Phenomenology of inattentiveness. The stubbornness of the body

• Applicant: Dr. Josephine Geisler
• Subject Area: General Education and History of Education
• Term: from 2019 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 414219187

Inattentiveness has been and is currently understood as being, as pedagogical practices prove, an interruption of attention. In this understanding it is a pathological phenomenon which, in order to restore attention, is to be avoided. Following the goal, of opening up inattentiveness to the pedagogical debate, the research project chooses this experience as basis to phenomenologically analyse the characteristic bodily consequences, with which the inattentive subject is confronted. Through this, the self-willingness of inattentiveness, beyond ascriptions of disruption and deficit, shall be pointed out and, in this reading of the phenomenon, educationally relevant possibilities shall be put in focus. With this recourse to the phenomenological perspective, inattentiveness is revealed as more than an undesired case of disruption. It rather allows to examine the phenomenon as an initial point for processes of learning and education by considering a defocused, calm being-by-its-self of the subject as the bodily-substantiated, unavailable origin of its every attentive turning towards an object. Through this perspective, paradoxically, attention appears as a disruption, an irritation in which the subject, when confronted with changes of meanings, sees something from a different perspective and gains different self- and object-relations. By means of aesthetic conceptions and stylistic evidence it can be shown that the educational potential of inattentiveness in alternative readings (with partly equivalent semantics) has been recognized for a long time, however, through being covered by the ascription of disruption, is not seen or explored. The bodily-substantiated interpretation of inattentiveness allows a critical perception of conceptions of cognitive psychology on inattentiveness; they give insight into a desire of a to-be-pedagogically-realized, constantly self-controlled selecting subject of achievement.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants