Inoperative Education as Drift between Eastern and Western Philosophies

Abstract

“Inoperative Education as Drift Between Eastern and Western Philosophies” expands upon recent notions of “inoperativity” in educational philosophy in the West through an encounter with the Taoist philosophy of Zhuangzi. Thus far, the concept of inoperativity has largely been inspired by Giorgio Agamben, the contemporary Italian critical theorist. Educational theory has taken up inoperativity in order to rethink the school as a space of free time, the student as a studier, and the gymnastic body, to name only a few. Through a comparative, philosophical analysis, inoperativity is rethought in a decisively Taoist register in order to generate three movements of inoperativity: drift as use, drift as use of uselessness, and drift as deactivation of learning (un-learning).

1. Inoperative Drift in Educational Theory

Recently, the subject inoperativity has become an educational concern. For instance, scholars have argued that schools are spaces of free time in which the link between one’s self and an acceptable occupation is temporarily rendered inoperative [1]. Others have turned to the studio as an educational space that renders inoperative divisions between art and science in order to unleash experimental possibilities in the gap that separates and conjoins the two disciplines [2]. And some have argued that study is a particular form of educational life that renders inoperative ordinary productivity for a more recursive, ritualistic, and impractical practice of education [3,4]. Theorists have also analyzed how certain exercises such as Swedish gymnastics creates an inoperative body or a body freed from functional, end-directed activity and, thus, open to pure movement [5]. And finally, active learning scholars have also appropriated the concept in order to find minimal or modest ways to render the inoperative contemporary political structures of a university [6].

Although there are differences between these various uses of inoperativity, there are nevertheless some key continuities that are worth pointing out. First, in all cases, educational potential emerges when ends are suspended. At first blush, this might sound counterintuitive, as education is often oriented toward ends, yet for all the authors, these ends are precisely what enables education to be reduced to “learnification” [7] or economization. Thus, one of the key insights from inoperative theories of education is that ends are neither necessary nor sufficient for defining educational life. Second, once ends are suspended, then educational movement can happen. Such movement might be described as drift [2] or a drifting away from functional ends toward potentiality for thinking, moving, and experimenting. The school enables drift from the external pressures placed upon students to become functional members of society or to operationalize skills so as to be more marketable for the knowledge economy; the studio produces conditions for drift between and amongst various disciplines that would otherwise be institutionally separated; study inserts drift into the educational process to the point where the studier might no longer even desire to be oriented by ends; and gymnastics sets adrift the pure movement of the body, enabling the gesturality of the body to show itself. In all cases, inoperativity is both a drift away from and a drift towards/between/amongst. And third, there are practices of inoperative drift that need to be “defended” against increasingly instrumentalized forms of learning. In this sense, what is actually at stake today in the defense of schools, studios, practices of study, and gymnastics is precisely what is most precarious about education: that it is an inoperative form of life, one that inserts a certain degree of freedom from achieving specific and measurable ends.

By and large, the current literature on inoperativity in education is inspired by Western philosophers, in particular Giorgio Agamben. Throughout Agamben’s work [8,9,10,11,12,13], he returns again and again to the question of inoperativity in relation to education (1995), politics (2000), jurisprudence (2005a), ontology (2004), theology (2005b), and aesthetics (2022), developing a rich set of concepts to describe various states of inoperativity in the realms of thought and action. Indeed, one might risk summarizing Agamben’s philosophical methodology as the search for moments of inoperativity that suspend divisions between inside and outside, self and other, human and animal (and animals and plants), and life and death. In such moments of suspension when dichotomies are neutralized and ends are left idle, what emerges is a state of potentiality that is an inoperative remnant that cannot fit or be made to function within binary systems. For educators, this means that educational philosophy becomes a search for moments of inoperative learning in which learning as not learning (meaning learning beyond ends) appears or shows itself.

