Education as Free Use: Giorgio Agamben on StudiousPlay, Toys, and the Inoperative Schoolhouse

Tyson E. Lewis

� Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013

Abstract In this essay, I argue that the work of Giorgio Agamben provides us with a

theory of studious play which cuts across many of the categories that polarize educational

thought. Rather than either ritualized testing or constructivist playfulness, Agamben pro-

vides a model of what he refers to as studious play—a practice which suspends the logic of

both ritual and play. In order to explore this notion of studious play, I first articulate

Agamben’s fleeting remarks on the topic with an important problematic found in his early,

literary work: transmission. If ritual transmits cultural traditions to ensure continuity with

the past, and play as constructivist invention makes such transmission impossible, then

studious play transmits transmissibility itself as a pure potentiality. Studious play

accomplishes this peculiar educational task by suspending without destroying traditional

things: laws, signs, and so on. I end the essay with a consideration of the ontological status

of suspended things, arguing that they are transformed into toys via the action of study.

Finally, I give a literary example of studious play found in Robert Walser’s novel Jakobvon Gunten in which the school itself is imagined to be a kind of toy.

Keywords Play � Testing � Ritual � Potentiality � Study � Giorgio Agamben � Toy

Beyond the Dialectic of Ritual and Play

There is a fracture defining education that can be traced back to Plato’s Republic. When

discussing childhood education, the character of Socrates argues in Book III that ‘‘we must

subject them [children] to labors, pains, and contests’’ (413d) in order to observe key

character traits revealing the special nature of the child. The description continues: ‘‘Like

those who lead colts into noise and tumult to see if they’re afraid, we must expose our

young people to fears and pleasures, testing them more thoroughly than gold is tested by

fire’’ (413d). Through a battery of tests, the potentiality of the child will actualize itself,

enabling the teacher to determine the student’s exact nature. In this sense, testing becomes

T. E. Lewis (&)Montclair State University, Montclair, NJ, USAe-mail: lewist@mail.montclair.edu

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Stud Philos EducDOI 10.1007/s11217-013-9365-4

a kind of rite of passage, the child’s first entrance into the division of labor that defines the

ideal harmony of the city-state. The trial by fire appears all the more powerful when told

through Plato’s myth of the three metals, which divides the future workforce into gold,

silver, and bronze, each with their attending attributes and particular qualities. The child,

like metal at a blacksmith’s shop, must be submitted to fire in order to determine his or her

properties—properties which necessarily correspond to certain social and economic roles

within the city-state. Thus education becomes a form of ritualized testing, a gauntlet which

children must endure in order to make manifest their potentiality in a determinable form.

Yet later in the same text, Socrates returns to the issue of early childhood education, this

time from a radically different perspective. In relation to teaching the highest levels of

mathematics and dialectics, Socrates states, ‘‘all the preliminary education required for

dialectic must be offered to the future rulers in childhood, and not in the shape of com-

pulsory learning either’’ (536d). Testing through labor, pains, and contests should not be

allowed because ‘‘no free person should learn anything like a slave. Forced bodily labor

does no harm to the body, but nothing taught by force stays in the soul’’ (536e). In

contradistinction to his earlier claim concerning the priority of ritualized testing, here

Socrates suggests to educators: ‘‘don’t use force to train the children in these subjects; use

play instead. That way you’ll also see better what each of them is naturally fitted for’’

(536e–537). The relation between playing and testing remains obscure throughout this

work. It would seem that testing is given a certain educational priority—a necessary

technology for determining who is fit to rule—and that play only emerges later as a specific

pedagogical practice for higher order mathematical thinking. In this sense, play is reserved

for those who are lucky enough to be born with golden souls and capable of reaching the

highest levels of the dialectic. Yet at the same time, it is clear that Socrates encourages

some form of play in order to determine ‘‘what each of them is naturally fitted for.’’ Thus

play is integral to the evaluative process itself. Indeed, it would make little sense to submit

the child to harsh testing if, as Plato suggests, play more easily and directly manifests the

soul of the child. Either way, my main point is that a problem emerges here which

educational philosophy has inherited and passed down throughout the centuries: the

ambiguous relation between rituals of testing and the freedom of play.

If, for Plato, ritual and play hang together—no matter how tenuously or awkwardly—in

schooling today we see a sharp separation of the two. On the one hand, we have the ritual

of standardization and high stakes testing. Perhaps the most earnest warning against such

ritualized testing is provided by Ivan Illich who argues that institutionalized schooling acts

like a modernized, secular church, full of rituals, auras, and mystical incantations which

have little to do with actual education and everything to do with preserving the sanctity of

this most cherished institution through testing, accreditation, and graduation ceremonies.

Illich writes, ‘‘The school system today performs the threefold function common to

powerful churches throughout history. It is simultaneously the repository of society’s myth,

the institutionalization of that myth’s contradictions, and the locus of the ritual which

reproduces and veils the disparities between myth and reality’’ (1970, p. 37). Here the

school, with its hidden curriculum, becomes an institution of mystification, a ritual per-

formance whose outcome is addiction to compulsive teaching and thus passive submission

to an external authority—the teacher or, as Plato might argue, the golden soul of the

philosopher king—who acts as a ‘‘priest’’ looking out for the flock. The net result: ‘‘School

makes alienation preparatory to life, thus depriving education of reality and work of

creativity. School prepares for the alienating institutionalization of life by teaching the

need to be taught’’ (Ibid, p. 47). Stated differently, the major effect of schooling is the

‘‘progressive underdevelopment of self- and community-reliance’’ (Ibid, p. 3)—a removal

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of education from an immanence with social life as such. Masschelein and Simons (2010)

add another important dimension to this argument. For them, schools function as a form of

secular baptism that offers children a Logo or orientation for entering a specific world.

Thus baptism transforms the child into a ‘‘not-yet’’ who ‘‘must-be’’ (by adopting a certain

language, style, and set of cultural norms and values). The logic of ‘‘must-be’’ is the result

of prioritizing ritual baptism as a necessary (rather than contingent) process of childhood

development, one that always sacrifices what remains of ‘‘not-yet.’’

On the other hand, we have theories of free play such as those represented by A.S.

Neill’s notorious Summerhill School in which play is the only worthwhile educational

activity. Famously, Neill once wrote, ‘‘Summerhill today (1971) is in essentials what it was

when founded in 1921. Self-government for the pupils and staff, freedom to go to lessons

or stay away, freedom to play for days or weeks or years if necessary, freedom from any

indoctrination whether religious or moral or political, freedom from character moulding’’

(1992, p. 3). On this view, school ritual is a form of indoctrination and is an obstacle to

maintaining the radical freedom and individuality of the students—a freedom that defies

any notion of Platonic predestination. For Neill, ‘‘the evils of civilization are due to the fact

that no child has ever had enough play’’ (Ibid, p. 38). By tapping into the instinctive ‘‘play-

drive’’ (Ibid) of children, Summerhill allows individual freedom to flourish, setting the

grounds for personal happiness through the encouragement of free play. We see the

influence on Summerhill on more contemporary approaches to play as an ‘‘(un)curricu-

lum’’ in the work of Dinger and Johnson (2011). Such pedagogies are direct attacks against

the overly-ritualized formalism of schools, and while progressive educators might not be as

drastic as Neill and abolish all ritual performance for the radical liberty of free play, they

would undoubtedly argue that play (in some form) is a necessary corrective to an over-

emphasis on testing in contemporary public schools. Under pressure to increase test scores

and measurable progress, schools are drastically cutting back on recess, reducing many play-

based classroom activities, and demolishing playgrounds to make room for more school

buildings, trailers, or sport fields in k-12 all in the name of educational efficiency (Olfman

2003). The marginalization of play has shocking results including measurable decreases in

brain and muscular development, communication, problem solving, social skills, creativity,

and an increase in violence, health risks such as childhood obesity, and ADHD (Chmelynski

2006; Lauer 2011). The ritualization of education through schooling as a secularized baptism

has turned its back on the relation between education and play, squeezing it out of curricula

and replacing it with skill and drill task-oriented activities. Play ceases to have any educa-

tional value and becomes a private affair rather than a public concern.

In this essay I will argue that the work of Giorgio Agamben provides us with a new

vantage point from which to view this age-old problematic. Rather than either ritualized

testing or the absolute liberation of free play, Agamben provides a model of what he refers

to as studious play—a practice which articulates while also separates ritual and play. When

one engages in studious play, the things and signs of the world are suspended and opened

up for free use. If ritual schooling—as social baptism—transmits cultural traditions and

free play refuses to transmit anything beyond the event of play itself, then studious play

transmits transmissibility. In other words, the impossibility of transmitting this or that

tradition (as in free play) turns back on itself as a positive having of that which is missing:

a pure potentiality for transmission as such. In this sense, studious play transforms sacred

things and signs (with specific functions, roles, meanings) into toys (which lack any sense

of destination). The attentiveness of studious play is therefore a kind of profanation of the

baptism of education by opening up the studier to the potentiality of the world to be ratherthan it has become.

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In what follows, I will first elaborate on the complex notion of transmissibility that is

unique to studious play, and that marks it off from either ritual baptism or free play. This

move means returning to Agamben’s theory of studious play in light of his equally

important theme of transmission—two aspects of his work that have thus far not been

overtly articulated in either his own writing or in the vast secondary literature which is now

appearing on Agamben both inside and outside the field of education. While education has

been bifurcated into either transmission of tradition (through the ritual baptism of testing)

or the impossibility of transmission (through the ludic nature of free play), studious play

heals the laceration by proposing attentiveness to the potentiality of things and signs

suspended from any determinate use. Second, I will explore the educational and onto-

logical value of the toy through a juxtaposition of Agamben’s reflections on the nature of

toys and Heidegger’s theory of equipment. What will become clear through this analysis is

how there is no room for toys in Heidegger’s fundamental ontology as it stands in Beingand Time. Although Heidegger failed to theorize toys, we can use his basic language of

fundamental ontology to help elucidate the nature of toys. In other words, Agamben helps

bring to the foreground the relationship between toys and studious play, but it is only

through a ‘‘playful’’ appropriation of Heidegger that the exact nature of the toy can come to

light. I will conclude with a provocative literary example of studious play found in the

novel Jakob von Gunten by Robert Walser. What is unique about this novel is that it

illustrates what is at stake when education is reconceptualized as an experience of studious

play and when the schoolhouse is profaned as a kind of educational toy.

Agamben and Education: A Missed Opportunity

At first, it may appear that Giorgio Agamben would endorse free play as a solution to the

ritualization of high stakes testing. As opposed to cultural petrification through schooling

as a ritual performance or social baptism, Agamben, in several important passages through

his many philosophical essays and books, turns to play as a possible alternative. ‘‘The

passage from the sacred to the profane can, in fact, also come about by means of an entirely

inappropriate use (or rather, reuse) of the sacred: namely play’’ (2007b, p. 75). To play is to

neglect to follow the rules of the ritual and to liberate things from their ‘‘proper use’’

according to a certain, predetermined Logos. The result of such play is ‘‘a new dimension

of use, which children and philosophers give to humanity’’ (Ibid). In this sense, play is the

exact opposite of ritual: ‘‘Ritual fixes and structures the calendar; play, on the other hand,

though we do not yet know how and why, changes and destroys it’’ (2007a, p. 77). In the

profane time of play, ‘‘man frees himself from sacred time and ‘forgets’ it in human time’’

(Ibid, p. 79). Thus play seems to embody a solution to petrification found in the ritual

performance of schools and attending testing regimes.

Much of the secondary literature on Agamben has played-up the role of play in his

philosophy, finding in play a kind of utopianism (both in a positive and negative sense).

For instance, Catherine Mills argues that for Agamben, play offers a messianic time of

redemption which ‘‘can also be used to free humanity in relation to economics, law, and so

on’’ (2009, p. 125). Play, in Mills’ reading, offers Agamben ‘‘a means of resistance to the

conditions of the current ‘extreme phase’ of capitalism, and most particularly to the

spectacular cultural regime of consumption that is integral to it’’ (Ibid, p. 126). Mas-

schelein and Simons (2010) agree with this reading, emphasizing that play liberates objects

for free use and as such is essential for a coming education, or an education without

specific destination. Joanne Faulkner has likewise focused on Agamben’s theory of play,

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only this time less as a utopian alternative to capitalism and more as an overly romantic

fantasy of childhood innocence. It is worthwhile citing Faulkner at length here:

…the child signifies potentiality for Agamben as a purely creative, experimental, and

speculative way of being, without which nothing could come to pass into actuality….

Yet [this description] still conforms to a disturbing tendency to signify in the child a

separation from the remainder of the community. Agamben evokes the figure of the

child at play, in Infancy and History, in order to represent the possibility of a break

from the metaphysics of everyday life. Through play, the child plucks objects from

their historico-material context, transfiguring everyday things into toys…. Yet, in so

doing, we might understand Agamben to recapitulate the very same gesture that

places the child within a conceptual zone of exclusion. (2010, p. 210)

In this passage, Faulkner argues that the very gesture of play granted to the child merely

replicates the very schism between bare life and the life of the citizen subject which

Agamben attempts to breach. Stated differently, the ‘‘innocence’’ of childish play becomes

a convenient fantasy for projecting adult anxieties concerning the fragility of their powers

and their worlds onto the other.

Although these two readings of play—positive and negative—are interesting, they both

miss the central point of Agamben’s argument. The human being is not a homo ludens but

a ‘‘homo profanes’’ (de la Durantaye 2008, p. 27). In Profanations it is not play as such that

is endorsed. Following his analysis of play, Agamben immediately states the following: ‘‘It

[profanation] is the sort of use that Benjamin must have had in mind when he wrote of

Kafka’s The New Attorney that the law that is no longer applied but only studied is the gate

to justice’’ (2007b, p. 76). Commenting further on Benjamin’s reflections on Kafka,

Agamben continues,

In the Kafka essay, the enigmatic image of a law that is studied but no longer

practiced corresponds, as a sort of remnant, to the unmasking of mythico-juridical

violence effected by pure violence. There is, therefore, still a possible figure of law

after its nexus with violence and power has been deposed, but it is a law that no

longer has force or application, like the one in which the ‘new attorney,’ leafing

through ‘our old books,’ buries himself in study, or like the one that Foucault may

have had in mind when he spoke of a ‘new law’ that has been freed from all

discipline and all relation to sovereignty. (2005, p. 63)

Suspended, the law that is studied is deactivated, no longer in force, and thus open to play.

In this sense, it is not play but rather the relation between play and study that is most

important. Summarizing, Agamben writes, ‘‘And this studious play is the passage that

allows us to arrive at that justice that one of Benjamin’s posthumous fragments defines as

state of the world in which the world appears as a good that absolutely cannot be

appropriated or made juridical’’ (Ibid, p. 63). Studious play is therefore neither simply free

play nor ritual but rather the zone of indistinction that lies between the two.

