ‘entangle threads from the ancient past and deep future, … [and] human and geological history’ (p. 356), may thus be addressed. Yet, given that the wound, as virtuality, is pure reserve it means that it can never be overcome and will always remain. Importantly, however, it can be counter-actualised. I consider opportunities for counter-actualisation next.

Understanding coloniality and the unfolding ecological crisis associated with climate change, and how these are intertwined (see Bhambra & Newell, 2023; Ghosh, 2023; IPCC 2022), as wounds in both Mignolo’s and Deleuze’s sense, offers generative possibilities for responding. This is the case since conceptualising these as such allows for elucidating the primary habits and practices through which they are enacted and the spatio-temporal flows and forces through which these habits and practices are produced and conditioned. For Williams (2008) we can only counteract the relations immanent to the wound-event ‘through the past and the future…since in the present they are already happening’ (p. 158) and have become actualised in the state of affairs. To counter-act the wound-event of the contemporary would thus entail treating it as a matter of fact (as the way things are) whilst at the same time ‘calling [forth] a reinvention [thereof] which will run parallel to the event and alter its sense’ (Williams, 2008, p. 155). Thus, counter-actualisation entails to not be limited to the possibilities our present point of view contains but rather through creative acts that engage the ‘excess of the virtual over the actual’ (Boundas, 2009, p. 223). The implication of such an understanding of counter-actualisation is that one can through creative and experimental acts, such as communal praxes of healing proposed by Mignolo, redouble the wound-event of the contemporary (also see Dolphijn, 2017). It is by redoubling the wound-event through engagement with the past and the future that one can alter the relations that exists in the present.

To be worthy of the wounds of the contemporary, then, means to work with the wound and to counter-actualise it not by seeking ‘to repair what has actually been done [but by replaying] what has happened at the level of intense relations of sense defined as the reserve of potential happenings’ (Williams, 2008, p. 36). This entails liberating everyday events, and the manner they are actualised in the present state of affairs in our habits and practices, by redoubling them through activating concepts that position ‘these events as processes whose outcome is not yet determined’ (Patton, 2000, p. 28). Drawing on the pure reserve/potential happenings of the wound, creates the possibility of different actualisations of the event in the state of affairs, in other words, different ways in which the present might unfold. Deleuze and Guattari (1994) state that the wound ‘is counter-effectuated [counter-actualised] whenever it is abstracted from its state of affairs so as to isolate its concept’ (p. 159). Thus, although the creative act of redoubling does not negate the present state of affairs, it allows for bringing it into conversation with different potentialities and values that allow for countering the conditions of the contemporary. To explore different potentialities and values available, I consider the concepts of incompleteness and conviviality and how they might inform the creative act of counter-actualising the wounds of the contemporary.

Incompleteness and conviviality as different aesthetics of (an educational) life

The use of the concepts of incompleteness and conviviality employed here emerges from the work of Francis Nyamnjoh (2017, 2021), Achille Mbembe (2021a, 2022a), and Édouard Glissant (1997, 2020). I specifically consider how the proposals for disenclosure (Mbembe), Relation and alterity (Glissant), and incompleteness (Nyamnjoh) might inform our conceptualisation of education as an important means and fecund field to counter-actualise the wounds of the contemporary.

For Mbembe (2021a), disenclosure entails embracing the web of relations from which identities arise and that extends outwards towards an other, human and more-than-human, that is always already present. In following Léopold Sédar Senghor, it is thus for him a project of giving and receiving, of becoming through being in-common. Based on this, disenclosure signals a ‘praxis of putting in relation’ (Mbembe, 2021a, p. 64) that is about encountering the world’s entirety—what Glissant (2020) refers to as le Tout-Monde (translated variously as the All-World or Whole-World). Importantly, a praxis of putting in relation does not mean the dissolution of difference and homogenisation of being to Being, as manifest in coloniality and the processes of enclosure, classification, boundary creation, and control—that which is ultimately experienced as the colonial wound. Rather, a praxis of putting in relation concerns honouring differences and that which is unique by engaging in relentless boundary crossing, de-familiarisation, and co-creation.