The literature on inoperativity that draws upon and extends Agamben’s philosophical insights is rich and significant, but more recently, the concept has been extended in new directions. There have been several attempts to explore non-Western approaches to this concept. For instance, Weili Zhao (2019) [14] has discovered connections between Western notions of inoperativity and what she refers to as Daoist “onto-un-learning”. Zhao explores the spiral-like movement within Daoist understandings of yin and yang in relation to the oscillations and drift of study. Furthermore, through Daoism, Zhao is able to further undo what might be perceived as lingering forms of individualism and anthropocentrism at work within some of the Western literature on inoperativity. In this sense, Zhao turns to Daoism to further render inoperative the inoperativity of Western philosophy and further allow the movement of drift to drift away from atomistic thinking of personhood and drift toward a holistic, correlative cosmology capable of neutralizing Western distinctions. In another article, Zhao and Ford (2018) [15] turn to Daoist wind stories to examine the underdeveloped affective dimensions of study that emerge when study and learning are conceptualized as dynamic educational movements that transform one another.

In the current essay, I continue to drift with Zhao. To do so, I focus our attention on three specific passages from the ancient Daoist text Zhuangzi, discovering, in this text, untimely meditations on what it might mean to live an educationally inoperative life full of drift. Although Hyland and Lewis (2022) [2] offer several distinct notions of studious or inoperative drift, most of our examples concern digital modes of drift. In this article, I experiment further with three additional notions of drift, including drift as the invention of new use, use of existing uselessness (or use of the self), and the deactivation of learning (inoperative learning).

2. From Relation to Contact: A Methodological Reflection

Before I begin the analysis of Zhuangzi, it is important to step back and consider the broader philosophical methodology underlying this analysis. At stake here is the nature of the relationship (or not) between Eastern and Western traditions. While Zhao has provided many insights into inoperativity by gesturing toward Daoist traditions, she has not fully spelled out the nature of the relationship between East and West. In passing, she refers to her work as dialogic, but I find this inadequate. In particular, what is presupposed in the notion of “dialogue” is an exchange of ideas between two independent traditions. Strangely, while Zhao is keen on rendering inoperative Western notions of the atomized self/individual, there is a danger in the notion of dialogue of reinscribing a dualistic logic between East and West that necessitates a learning relationship.

Importantly, this notion of dialogue and of dialogic relations is so deeply engrained in (Western) philosophy that it is hard to even see (let alone dislodge). Some have even argued that there is no education without relation [16]. In practical educational discourse and practice, we often hear about intercultural dialogue as a way to negotiate differences and similarities across cultural divides. This exchange can take three forms. First, one tradition can learn from the other, plugging up a gap or lack in its own knowledge base. Second, the two traditions can learn to agree to disagree about fundamental and irreconcilable differences. Third, the two can learn to communicate across differences and produce new knowledge (an additive, synthetic exchange). Based on my reading, Zhao’s work falls into the first category, turning to the East to pinpoint inadequacies in the West and address oversights. The East is employed as a teacher, and the West is figured as the learner. This is not necessarily an issue in itself, yet in the context of un-learning, inoperative learning, and studying, this educational relationship might become problematic (or at least open for debate). Stated differently, a relationship of teaching and learning is, in the end, predicated on an operative notion of educational relations. But such relationality leaves little room for studious drift to undo learning relationships, rendering inoperative the dialogic model underlying what we would normally consider as “productive” or “educational” scholastic exchange across cultures.

Yet what if the starting assumption were different? For Agamben, there is a distinct difference between relationships and contact points. Relationality—as is presupposed in most theories of dialogue—concerns the meeting of pre-existing, predetermined, and independent individuals/groups/traditions. In other words, there is an existing division or separation between x and y that is predicated on a certain set of representations (determined in advance). The problem for Agamben is that such concepts of relationality do not capture the ways in which individuals/groups/traditions can come in contact with one another. Contact is a form of intimacy that is “non-relational” [17] (p. 237). It happens when “two entities are separated only by a void of representation” or the “inoperativity of every representation” (Ibid.). To be in contact is to deactivate the opposites that separate and to drift into the zone of inoperativity or indiscernibility. This is an open space that does not hold firm to differences or identities and does not operate in terms of recognition or negation. Contact thus enables us to ward off against the common trope of playing one side off the other or simply synthesizing them both into a new, higher-level articulation. Instead, it is an experiment in what is possible when the coordinates that orient our lives (such as East vs. West) are suddenly made queer and unfamiliar, destabilized by the inoperative core that belongs to neither and yet is nevertheless shared. Whereas learning relations are additive (either filling a gap or producing a new meaning across differences), inoperative contact is subtractive (the gap is not filled but rather drifted into as a space of potentiality).