In this sense, we can use Agamben’s theory of play, ritual, and studious play to return to

a central question that concerns many of Agamben’s early texts: how is transmission of

culture possible in an age that is ‘‘post-historical’’? Here I would like to suggest that the

discourses and practices of ritualized testing concern themselves with the transmission ofspecific content and skills. Indeed, ritual testing concerns the reproduction of the com-

munity through socialization of students into the Logos that defines a particular identity:

the identity of the worker/consumer within a global market. This model of learning con-

cerns the maintenance of values and norms in the name of perpetual progress, perpetual

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profits, and perpetual growth. Transmission of a particular Logos, in this sense, submits

potentiality to the tyranny of the old, leaving no space for strangers and newcomers to

introduce the possibility of the new. Ironically, in a capitalist society that privileges the

continual disruptions of the market, the turn back to high-stakes testing as an apparatus of

transmission speaks to an unstated anxiety concerning the ungrounded grounds of a

community estranged from itself. The more playful capitalism destroys the past in the

name of infinite progress toward absolute productivity and profitability and the power of

the entrepreneurial will produces the world for its own consumption, the more the edu-

cational system reverts back to lost rituals of high-stakes testing. Thus the entrepreneurial

will of the capitalist subject suffers a peculiar educational negation of the will, or sub-

mission of the will to the authority of a tradition that no longer exists and a ritual that has

lost its essential meaning as a focal practice. Testing is a continual search for the authority

of certain signs, laws, and customs to guarantee the unity of meaning, the certainty of

plans, and the rightness of virtues that have lost their authority under capitalism’s ludic

propulsion. Testing, in this light, is oddly anachronistic, a repetition that is not a solution to

the problem of capitalism so much as one more symptom.

Free play on the other hand seems to offer a model of education which is based on

nothing more than the accumulation of events or instances without any connection to the

past. In this sense, free play suggests the impossibility of transmission. Students live in the

perpetual present of their own concerns cut off from the past or the future, exposed to

moments that are free-floating. The child constructs knowledge through the projection of

his or her creative will (or as Neill would say, the play-drive) onto the material content of

the world. In this sense, the player is akin to Agamben’s analysis of the man without

content, or artist whose only real muse is his or her own willfulness. Agamben observes,

‘‘According to current opinion, all of man’s doing—that of the artist and the craftsman as

well as that of the workman and the politician—is praxis, that is, manifestation of a will

that produces a concrete effect’’ (1999, p. 68). We can see the prodigious emphasis on

praxis in the aesthetic theory of Nietzsche, where the artist is a Will to Power, or even in

Marx, where the essence of the human is productive labor. Summarizing a long trajectory

in Western culture that has eclipsed poiesis with a biological notion of willful action,

Agamben writes, ‘‘The point of arrival of Western aesthetics is a metaphysics of the will,

that is, of life understood as energy and creative impulse’’ (Ibid, p. 72). The outcome of

willful action is nothing more than the will reaching its own limit and reflecting itself in

that limit. In terms of the art world, the artist as pure will becomes the ‘‘man without

content’’ (Ibid, p. 55) who has lost his/her sense of dwelling in a shared world precisely

because his/her creations can only reflect his/her aesthetic subjectivity as absolute essence.

In both cases (free play and artistic creation), transmission is downplayed for creative,

improvisational creation. If the past exists, it only exists to be overcome, negated, or (at the

most avant garde) destroyed in the name of willful invention. If ritual negates the will or

places the will in service to a tradition that futilely attempts to transmit its content, then

free play valorizes the will as the wellspring out of which tradition can be smashed, ritual

destroyed, and liberty proclaimed.

As a third option, studious play is neither the transmission of specific content (specific

norms, values, and ways of being in the world), nor is it the impossibility of transmission

(toppling over into endless events and willful invention/construction). Rather studious play

transforms the impossibility of transmission into the transmission of impossibility. In such

a model, transmissibility is liberated from transmitting any definitive message or law that

would ground the identity and unity of a community in an essence. Although the trans-

mission of tradition as a ground for community identity is an impossibility, this

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impossibility is also the possibility for new uses that open up when the law is suspended,

rituals are left idle, and objects are profaned. Studious play is the transmission of whateverremains effective within the crumbs of tradition—the crumbness of tradition. This is a

strange operation whereby the impossible is given back to itself as a positive ground for

experiencing potentiality without submitting this potentiality to any pre-determinate force.

Rather than negate the will or revel in willful self-expression, the studier is willingly opento the potentiality of whatever.

The Educational Value of Toys

When the impossibility of transmission becomes a positive ground for experiencing the

potentiality of transmissibility then the laws, things, and signs of the world are transformed

into toys. For Agamben, the toy is a peculiar kind of thing that ‘‘can be said to be

withdrawn from all rules of use’’ (1993b, p. 57). Thus a child can pick up a hammer and

suddenly transform it into a microphone, a spaceship, a guitar, an animal, and so on.

