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Study and the Aesthetics of Hesitation. A Reply to Fern Thompsett and Joris
Vlieghe

Article in Studies in Philosophy and Education · June 2023

DOI: 10.1007/s11217-023-09887-3

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Studies in Philosophy and Education
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-023-09887-3

Study and the Aesthetics of Hesitation. A Reply to Fern

Thompsett and Joris Vlieghe

Hans Schildermans1

Accepted: 10 February 2023

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2023

If study does not name the activity of the solitary scholar, buried among books in the depths
of a library, but a collective and inventive practice of thinking in and with a world that is
always in the making, how much space is then left for individuality that goes against the
dictates of the collective consensus, that is idiotic in the sense that it slows down where
common sense would rashly jump to conclusions? The issues raised by Fern Thompsett and
Joris Vlieghe in their reviews of my book forced me to think about this relation between the
wayward nature of study and the consent required for political organization to be efficacious.
Drawing on Deleuze’s philosophy of sense, Joris Vlieghe has problematized the collec-
tive nature of study as I have described and conceptualized it in the book. The danger of
thinking study as a collective event is indeed that it gets diluted by commonsensical habits
of thought, or worse, that it becomes polluted by ‘dirty talk.’ This concept of thinking stems
from a deep concern about the end of original thought where any collective discussion
simply boils down to a repetition of what we all already know, where genuine problemati-
zation gives way to superficial interrogation, where the answers are already implied in the
questions, and where we just accept what goes without saying (see Snir 2020). In Vlieghe’s
Deleuzian account of thought, thinking always goes against the grain and irritates common
sense. Thinking, or better real thinking, is always a creative act that brings something radi-
cally new into the world and as a result grants the thinker a kind of individuality (style) that
opposes and upsets the ordinariness of common sense. Fern Thompsett, writing more from
her experience with collectives of activists and the free university-movement, is both in
sympathy with and vigilant of the mobilization that is risked by according such a significant
position to collectivity.
While facing Thompsett and Vlieghe’s critical comments, however, I want to bear in
mind a constraint put forward by Isabelle Stengers, who provided the main theoretical inspi-
ration for the book. This constraint has to do with the relation between thinking and com-
mon sense and makes her crucially diverge from her mentor, Gilles Deleuze. She writes
that few statements have been so badly received as Leibniz’s belief that philosophy should

Hans Schildermans
hans.schildermans@univie.ac.at
1
Department of Education, University of Vienna, Sensengasse 3a, A-1090 Vienna, Austria