Instead of an intercultural dialogue, I hope this essay can act as an experimental contact revealing points of indistinction between the East and West (a Westernly Eastness and an Easterly Westness that falls off of a geopolitical map of cultural divisions and distinctions). Perhaps we can be so bold as to speculate that there is no educational contact with relations! The drift of contemporary Western educational philosophy intersects, crossing paths with drift/wandering from ancient Chinese sources and producing a short circuit in its abilities to orient East and West. If this is the case, then what we are after is a radically inoperative notion of inoperativity that cannot be recuperated into a stratagem for teaching the West (or vice versa). Nor is it to erect boundaries that would separate West from East. Nor would it be to produce new knowledge through sharing. Rather, inoperativity is a state of exile in which the West appears foreign to itself and likewise with the East. Relationality maintains what drift neutralizes: that there is a beginning (in which East and West are separated), a middle (an exchange, either positive or negative), and an end (which culminates in learning). My approach enables us to examine how studious drift does not add to our understanding of Eastern and Western traditions; instead, it subtracts knowledge. Further, it does not proceed toward an end so much as it prefers the middle or the point of contact. Perhaps we can say that we are interested in following a line of drift, a loop, or circular pattern that emerges at a zone of indistinction in which the East and West become strange, incapable of holding together or stabilizing their representations/identities. This is the space in which lines of drift can multiply.

3. Drifting with/through Inoperativity with Zhuangzi

3.1. Drift as New Use

In a dialogue between the logician Huizi and Zhuangzi, Huizi said, “The King of Wei gave me the seed of a great gourd. I planted it, and when it matured it weighed over a hundred pounds. I filled it with liquid, but it was not firm enough to life. I cut it in half to make a dipper, but it was too wide to scoop into anything. It was big and all, but because it was so useless I finally just smashed it to pieces” [18] (p. 7). Zhuangzi replied, “You are certainly stupid when it comes to using big things…. You…had a gourd of over a hundred pounds. How it is that you never thought of making it into an enormous vessel for yourself and floating through the lakes and rivers in it? Instead, you worried that it was too wide to scoop into anything, which I guess means the mind of our greatly esteemed master here is still all clogged up, occupied with its bushes and branches!” [18] (p. 8).

Why did Zhuangzi mock Huizi? As a logician, Huizi thought in terms of pragmatic solutions to everyday problems. Thus, his immediate intuition upon inheriting the gourd from the King of Wei was to transform it into a rather generic dipper for ladling water. In Zhuangzi’s telling, Huizi was restricted by his empirical experience of what a gourd ought to be and how it ought to function. When his gourd turned out to be too large to be turned into a dipper and, thus, became pragmatically unwieldy, Huizi smashed it. Huizi could not see in the gourd any potentiality beyond the actuality of the gourd in its everyday, pragmatic function. In short, Huizi was incapable of seeing in the gourd any potentiality that was not already oriented toward predefined ends set in advance by social convention. Huizi had learned how to use a gourd and that was that.

Zhuangzi on the other hand was capable of imaginative drift beyond what had previously been learned about how to use a gourd. For him, the very fact that the gourd was inoperative according to predefined ends meant that he could see the gourd in its singularity, in its particularity. It was no longer a typical gourd, a mere means to a predetermined end. When functionality was subtracted from the equation, Zhuangzi could finally see the gourd beyond what had been previously learned. We might even doubt if Huizi actually saw the gourd at all. Instead, he merely saw his projection of a certain, preset typicality onto the gourd, which thus measured the gourd against a certain standard of what gourds ought to be and what role they ought to play in society.

Drifting away from predefined ends meant that Zhuangzi was capable of seeing the gourd with fresh eyes. Whereas Huizi could only see the gourd as deficient according to his learning, Zhuangzi could see the gourd as overflowing with untapped potentialities for new uses, transforming the gourd into a boat. Thus, Zhuangzi inserts a gap between whatever the singular gourd is and its purported social functionality. The gourd’s potentiality as a singular thing was not absorbed into its role as a dipper. Instead, the potentiality of this singular gourd exceeded such functional reductionism. Rediscovered as a means divorced from a prescribed end (becoming an operative dipper), the gourd’s potentiality could be experienced as such, liberated from subservience to a learned societal norm. Once freed, Zhuangzi was able to take up the remainder of potentiality present in the gourd and dream up new, unprecedented, imaginative uses.

