The Touch of the Present: Educational Encounters and Processes of Becoming

We are all familiar with the momentary nature of sensual contact: a touch on the shoulder; a kiss on the lips; a whisper in the ear; a cool breeze on the cheek; the scent of a lily. Whilst these sensations connect to past associations and memories and whilst they might trigger longing or a desire for continuation into the future, the event of contact resides in the present. This is also the time, as Jan Masschelein claims, of education; a time where students can experience the world in the gap between past and future.2 Education, on this view, is not merely about preparing students for an already imagined future, or about enculturating them into structures of the past (although this happens as well); instead, it is to offer the space and time for inquiry and experiment into the here and now that enables what Gert Biesta refers to as subjectification: the ability of the subject to come into presence and “to exist as a subject of initiative and responsibility.”3 Following Masschelein’s definition, this paper understands education as deriving from the latin e-ducere, signalling a “leading out” or “reaching out.”4 This reaching out implies a movement toward an encounter with something or someone in the world – an encounter that I am calling here the touch of the present. This paper explores how this time of the present is the time of subjectification