Normative pressures to use the hammer in this way rather than that way are suspended or

rendered inoperative by the toy, which resists strict classification as this or that kind of

thing. Instead the toy is whatever it is. Commenting on the ontological status of whatever,

Agamben argues ‘‘The being that is properly whatever is able to not-be; it is capable of its

own impotence’’ (1993a, p. 35). This whatever being becomes special and delightful when

‘‘without resembling any other, it resembles all others’’ (2007b, p. 59). When we appre-

ciate whatever, we undo ‘‘the original sin of our culture’’ that consists precisely in ‘‘the

transformation of the species into a principle of identity and classification’’ (Ibid).

Whatever being is special in that it can never be attributed to an identity (of this or that

kind person or thing) and as such is a desubjectification that renders impossible the

demarcation of all hierarchies, divisions, and ordinals that separate, demarcate, and classify

potentiality. A whatever-being is special, or a pure singularity, because it does not belong

to any set or class. It does not have one particular property or set of exclusive predicates

but rather contains within itself properties to be and not to be this and that kind of thing. In

other words to be special is to remain indistinct and unrepresentable, and free of any

determination to be or not to be set in advance. Stated differently, whatever being is being

rather. Commenting on section nine of Heidegger’s Being and Time as well as proposition

6.44 of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, Agamben writes, ‘‘In the principle of reason

(‘‘There is a reason why there is something rather than nothing’’), what is essential is

neither that something is (being) nor that something is not (nothingness, but that something

is rather than nothingness)’’ (1993a, p. 104). Whatever exists prior to an either/or logic that

sets being and not being against one another in a kind of dialectical contestation. As

Agamben argues, whatever is an ‘‘ambiguity’’ or an ‘‘undifferentiated chaos’’ (1999,

p. 254) that resists any clear distinction between wanting and not wanting, affirmation and

negation, occurrence and non-occurrence, subject and object, use and exchange values that

keeps open the ‘‘luminous spiral of the possible’’ (Ibid, p. 257): our freedom to be ratherthan that which we have become or are destined to become. Stated differently, whatever is

an ontological tautology, or what I would call an ontotautology, wherein each side of the

equation [Agamben gives the example ‘‘it-will-occur-or-it-will-not-occur’’ (Ibid, p. 264)]

remains an open possibility. Whatever as a tautological structure holds within itself both

being and not being without choosing either, and therefore remains within a luminous

spiral of contingency as a necessary ontological un-grounding.

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The toy is the quintessential embodiment of whatever. Neither this nor that, it is both

simultaneously, thus holding within itself a primordial surplus or potentiality that is never

exhausted by any one particular playful activity. When things, laws, and signs are sus-

pended from their use or exchange values through the work of studious play, then whateverremains becomes a toy. This is not a transformation of an essence (some kind of mutation

in the ‘‘genetic structure’’ of the thing) so much as a return of the thing to its primordial

potentiality, its whatever ontology. In this sense, the toy is a free thing. Agamben writes,

‘‘A look at the world of toys shows that children, humanity’s little scrap-dealers, will play

with whatever junk comes their way, and that play thereby preserves profane objects and

behavior that have ceased to exist’’ (2007a, b, p. 79). The ‘‘little scrap-dealer’’ is attentive

to precisely whatever remains when things and signs are stripped of their sacred origins in

ritual: the potentiality to be otherwise than. Rather than the transmission of this or that

message, meaning, or use, the toy plays with the potentiality of transmissibility unleashed

from specific roles, functions, or predestinations. Summarizing, Agamben speculates:

Not in the monument, an object of archaeological and scholarly research, which

preserves in time its practical, documentary character (its ‘material content’, Ben-

jamin would have said); not in an antique, whose value is a function of its quanti-

tative ageing; not in an archive document, which draws its value from its place in a

chronology and a relationship of proximity and legality with the past event. The toy

represents something more and something different from all these things. It has often

been asked what is left of the model after its transformation into a toy, for it is

certainly not a matter of its cultural significance, nor of its function, nor even of its

form (which can be perfectly reproduced or altered almost beyond recognition, as

anyone who is familiar with the elastic iconism of toys knows very well). (2007a, b,

p. 80)

But what is left when such significance, functionality, and form are left idle? Nothing less

than the potentiality for new uses, for new historical modes of being to arise, for new

profane meanings to emerge.

In order to further clarify its ontological status, it is helpful to juxtapose Agamben’s

theory of the toy next to Heidegger’s theory of equipment. Heidegger writes, ‘‘In dealings

such as this, where something is put to use, our concern subordinates itself to the ‘in-order-

to’ which is constitutive for the equipment we are employing at the time; the less we just

stare at the hammer-Thing, and the more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial

does our relationship to it become, and the more unveiledly is it encountered as that which

it is—as equipment’’ (2008, p. 98). Only through immersed use does the being of equip-

ment reveal itself as ready-to-hand (zuhanden). In this sense, the being of hammers—