Such drift does not teach students the proper function of things. Instead, it opens up a space and time that is decisively improper. It is certainly the case that Zhuangzi’s proposal would have struck the logical mind of Huizi as ridiculous, if not preposterous. Yet, from Zhuangzi’s perspective, Huizi’s mind remained trapped by the operative logic of learning. Huizi’s imagination is overdetermined by the social function of the gourd, which he has learned, both formally and informally, as the “proper” function. This socially defined function sedimented into the gourd, taking on the appearance of an ontological telos. Yet Zhuangzi reminds the reader that there is no telos, there are only uses for singular things. Despite the obviousness of Zhuangzi’s point, educationally, it is clearly difficult to unlearn what Huizi had learned (and learned well). For Huizi, logic consisted of fitting means and ends together to produce measurable results (how efficiently the gourd could ladle water). But Zhuangzi’s educational protocol represents an opportunity for inoperative learning or a learning that undoes what has been learned in order to experiment with the potentiality that remains when means are divorced from predetermined ends. This is the space and time of educational drift: drifting away from function toward new use.

3.2. Drift as Use of Uselessness

In another encounter between Huizi and Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi stated, “I have a huge tree that people call the Stinktree. The trunk is swollen and gnarled, impossible to align with any level or ruler. The branches are twisted and bent, impossible to align to any T-square or carpenter’s arc. Even if it were growing right in the road, a carpenter would not give it so much as a second glance… You… have this big tree and you worry that it’s useless. How you could loaf and wander, doing a whole lot of nothing there at its side! How far-flung and unfettered you’d be, dozing there beneath it! It will never be cut down by ax or saw. Nothing will harm it. Since it has nothing for which it can be used, what could entrap or afflict it?” [18] (p. 8).

Here, we find a different formulation of inoperative drift. First and foremost, both the gourd and the tree are not the right size or shape as defined by typical functionality. The “Stinktree” is “impossible to align with any level or ruler”, meaning that it is beyond measure and lacking proportion. Importantly, it lacks proportion in relation to the tools of measure and the standards of measurement. Whatever the tree is, it cannot be calculated because the tree’s purported deformities render such calculation inoperative. The tree cannot be perceived as a mere means to an end. No carpenter would ever desire to cut it down and turn the tree into furniture. No artisan can look at the tree and see it as raw material to producing something of value to humans. When Zhuangzi writes that the tree is useless, he means that it is functionless within a human economy of measure and calculation. Its life is so absolutely inoperative that it falls through the cracks of calculative thinking. And for this reason, the tree will live forever, without being bothered!

Whereas the first notion of drift suspended functionality and revealed singularity, in order to open up new use, here, we find a different protocol for drift. The first two movements are the same, but the third drifts in a different direction. What is at stake in the case of the Stinktree is not new use but rather appreciation of the use of uselessness by the tree. The tree enjoys whatever it is, its simple thusness or being as it is. It is not about producing new states or transformations but about quietly and contemplatively living its life as it finds itself. The tree is left to its own devices to experiment with defining the form of its life in absence of the pressure to conform to a strict set of measurements. Without measure, it is beyond threat of being transformed into a means toward an end. Instead, it is released to be its own pure means as whatever it is, whatever shape it might take.

This useless use of itself as an open-ended means is a radically posthuman understanding of use. Notice that use is no longer related to human design. Instead, the tree returns to itself as it is. It is left alone by humans and their calculative use of reason. The tree does not insist on its existence, refusing to partake in human economies. Instead, it simply persists in its being. For this reason, the tree is beyond being destroyed or saved, sacrificed or worshiped. It is simple there, growing this way or that, without regard for human design. And in this way, the tree preserves the use of itself for itself through experimentation with its own uselessness.