Being-with-others in this manner acknowledges an acceptance of the principle of alterity whereby the other is encountered with authenticity, interest, and with a willingness to hear their truth (Glissant, 1997). This allows for not relying on false transparency by casting others as completely knowable and lacking ontological density, but the willingness ‘to enter into the penetrable opacity of a world in which one exists, or agrees to exist, with and among others’ (Glissant, 1997, p. 114). The principle of alterity and the acceptance of the opacity of the other means that ‘each of us needs the memory of the other’ (Glissant as cited in Mbembe, 2021a, p. 172). We need others’ memories of beauty and of suffering to learn and live together, and in so doing, create the possibilities for becoming-other through communal praxes that sets out to repair the fabric of the world. The weaving of memories that Glissant calls for, these landscapes of shared elsewhere, belong to an order of aesthetic and political experimentation that allows for blurring the temporal boundary of before and after, and spatial demarcation of I and the Other. It is through this reorganisation of spatial and temporal relations that possibilities are created for a mode of existence that entails simultaneously inhabiting multiple worlds and multiple times. This inhabitation, furthermore, requires both thinking the world-to-come from multiple perspectives and archives, and a plurality of centres, as well as understanding the world-to-come as a method of thinking that takes as its starting points ontological and epistemic re-membering, re-assembling and re-generation (see also Glissant, 2020; Kruger, 2021; Mbembe, 2021a, 2022a).

A praxis of putting in relation thus makes possible engaging in a different aesthetics of living that is informed by an ethics of mutuality that requires the willingness to ‘step outside yourself and intentionally open up the possibility of multiple passages and multiple crossings’ (Mbembe, 2022a, p. 109). It is through the inflection of openness proposed by such an ethics that the notion of incompleteness, as discussed by Nyamnjoh (2017, 2021), becomes relevant. This is the case since openness grows from an understanding of incessant incompleteness. Here incompleteness is understood as gesturing towards ‘a process of intermingling without beginning or end, whose outcome is as per definition unpredictable’ (Hemer et al., 2020, p. 6). In this sense, incompleteness should not be understood as signifying absence or lack, but rather as potentiality or potency. For Nyamnjoh (2017), it is through being-with-others, human and more-than-human, that potency can be cultivated, activated, and nurtured to different degrees and intensities. It follows that conviviality, as celebration and preservation of incompleteness (rather than Being and Totality), is about reaching out and with others ‘explore ways of complementing ourselves with the added possibilities of potency brought our way by the incompleteness of others’ (Nyamnjoh, 2017, p. 262). In this sense, every entity we enter into relation with is a doorway into a particular and unique world (Mbembe, 2022a).

Reaching out and crossing thresholds into different worlds necessarily entail contestation and tension. However, it is precisely the creative interdependency that engaging in such convivial relationality demands that positions it as a concept that could be activated to counter-actualise the wounds of the contemporary by working towards creating a shared world that allows for living-together-in-difference. If sociality entails companionship and allyship, it is by weaving together disparate memories as we transgress boundaries and cross thresholds that new dimensions of shared becoming are opened. This is needed notwithstanding the tensions and contestations that might arise. It is the weaving of memories, I aver, that allows for participating in communal praxes of healing that is informed by the potentiality of the excess of the virtual to become actualised in the present under a different configuration than the prevailing state of affairs. It is this process of redoubling, by altering the relations that exists in the present through the past and future, that allows for experimenting with a world-to-come. This means that needing the memory of the other ‘is not a matter of charity or compassion. It is a condition of survival of our world’ (Mbembe, 2022b, p. 135). To create a different aesthetics of living we need to reconfigure the relations that exists in the past through engaging with the memory of the other, and in so doing, allow not only alternative daily habits and practices to become actualised in the present, but more fundamentally, to affirm ontological plurality.