Heidegger’s famous example—is not a self-sufficient substance that exists independent of

its readiness to be picked up and used for hammering by Dasein. The readiness of

equipment’s being consists of an ‘‘in-order-to,’’ ‘‘towards-which,’’ and ‘‘for-the-sake-of-

which.’’ In relation to hammers, we could say that they are used in-order-to hammer nails,

towards-the-purpose-of building houses, for-the-sake-of sheltering Dasein. Thus the being

of equipment is determined by the equipment’s worldly qualities, or by the relational

totality of involvements which link hammers to other pieces of equipment (like nails), to

contexts (like the workshop), and to purposes (like supplying shelter). Indeed, Heidegger

argues that the use of the hammer consists in ‘‘freeing it for [auf] its readiness-to-hand

within the environment’’ (Ibid, p. 117). Only when Dasein picks up the hammer as a

potentiality for hammering within the context of an in-order-to, towards-which, and for-

the-sake-of is the being of the hammer freed. Freeing is an activity that allows hammers as

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equipment to ‘‘be involved’’ (Ibid) in the world as the kinds of equipment that they are. In

turn, an authentic use of hammers is not a separation or radical deviation from the nor-

mative pressures of ‘‘in-order-to,’’ ‘‘towards-which,’’ and ‘‘for-the-sake-of-which.’’ Rather,

authentic use of equipment comes about through ‘‘an existentiell modification of the ‘they’[as the average everyday use of equipment]’’ (Ibid, p. 168). The modification which

Heidegger speaks of here could be thought of as innovative uses of hammers to better

achieve the ultimate ‘‘for-the-sake-of-which’’ hammers are used as hammers. The key to

such innovation is that it does not modify the existentiale structure of the hammer (its

fundamental ‘‘in-order-to,’’ ‘‘towards-which,’’ and ‘‘for-the-sake-of-which’’). Stated dif-

ferently, these modifications remain recognizable and intelligible precisely because the

innovations retain and work within the parameters, rules, and traditions that form the

essential being of the hammer (its ontological meaning). Authentic—rather than merely

generic or typical—uses of hammers within a given context of use further free up the

hammer for better, more efficient or more skillful usage. Readiness-at-hand becomes

increasingly handy via authentic use.

The kind of understanding which frees up equipment to be the kind of being that it is

(ready-to-hand for various uses) is never made explicit but is rather found in the pre-

conceptual familiarity of Dasein with the world. But when Dasein steps out of this mode of

intuitive familiarity and thematizes its involvements, then specific things appear as

‘‘present-at-hand’’ (vorhanden) or abstracted from the totality of interrelationships which

define the being of equipment. Heidegger writes, ‘‘…looking-at enters the mode of

dwelling autonomously alongside entities within-the-world. In this kind of ‘dwelling’ as a

holding-oneself-back from any manipulation or utilization, the perception of the present-

at-hand is consummated’’ (2008, p. 89). Through perception of the thing as a thing with

certain properties, Dasein can then interpret it, make propositions about it, and so on. In

intuitive coping and dealing, the equipment as equipment is totally transparent, concealed,

and invisible. When one uses a hammer for hammering, there is in essence no hammer at

all, only the potentiality for hammering as an activity in which one is fully submersed. Yet

when Dasein steps to the side, perceives the hammer as a thing, and thus extracts it from

use, the hammer becomes ‘‘unready-to-hand.’’ Unready-to-hand is akin to the hammer

devoid of ‘‘in-order-to,’’ ‘‘towards-which,’’ and ‘‘for-the-sake-of-which.’’ The present-at-

hand qualities of the hammer as a meaningless material object of a certain size, shape,

color, and texture are thrust into the foreground while the ‘‘ready-to-hand’’ qualities recede

into the background. The hammer loses its ‘‘hammerness’’ when it becomes conspicuously

present for Dasein to contemplate.

Now we can return to the question of the toy. It would seem that toys do not fall into

either the category of ready-to-hand or present-at-hand. Unlike equipment, toys lack an

‘‘in-order-to,’’ ‘‘towards-which,’’ ‘‘and for-the-sake-of-which.’’ They are indeterminate

without destination. Thus the hammer can quickly change into a microphone, an airplane,

an animal, and back again. The normative pressures that define a hammer as a particular

kind of equipment in relation to other pieces of equipment are suspended, rendered

inoperable. And when suspended, the whatever being of the hammer opens up to new

articulations, new usages that are not prefigured by the traditions, norms, values, and

precedence that form the being of the hammer as a hammer. Unlike Heidegger who argues

that Dasein frees up equipment through the actualization of its being via usage, the free-

dom of the toy derives from this state of indeterminacy where all actualizations are delayed

indefinitely.

But unlike present-at-hand objects, the suspension of the being of the hammer as the

kind of equipment that it is meant to be does not result in any kind of conspicuous

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presence. As described above, when a piece of equipment becomes present-at-hand, it is

thrown into relief, thrust into the foreground, and extracted from the taken-for-granted,

totally transparent background of use. In this state, the hammer can be contemplated as a

kind of mute object that has lost its being-in-the-world. It is no longer an affordance that

calls for use. Instead of an existential potentiality, the hammer becomes a material actu-

ality. But a toy never appears in this way. It remains open to free use without an ‘‘in-order-

to.’’ As such, the toy remains transparent and inconspicuous in ways which present-at-hand

objects cannot. Stated differently, the toy prefers not to be either ready-to-hand or present-

at-hand. Abhanden is a peculiar ontological status that is a kind of limbo both inside yet

radically outside of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology.