And this use of uselessness is contagious. It would seem that the tree’s radical inoperativity attracts others who are equally inoperative. It attracts those who loaf and wander and dream. The tree becomes a gathering point for drifters who meet under its branches. They are not attracted to the tree in order to achieve some kind of end but rather to be released from their ends and join in a collective experimentation with pure means. As Zhuangzi writes, the Course (Dao) is “without definite form” and emerges only through “non-doing” [18] (p. 56). The tree is the place where non-doing can take place, where loafers can loaf or drift around. Perhaps the tree, thus, becomes an original image of the school, which, in Greek, means free time [1]. The tree gathers and provides shelter to those who, like itself, are useless to society, who have nothing but free time on their hands.

The tree is not a teacher. The drifters who gather beneath it do not learn how to be inoperative from the tree. Such lessons cannot be taught directly. Instead, the tree provides a space and time in which the drifters can drift together, study with one another. This is a strange kind of community: one that is not oriented toward shared ends that would otherwise unify their actions. Instead, they share nothing but the aimlessness of the drift that they find themselves caught up in. This is a community of those who do not have a sense of belonging, who do not have vocations that make them socially viable. Instead, they only do/enact their potentiality to do nothing. The community surrounding the Stinktree does not have any sense of clear identity and instead is in a state of constant experimentation with whatever it is. It is an inoperative community that, like the tree, appears without function or direction to those who see the world through the lens of calculative reason. If the tree does not teach, and there is no lesson to be learned here, this does not mean that the anecdote of the Stinktree has no educational meaning. Instead, the tree shifts us toward a radical rethinking of the school as a place to gather in order to study with one another without ends, without the desire for ends, and without a notion of education as salvation, transformation, or development. Instead, education becomes more about sharing a non-doing or actively taking up the non-doing within every doing (or a line of drift).

In short, if there is an educational dimension to Zhuangzi’s analysis of the Stinktree, it is an image of self-study: not of one’s potentiality for becoming or transforming the self into something new but rather of one’s inability or one’s ability to be useless. Vegetation—and in particular, the most deformed and disabused expression of vegetal life—is the ultimate school for such paradoxical forms of aggregated self-study.

3.3. Drift as Deactivation of Learning (Un-Learning)

If the tree defines the space of an inoperative school, then Zhuangzi’s description of the master butcher defines the actions of an inoperative teacher. Zhuangzi writes, “The cook was carving up an ox for King Hui of Liang. Wherever his hand smacked it, wherever his shoulder leaned into it, wherever his foot braced it, wherever his knee pressed it, the thwacking tones of flesh falling from bone would echo, the knife would whiz through with its resonant thwing, each stroke ringing out the perfect note, attuned to the Dance of the Mulberry Grove or the Jingshou Chorus of the ancient sage kings” [18] (p. 29). The butcher then says, “What I love it eh Course, going beyond mere skill. When I first started cutting up oxen, all I saw for three years was oxen, and yet still I was unable to see all there was to see in an ox. But now I encounter it with the imponderable spirit in me rather than scrutinizing it with the eyes. For when the faculties of officiating understanding come to rest, imponderable spirit-like impulses being to stir, relying on the unwrought perforations. Striking into the enormous gaps, they are guided though those huge hollows, going along in accord with what is already there and how it already is. So my knife has never had to cut through the knotted nodes where the warp hits the weave, much less the gnarled joints of bone” [18] (p. 29). The butcher concludes, “Nonetheless, whenever I come to a clustered tangle, realizing that it is difficult to do anything about it, I instead restrain myself as if terrified, until my seeing comes to a complete halt. My activity slows, and the blade moves ever so slightly. Then whoosh! All at once I find the ox already dismembered at my feet like clumps of soil scattered on the ground. I retract the blade and stand there gazing at it all around me, both disoriented and satisfied by it all” [18] (p. 29).