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 H. Schildermans

not have as its ideal the “reversal of established sentiments” (Leibniz as quoted in Stengers
2000, p. 15). While recasting philosophy as diplomacy, she chooses to adhere to this state-
ment by giving it a particular technical interpretation. If diplomacy is about respecting
established sentiments or respecting the commonplaces of common sense, this should not
be read in a moralistic or naively optimistic way as if respecting each other’s opinions
would lead to more mutual understanding and appreciation. Rather, referring to Leibniz,
Stengers argues that “[i]f his aim was to ‘respect’ established sentiment, it seems to me, it
was much as a mathematician ‘respects’ the constraints that give meaning and interest to his
problem” (Ibid.). Contrasting the martyrdom of the truth-teller—who speaks the truth at the
risk of being sentenced to death—with Leibnizian diplomacy, Stengers aims to tie together
thinking and becoming by assigning to “the statement of what one believes to be true the
responsibility not to hinder becoming: not to collide with established sentiments, so as to try
to open them to what their established identity led them to refuse, combat, misunderstand”
(Ibid.).
It is in this spirit and with this concern in mind that I formulate this response to Thomp-
sett and Vlieghe’s generous reading and generative questioning. I will make use of their
insightful suggestions to give further consideration to the collective nature of study and the
risks involved by elaborating on the aesthetic quality of study on the one hand and the tem-
poral dimension of studying on the other hand. I will first propose a particular understanding
of aesthetics that is in line with my concept of study as a relational practice. Next, I will
develop this aesthetics as one of hesitation which brings me to the temporal dimension of
study and its relation to political activism. In combining these two lines of thinking, my aim
is to briefly articulate the educational and political potential of study in terms of an aesthet-
ics of hesitation.
In order to develop the aesthetic quality of study more thoroughly, it is important to dif-
ferentiate between two broad understandings of aesthetics, only one of which will prove to
be fruitful to our endeavor. The coming into being of modern aesthetics as a disciplinary
branch of academic philosophy can indeed, as suggested by Sehgal (2018), be interpreted
as the flipside of the development of modern natural science. Whereas the latter would deal
with the objective inquiry into primary qualities of the natural world, the former would
concern itself with the subjective experience of that natural world as it appears to human
beings and how that experience is being expressed in works of art. In this reading, aesthet-
ics as a specialist academic discourse would be the byproduct of “the bifurcation of nature”
(Whitehead as quoted in Sehgal 2018, p. 117) and relegate feeling entirely to the realm of
human experience, thereby denying the fact that even scientific experiments are to a certain
extent predicated on the production of a particular experience of the world, in which both
human and other-than-human beings (e.g., particles, bacteria, minerals) participate. In that
sense, “the bifurcation of nature, understood as a cultural habit of thought, desensitizes or
even anaesthetizes, makes us feel less rather than more than what is given in experience”
(Ibid., emphasis in original). In this understanding, it seems rather undesirable to develop
an aesthetics of study as it would endorse and support the separation of knowledge from its
pragmatic value in the world which would amount to the anesthetics or matter-of-factness
as claimed by modern science.
Instead of this ‘specialistic’ understanding of aesthetics, I will try to answer the question
by following Whitehead and the way in which he generalizes aesthetics to the point that it
becomes the foundation of philosophy, rather than a disciplinary branch of it. With a nod to

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Study and the Aesthetics of Hesitation. A Reply to Fern Thompsett and…

Kant, Whitehead characterizes his own philosophy as taking the form of a “critique of pure
feeling,” which would make the other critiques—including the one that hailed aesthetics
as a philosophical domain—superfluous (Whitehead as quoted in Shaviro 2012, p. 46). Put
differently, the meaning conferred on aesthetics here refers back to its etymological roots
in the ancient Greek aesthesis, which means sensation or perception in general. Important
to note is that this is not an anthropocentric notion of feeling that would make the human
being capable of feeling a world that itself lacks this capacity. Trees, for instance, feel the
wind as it rustles their leaves, as does the bird flying away in search of safer shelter. Feel-
ing, this aesthetic experience, thus becomes the basic element within Whitehead’s relational
ontology. Commenting on Whitehead’s rendering of aesthetics, Shaviro emphasizes that
“[a]esthetics is the mark of what Whitehead calls our concern for the world, and for entities
in the world” (Ibid., emphasis in original). Feeling is, in other words, the glue that holds the
different entities in the world together and provides the medium for their mutual and interde-
pendent becoming. In that sense, “aesthetic designates first of all a production of existence
that concerns one’s capacity to feel.” It is “the capacity to be affected by the world, not in
the mode of subjected interaction, but rather in a double creation of meaning, of oneself and
the world” (Stengers 2000, p. 148, emphasis in original).
If aesthetics names feeling as a relational and transformative process in the Whiteheadian
sense, then it must be part of any ecological account of any practice, including any practice
of study. The ecology of study as proposed and developed throughout my book therefore
presupposes an aesthetics of study, because every ecology has to assume a theory of sense
perception. What then does this mean in regards to Vlieghe’s suggestion that “studiers also
need to cultivate taste and develop style” (see Vlieghe, this issue, emphasis in original)?
Disentangling taste and style from the problematic situation in relation to which this taste
and style have to be cultivated, respectively developed, however, risks a return to a some-
what older idea of the university where it would educate the future citizen in a way that this
citizen would become representative of a national elite, distinguished by taste and style, that
lower social classes could aspire too—Humboldt and Newman have formulated such ideas
for the German Bildungsbürger and the British gentlemen respectively (see Readings 1997).
Although I would not want to equate the taste and style of the German and British national
elites to the style of the French pop quizzes (the ones Deleuze hated to listen to on the radio,
as mentioned by Vlieghe in his reflection on the aesthetics of thinking), I am reluctant to
understand taste and style as independent aesthetic qualities, even if it is “a not-yet existing
taste and style [the studiers] still can and have to develop” (see Vlieghe, this issue).
Taste indeed, from an ecological point of view, is the prerequisite of survival in an envi-
ronment that can signify nourishment or poison. One must taste in order to know what sus-
tains or kills, and therefore it is not sufficient for taste to come as a not-yet. Put differently, to
taste means to take a risk, but also to cultivate a capacity for discerning, for paying attention.
This discernment is, however, not that of the distanced critic—bear in mind the etymology
of critique in krinein, which means discerning—but an active and engaged process that
inevitably leads to transformation, not in the least of those who discern or taste. Taste there-
fore cannot be cultivated independent from the problem that would make the invention of
that taste possible and necessary. A similar argument could be made with regards to style.
Vlieghe regrets that in the book “[t]he stress is more on the fact that we need to invent, con-
struct and work out arrangements that are not naturally given, rather than on the quality of
the experience that might or must come along thanks to these arrangements” (see Vlieghe,

