Notions of Bildung and ethical competencies has arguably been heavily influenced by traditions of critical theory and theories focusing on language and the power structures linked to language and linguistics (Cohen, 2006). New theoretical perspectives on materialisms and challenges that rise from the ‘great outdoors’, ranging from global climate change to the very local, has raised the question of how to understand building and ethical competencies in new ways.
A recent inspiration is Eugene Thacker’s 2011 book In the dust of this Planet. In this book Thacker differentiates between The-world-for-us, The world-in-itself and the horrific World-without us. The world-for-us represent the project of modernity and its omnipresent lust for control of human and environment. The world-in-itself represents the failure of this project. How we never manage to obtain total control of nature and environment. How cancer hits the individual and floods the masses. We do however not have direct access to the world-in-itself, it represents itself, through natural disaster and sickness, but need to be put into words and thoughts, drawn into the-world-for-us to make sense. Thacker argues, drawing on inspiration from the horror genre that it might be possible to introduce a third notion: the traumatic idea of the world-without-us.
This world-without-us can be understood through the emerging notions of post-humanism (Braidotti, 2013) or post-anthropocene (Bratton, 2013)or via the theoretical movements of e.g. speculative realism (Meillasoux, 2007; Bryant, 2013; Harman, 2011) or transcendental nihilism (Brassier, 2007). In this presentation I will discuss how these emerging ideas could influence educational perspectives on Bildung and ethical competencies. How do we deal with educational issues linked to the-world-without us, and do these challenges require a certain Dark pedagogy?