At the beginning, the butcher had to learn a certain set of skills to meet the basic standard for being a butcher. But then, when the skills have become fully internalized, something important happens. The butcher ceases to rely exclusively on his skills. Indeed, his skills become inoperative. Whereas with the gourd, inoperativity meant inventing new use, and with the tree, inoperativity meant embracing nonuse as a use of the self, here, we find a different formulation: no longer using skills and instead being used by (or taken up by) the situation. As the butcher experiments with what is possible in his craft as a butcher, learned skills become less and less useful. Indeed, it is precisely the skills that hold him back! Once the skills are left behind (“faculties of officiating understanding come to rest”), the butcher is no longer a butcher in any conventional sense. Or perhaps we could state this differently: the butcher is no longer a butcher but is not something else either. The butcher is and is not a butcher in equal measure. The skills defining who a butcher is, what a butcher does, and how a butcher functions are held in suspension. Instead, the butcher opens up to an “imponderable spirit-like impulse” that is more than what is called for by the profession. This spirit-like impulse is an intuitive sensitivity that enables the butcher to become receptive toward whatever is called for in the moment. He is sensitive to the potentiality found in the surface of things and willingly gives himself over to this potentiality. The butcher’s function as a butcher is no longer simply to carve but becomes experimental and investigative. Indeed, as the butcher reports, he is often surprised (“disoriented”) about what happens when he lets idle his skills and his predefined, consciously oriented intentionality. He recalls, “…whenever I come to a clustered tangle, realizing that it is difficult to do anything about it, I instead restrain myself as if terrified, until my seeing comes to a complete halt”. He no longer relies on sight, on skills, or on predefined definitions of what one ought to do when facing an obstacle. Importantly, how he handles the situation just seems to happen without a hint of his agency, will, or knowledge intervening in the act. In fact, he says, “All at once I find the ox already dismembered….” It is as if the act happens without his will. He almost suggests he is passive while cutting the ox. Stated differently, the ox seems to cut itself!

As the butcher recounts, in moments of flow, he no longer sees or thinks about what he is doing. And in this moment, something profound happens to his sense of temporality. First, his “activity slows” to the point where it is almost at a standstill. Then, the “blade moves ever so slightly”. It is not the grand gesture that is important but the almost imperceptible gesture that is so small that it disappears into the act without even being noticed by those observing. It is the smallest of gestures that makes all the difference, navigating the particular topology of the ox. Then, finally, there is a resounding “whoosh”, and the ox falls to pieces “all at once”. There is, thus, a shift away from observable skills to imperceptible variations that are responsive to the surface details or feel of the ox’s flesh. To feel these variations in flesh, the blade slows down and moves with great caution and care. Details that would otherwise be glossed over in the need to be efficient and complete a task become clear. And then, as if no time had passed at all, the task is complete. In the blink of the eye, the task completes itself as if it did not even exist as a task in the first place. Just as the butcher is absorbed or taken up in the task, so too the idea of a task as the task is neutralized, disappearing into the tactful navigation of surfaces.

Tasks have a linear temporal structure to them. There is a beginning, middle, and end. The actions undertaken during a task are directed at fulfilling the ends that orient them. Yet with the butcher, a different temporality emerges. The beginning, middle, and end seem to collapse in on themselves. The butcher gets lost in the activity of tracing surfaces, and before he knows it, the end has been reached. Thus, the beginning and end are absorbed into an experimental middle that does not seem to have an end. Only in a moment of forgetting the end and experimenting with small gestures in the middle can the end be, paradoxically, arrived at, almost by accident in a disorienting whoosh. In this sense, the butcher is no longer oriented by and toward ends. Instead, the arrival of the end is shocking. The butcher is not concerned with the completion of the task, which becomes an interruption of an experimentation in what is possible when one dwells in the potentiality of the middle. The action appears to complete itself “all at once” as if the beginning collapses into the end and the end collapses into the beginning, leaving only the experimental middle. If one experiences nothing but the middle, then one cannot assess progress or regress along the way toward the end. The end no longer acts as final cause (or the sake for which something is done, as Aristotle would say). Instead, the end merely appears with a whoosh, all at once. A calculation of development or progress toward the end, therefore, has no meaning for the butcher. When embracing the small gestures of the middle, the butcher cannot calculate where he is in the process. Linear temporality that unfolds toward a certain end is transformed into a rhythmic temporality that traces the movement of knife over flesh through a series of impromptu and unplanned/unanticipated twists and turns.