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this issue). Although I agree that more attention is paid to technical arrangements and mate-
rial artefacts than to the experiences facilitated by these arrangements and artefacts, it is
important to stress that the experiences are crucially dependent on these arrangements and
artefacts. Bearing in mind Vlieghe’s example of the carpenter, who cultivates taste and style
in relation to the wood he is working with, it is impossible to disentangle the carpenter’s
style from the form of the wood as both are the effect of a reciprocal articulation: the car-
penter shapes the wood as much as the wood shapes the carpenter. This is why it is vital
to reclaim the university as an universitas, where universitas does not mean a collective or
association in general, but a collective of craftworkers engaged in the craft, both technical
and material, of studying. Style is then the result of a craft, always to be invented anew, that
reciprocally ties together the studiers and their problem.
Nevertheless, on a more fundamental level, Vlieghe’s suggestion raises the question of
why is it so crucial to insist on the importance of technical and material artifices? Clarifica-
tion of this question will allow for articulating the educational quality of the aesthetics of
study more precisely. There are obvious resonances between the art of problematization in
study practices and Dewey’s political-educational theory of inquiry. However, on one point
they fundamentally differ. For Dewey, a problematic situation already implies a particular
coordination of points of view around a situation that is itself unstable, but therefore not
problematized yet. The indeterminate situation precedes the problematic situation. Prob-
lematization, for Dewey, is always to a certain extent a method of stabilizing what until
then was indeterminate (see Schildermans 2022). The assumption here is that indeterminate
situations ‘just’ open up, and that it is via inquiry that these situations are turned into prob-
lematic situations which already contain the germ of a solution in themselves. At this point,
I diverge from the pragmatist theory that indeterminate situations ‘just’ happen and become
immediately part of our experience of the world. Although I consent to a cosmological
pluralism of different worlds in the making, all unpredictable, as advocated by William
James and as evidenced by the many instances of climate change, I contend that there are
many different ways we have developed to become unaffected by the transformations of the
world. For example, in terms of climate change, it seems that both the matter-of-factness
with which objective scientific truths are proclaimed, and the self-righteousness with which
climate change deniers dismiss these truths, both eliminate the existential dimension of
these challenges for living together on a damaged planet and thereby eradicate our aesthetic
capacity to be affected by them.
In that sense, critique seems to have become an anesthetic that estranges us from the
world and turns us into distanced spectators that are themselves not implied in the ongoing
transformations of that world—and this seems to be true for critical scientists as much as
for conspiracy theorists, climate change deniers and populist politicians (see Latour 2004).
In a most ironic way, critique—Marx’s antidote against the intoxications of ideology—has
turned into a most powerful anesthetic, a new opiate of the masses. Studying, and the vari-
ous arts, techniques and materials involved, has then to be envisaged as a manner of destabi-
lizing discussions that have run into dead ends by provoking an indeterminacy, an interstice,
that denaturalizes sedimented habits of thought and resensitizes us for the issue at hand, so
that it can make us think again. This experience of hesitation constitutes a vital dimension of
the aesthetics of study because it discloses an experiential space where the link between past
and future is suspended and where the future appears again in terms of possibility, rather
than necessity or probability.