Neither ready-to-hand nor present-at-hand, I suggest that toys are abhanden or away-

from-hand in the sense of being-in-suspension. Abhanden conveys a sense of potentiality

or whateverness brought forth through studious play without knowing what this potenti-

ality is destined for. To engage in studious play with the law means that one does not

simply modify its existentiell uses. This would be akin to an amendment to the current law

in order to make the law more efficient, clear, or reasonable in its applications. In such

cases, the law would retain its recognizability as a law with a particular ‘‘in-order-to,’’

‘‘towards-which,’’ and ‘‘for-the-sake-of-which.’’ And yet with studious play, the law is not

simply reduced to a ‘‘present-at-hand’’ object of analysis either. In this case, the law would

be a mute object that lacks any utility (present or future), a kind of archeological relic that

fascinates precisely because of its alien qualities (not unlike a hieroglyphic monument

whose code must be deciphered for the message to be transmitted). To play studiously with

the law is to suspend the law, transforming it into a toy. As a toy, the law is deactivated not

for the purpose of detached analysis but for the purpose of reinvention, radical experi-

mentation, and radical abandonment. This is the law as not the law, or the law as whatever

it is without destination or determination in advance.

When one studiously plays with toys, one is not transmitting this or that message from

the past (as in ritual reenactments). If this were the case, then all toys would be monu-

ments, antiques, or archives to be studied for their ‘‘life’’ or ‘‘historical lessons.’’ While

toys cannot be monuments, antiques, or archives, monuments, antiques, or archives can

become toys when they are playfully studied. But this would mean letting go of their

particular lessons and opening them up to whatever remains for free use. Consequently,

their function as transmitters of cultural legacy is left idle, and the monument as a ‘‘ready-

at-hand’’ teaching tool becomes abandoned or away-from-hand.

And instead of making transmission impossible (as when we merely play with toys), one

transmits whatever remains—a kind of open potentiality for new uses. To merely play with

a toy is to play with particular uses, but to studiously play with a toy is to be attentive to

whatever enables these free uses to emerge in the first place. Stated differently, to play is

always to play with possibilities (to be this or that) while to studiously play is to play with

potentiality (to be this and that). What separates (and binds) the two activities is precisely

the status of impossibility. The player plays with what is possible for a particular will to

actualize according to its devises and plans. The emphasis here is on the new use values

created through the play which reflect back to the player his or her play-drive. The studier,

on the other hand, is willingly (rather than willfully) attentive to impossibility as a pos-

sibility of whatever to be transmitted, ignited, lit up beyond any use value or willful

intentionality. In other words, the attention of the player is on what the thing becomes

(exploring a possibility, followed by another, and another as the will dictates) whereas the

attention of the studier is on whatever makes such becomings possible in the first place (the

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potentiality of the toy as such). Potentially is what is transmitted when one studiously plays

with monuments, antiques, or archives as toys.

The School as Toy: A Literary Intervention

Play versus ritual, ritual versus play. This debate in education is predicated on the dis-

avowal of a third term, an impossible synthesis betwixt and between the two: studious play.

Instead of the submission of the will to endless labors of repetition (ritual reenactments) or

the ludic invention of improvisation through the creative will (free play), studious play is

the suspended divide that separates and unites: it is a case of not–not willing. It does not

destroy ritual by simply letting children play with whatever they want whenever they want

according to their willful pursuits (as in some of the most extreme forms of free schooling).

It simultaneously does not give up on innovation and invention in the name of tradition (as

in the most extreme forms of high-stake testing). Instead of transmitting or not transmitting

this or that, studious play transmits transmissibility. It transmits this and that, or rather the

potentiality for transmission as such.

To encourage studious play, teachers must give students the time and space for such

experimentation. But this would mean turning the schoolhouse into a kind of toy—an

educational toy par excellence (Masschelein and Simons 2007 make a similar claim

regarding unused and discarded school buildings). Liberated from its destinations, the

schoolhouse becomes abandoned to whatever it is that remains: a school as free time. At

this point, I would like to delay the ending of this essay with a brief literary diversion. A

diversion that will give us a kind of inoperative example of studious play and the

schoolhouse as a toy. As an example, Robert Walser’s strange novel titled Jakob vonGunten will not be found in any class of educational theories, objects, or effects. But this

exclusion is indicative of the book’s paradigmatic status as the novel about studious play.

Indeed, Walser’s book is a parody of the German Bildungsroman such as Goethe’s WilhelmMeisters Wanderjahre, which emphasizes personal development and self-realization

through education. Instead, Walser provides a surreal alternative where education is not

about progressive mastery so much as an ambiguous experience of suspension, interrup-

tion, and even exhaustion without determinate end or positive outcomes. Although men-

tioned in passing by Agamben in relation to his paradigm of study and studious play (1995,

p. 65), Walser’s book demands a more thorough treatment in order to make more explicit

the time, space, and action of studious play (as opposed to ritual or free play).