Given this, how might the concepts of incompleteness and conviviality inform counter-actualising the wounds of the contemporary within the context of education? In responding to this task, I start from the position that one of the fundamental tasks of education is that of re-invention, of creating the earth anew. Educational practices that emerge from an understanding that all events are doubled between Aion and Chronos (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994) create the opportunity to explore and become responsive to the lived realities of individuals and communities of the wounds of the contemporary, as actualised in the state of affairs, and how these manifests with differing intensity and frequency in different contexts. At this same time such an understanding will, importantly, allow for placing these lived realities alongside their immanent potential to be different, thus allowing for thinking and living through complex and challenging times and willing something otherwise in that which is experienced. To counter-actualise the wounds of the contemporary through the past and the future (Williams, 2008), I propose activating the concepts of incompleteness and conviviality. This could enable foregrounding that sharing and living the memory of the other is conditional to the survival of our world, and that it is through such sharing and living of others’ memories that experimentation with the creation of collective imaginaries of an open future becomes possible.

The collective imaginaries generated through the memory of the other are germane of a different aesthetics of living than that of the present, gesturing both towards counter-actualising the colonial wound as made manifest in the breakdown in sociality, and planetary entanglement as experienced through climate change and ecological collapse. However, the generation of collective imaginaries of an other world is only possible if the relations one enters emerge from an understanding of the incessant incompleteness of the self and the opacity and ontological density of the other. For O’Donnell (2022, p. 677) ‘the right to opacity rests on an ethic of respect for the irreducible singularity’ of the other as much as on understanding that we can only ever exist in relation. It is this foregrounding of incompleteness that makes turning to and becoming attentive to the Whole-World (le Tout-Monde) a necessity and that allows for pedagogies of putting in relation, of giving and taking, with humans and the more-than-human, to be practised. Accentuating incompleteness, furthermore, open spaces for becoming attentive to and generating opportunities for engaging in everyday instances of conviviality.

Enacting the principle of alterity, when engaging in pedagogies of putting in relation, allows not only for re-signification and re-humanisation in working towards a common, albeit diverse, humanity, but also for positioning the more-than-human as subject vis-à-vis an understanding that consigns it to an utterly transparent and wholly knowable object. It is through such re-signification and re-humanisation, and the foregrounding of opaque subjecthood, that ontological and epistemological heterogeneity could be re-inserted within the realm of education, and the wounds of the contemporary could be counter-actualised. Conceptualising education in this manner positions it first and foremost as ‘an act of exchange and encounter, with humility, with curiosity, with attention to detail, to careful observation, to sensibility…[and] to deep listening’ (O’Donnell, 2022, p. 681). This orientation towards education would necessarily entail experimentation, exploration, and being-in-relation with others, human and more-than-human, with humility and in recognising that incompleteness is ever present, but that this incompleteness signals the potential for creating different possibilities for what life might become.

Any response to the conditions of the contemporary in education should thus involve creating opportunities to cultivate collective imaginaries born from participating in shared memories. At the heart of these imaginaries would be a praxis of putting in relation and of giving and taking that would allow for creating shared understandings of what communal practices of counter-actualisation might entail and how these might be enacted. The enactment of communal practices of counter-actualisation would, firstly, allow for becoming worthy of the colonial wound by accentuating the fundamental role that sociality, understood in terms of Relation (Glissant, 1997), plays in ontological and epistemic re-membering, re-assembling and re-generation. Participating in communal practices of counter-actualisation could, furthermore, allow for foregrounding planetary entanglement, expressed in both temporal and spatial dimensions, and how it manifests in shared, though differing, experiences of climate change and ecological collapse. Counter-actualising the conditions of the contemporary by activating the concepts of incompleteness and conviviality is thus fundamentally concerned with opening new vistas for becoming, born from the interplay of the virtuality of Aion and actuality of Chronos. Given that the ‘performative moment of the present is informed by the past, [and] our memories of past are at the same time continually being reinterpreted in the present’ (Müller & Kruger, 2021, p. 134) means that participating in shared memories not only makes us who we are but more importantly also who we might become in our efforts to counter-actualise the wounds of the contemporary.

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Frans Kruger

Frans Kruger is an Associate Professor in Education at the University of Nottingham, UK, and an honorary research fellow at the University of the Free State, South Africa. His research interests include African philosophy, decoloniality, environmental and sustainability education, posthumanist pedagogies, and critical peace and nonviolence education.