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Study and the Aesthetics of Hesitation. A Reply to Fern Thompsett and…

This notion of hesitation is congruous with Bergson’s philosophy of time as slowdown

or delay. “Time is this very hesitation, or it is nothing” (Bergson as quoted in Rutgeerts
2021, p. 255). It is only because there is hesitation, that time is experienced as possibility.
Thompsett’s remark about the temporal dimension of decolonization is in this regard very
apt. Often, decolonization is conceptualized in terms of the political economy of land pos-
session (e.g., Tuck and Yang), or in terms of epistemology and the occupation of knowledge
and the imagination (e.g., Mignolo, Santos). Hesitation comes forward as an important ele-
ment in any decolonial tactics that aim to undo the means-ends logic that fixes the future
and instrumentalizes the present to make it into a pathway towards that future. This logic,
to a certain extent, tends to lay claim on the decolonial imagination as well, and therefore
it seems all the more appropriate to duly arrange practical experiments that make studious
moments of hesitation possible as part of any decolonial struggle, if it is not only to have a
political significance, narrowly understood, but an educational one as well. This suggests
that any decolonial struggle has as its aim not just the transformation of the world, but also
to give that world the power to transform us, to become an ingredient in our way of thinking
by making us hesitate instead of conclude, conscribe, call to arms.
For Stengers, the notion of obligation was a manner of transforming the epistemologi-
cal contradiction of realism versus relativism into a contrast—a constructivist theory of
‘the truth of the relative’ as she called it, referring to Deleuze. In a similar vein, hesitation
is a concept that has the power to transform an ethico-political contradiction—affirmation
versus critique—into a contrast (see Hoppe 2020). Indeed, it does not negate the possibil-
ity of political engagement altogether, neither does it downplay the importance of such
engagement. At the same time, however, it offers an antidote against the risks of political
mobilization. As such, it has to play a crucial role in satisfying the requirement set out by
both Thompsett and Vlieghe, namely, to articulate more precisely the significance of com-
mon sense (including its dangers) in my characterization of study. I have tried to do so by
further developing the aesthetic quality of study and to conceptualize this quality in terms
of hesitation. For me, it was important to avoid two risks. First, there is the obvious risk that
looms in every collective process, namely the development of what Arendt would call mob
mentality—an all too strong collective identification that ultimately asphyxiates thinking
and bans the rat and the renegade. At the same time, however, I wanted to avoid the oppo-
site risk, namely the Freudian narcissism of small differences that leads to overemphasizing
the distinctiveness that comes with taste and style, at least as capacities that set apart the
maverick from the mob.
The collectivity produced in study practices, and the common sense (or perhaps more
apt, common sense-making) which activates that collectivity, cannot be conceived as a col-
lectivity based on identification or conformity, neither can it be conceived as just the combi-
nation of all too personal tastes and styles. Rather, the collectivity of study emerges as “the
partial, fragile, ongoing, and unfinished weaving of a tremorous form of togetherness that
obtains thanks to, and not in spite of, divergence” (Savransky 2021, p. 68). If the efficacy
of any anesthetic is either to mobilize us and to become conscripts of the collective, or to
infatuate ourselves with our narcissist critical distance from that collective, study makes us
capable again of collectively paying attention to a situation that makes us hesitate and think;
and this is indeed the tantalizing effect of a particular aesthetics—always made possible by
the presence of material and technical artifices—of hesitation. Therefore, it is impossible to
study alone, and studiers are always dependent on matters that make them hesitate. These

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 H. Schildermans

matters are of course not limited to study materials, but also include the generative questions
of colleagues that were so generous to take the time to formulate these questions.

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