The butcher is adrift in three senses. First, he drifts away from learned skills into uncharted territory. As the butcher drifts away from such skills, he embraces a state of inoperative learning or education that does not negate or destroy the aforementioned skills so much as frees them from their standardization and instrumentalization under learning logics. As Zhuangzi argues, he has escaped earthly knowledge. His actions, thus, might appear strange or unfamiliar to the observer who would be trained in the proper approach to butchery. Second, he drifts into the medium itself, giving himself over to the sinuous textures and flows of muscle over bone. As the butcher is inoperative through his practice, so too the ox’s carcass stops being “meat” and becomes an occasion for exploring the ontology of flesh. And third, the butcher drifts away from clock time into an alternative temporality of small moments and gestures that loses any sense of a beginning, middle, and an end. In this altered state, the butcher encounters that which falls out of clock time: a temporality that, through lived experience, cannot be organized in terms of linear narratives of development, progress, or growth.

In relation to educational thematics, the butcher might be viewed as an inoperative teacher. His apprentice would not learn how to properly cut the ox. Because of the small, particular, and precise gestures of the butcher’s blade as it explores the flesh of the ox, the apprentice would never learn generalizable skills (human knowledge). Nor would the apprentice receive training in how to meet professional deadlines that are output driven and economically motivated. The butchery would simply take however long it would take to cut the ox and would get lost in the small gestures of the blade as the gestures trace out the fine details defining the singularities of the surface features of the ox. This would be a decisively unprofessional form of education that does not respect the skills or the time of professional tasks. Indeed, the butcher as a teacher would insist on un-learning what the apprentice had previously learned in order to open up a space and time for unpractical practice with the potentialities of knife and flesh. As Zhuangzi writes, the Course (Dao) cannot be taught through “meditation” (si), “reflection” (lu), “knowing” (zhi), “following” (kong), or by any method in general [18] (pp. 1–28). Instead, the Course of the butcher is beyond skill acquisition and presupposes neutralization of what one has previously learned, opting instead for a form of studying that is in excess of professionalization (and always undoes the codes of conduct and standards of practice set by any given profession, including butchery).

4. Conclusions: Inoperative Educational Drift

I can now summarize the three distinct notions of inoperative drift at work in these three anecdotes from Zhuangzi. First, we have a gourd that appears useless, but for this very reason, detaches itself (in its singularity) from everyday ends so as to produce new potential uses. Second, we find a tree that simply embraces whatever it is in its uselessness in order to rediscover a use of the uselessness for its own self-preservation. And finally, Zhuangzi offers us a butcher as an inoperative butcher or a butcher that becomes so involved in the adventure of cutting the ox that he loses any sense of an end orienting his work or any sense of efficiency related to his instrumental task. He is not outside of time but rather wrapped up in the middle, drifting along its surface contours, oblivious to any professional duties to his clients or to a regular, systematic, organized workflow that defines the parameters of an assigned task. When taken together, we argue that this is a rather compelling description of several important dimensions of inoperative educational drift.

For instance, the school is a place of free time from utility, functionality, and the pressure to be socially or economically viable and productive. On this reading, the Stinktree becomes the original school. Within the school, studiers can turn their attention to the singularity of things in order to suspend their functionality and open them up for new potential uses. The teacher is not there to instruct lessons and produce evidence of learning. Instead of teaching how to butcher, the butcher renders inoperative the standards of his profession, promoting drift from what has been learned and drift toward what cannot be learned (Dao). Drift from ends thus unites the three notions of inoperativity, pressing up against notions of education as the calculation of the relations and proportion between means and their end.

This analysis of Zhuangzi’s writings does not belong to the East any more than it belongs to the West (and their respective traditions). Indeed, there might be some who argue that I have projected too many Western categories onto ancient Eastern concepts. Or others might worry that some kind of cultural appropriation has happened behind the scenes. Yet these readings miss what is possible if we take up the drift of thought which is neither inside nor outside this dichotomy: a useless and inoperative space that joins the East and West together as much as it separates them. This point of contact is radically inoperative both in terms of content (we can discover nothing other than a useless remnant in this no man’s land) and form (we cannot calculate out this inoperative zone’s final coordinates on any map (territorial or conceptual)). Perhaps, in the end, what the essay expresses is a form of cross-cultural writing and thinking that is not about dialogue between two separate traditions (which always seems to propose one as the corrective for the other) and more of a contact between that which these traditions share: a meager remnant of a powerless and inoperative movement that prefers not to stay put, do what it is told, and be assigned as property to this or that representation of East vs. West. And with this methodological reflection, we suddenly and surprisingly find ourselves at the end, slightly disoriented, with the ox on the ground, cut into fine pieces.