As a runaway, the character Jakob wants to shed all trappings and privileges of his

bourgeois upbringing by learning to be a servant at the strangely decaying Benjamenta

Institute. Here the students learn nothing but how to follow rules. Indeed, mastery of the

rules and various meaningless procedures seems to be the only function of ‘‘education’’ at

this institute. ‘‘What we pupils do, we do because we have to, but why we have to, nobody

quite knows’’ (Walser 1999, p. 35). The rules are largely decontextualized, formal prin-

ciples of action that lack any clear reason or purpose. Although rule-bound, these rules

remain superficial, almost as if they are there not through any necessary force but through

the contingency of the pupil’s own performance of the rules. They exist without

enforcement, without force, without transmitting any notion of the ‘‘proper.’’ Thus Jakob

can write of exhaustive, ritualistic rule following while also noting that ‘‘we send out our

feelings in all directions, gathering experiences and observations’’ (Ibid, p. 98). This is the

exact experience of studious play, where rules exist without force or meaning, enabling one

to ‘‘send out’’ feelings in all directions in order to observe, think, feel without

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commitments to this or that project. Without clear purposes, rules remain detached from

skills. And in this detachment, they become like playthings or toys which can be observed

and simultaneously not observed by the students. Notice that Jakob does not negate any of

the rules (as in the pure creative destruction of free play). Rather the rules becomes dis-

appropriated as common playthings or things away-from-hand.

Jakob proclaims, ‘‘we pupils, or cadets, have really very little to do, we are given hardly

any assignments…. We are not taught anything…the educators and teachers are asleep, or

they are dead, or seemingly dead, or they are fossilized, no matter, in any case we get

nothing from them’’ Walser 1999, p. 5). Further on, he asks: ‘‘Where are the teachers here?

Is there any plan, any idea to what we do? There’s nothing’’ (Ibid, p. 16). And finally,

‘‘Either the teachers in our institute do not exist, or they are still asleep, or they seem to

have forgotten their profession. Or perhaps they are on strike, because nobody pays them

their monthly wages? Strange feelings seize me when I think of the poor slumberers and

absent minds. There they all sit, or slump, against the walls in a room specially arranged

for their repose’’ (Ibid.: 59). The instructors at this institute seem to give rules and general

principles but these rules are not attached to significant practices, nor is there anyone

awake to actually implement them. And because of this, the rules remain merely rules to be

playfully studied with rather than explicitly followed. The rules cease to be injunctions and

become more and more open to the contingencies of I-follow-and-I-do-not-follow-rules.

Without the teacher to verify the transmission of traditions, norms, values, and prin-

ciples, there is only free time that remains without destination. ‘‘In my other school there

was plenty of knowledge, here there is something quite different. Something quite different

to us pupils here’’ (Walser 1999, p. 61). But what exactly is this ‘‘something quite dif-

ferent’’ that begins to emerge when teaching is left idle and the school becomes an

inoperative toy? It is my argument that when the school ceases to test (transmission

given…transmission received…transmission verified) against an intended outcome, the

potentiality of whatever remains emerges from within the free time.

The effect of the inoperative state of the institute is that the students are left feeling

‘‘stupefied’’ (Walser 1999, p. 66) without direction or guidance. If the typical educational

narrative is one of progressive determination and mastery, then Jakob’s narrative is one of

increasing stupefaction in light of a world that lacks affordances, that lacks a sense of

equilibrium between the habituated body and environmental possibilities. Jakob continu-

ally strikes the reader as someone out of ‘‘flow’’ with the world inside and outside his

institution. All that Jakob can do is imitate appropriate behaviors on a purely superficial

level of engagement. He is, in other words, between subjectification (through ritual baptism

into the order of things) and desubjectification (as unrecognizable excess). As in Agam-

ben’s description of studious play (see Agamben 1995), Jakob is perpetually stupefied,

lacking determinate projects, interests, or orientations toward future outcomes. And this

experience of constant and uninterrupted stupefication leads to its own kind of exhaustion:

‘‘To do nothing and yet maintain one’s bearing, that requires energy, a person doing

something has an easy time in comparison. We pupils are masters of this kind of propriety’’

(Walser 1999, p. 74). Here mastery is not the mastery over transmitted skills or knowledge.

Rather studiers at the institute are masters of potentiality which always withdraws before

any actualization or verification that this or that has been received.

But what is most interesting in Jakob’s memoir is his fascination with his roommate

Kraus. Kraus sees himself an immanently productive. Kraus is always attempting to learn,

to practice, to recite, to perfect himself and thus gain a sense of self-mastery through

education. He often complains to Jakob that he is not learning enough or trying hard

enough. Kraus warns: ‘‘That’s not very clever of you, Jakob. And, let me tell you, your

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questions are as naı̈ve as they are sinful. Whoever can be bored in this world? You,

perhaps. Not me, I can tell you. I’m learning things by heart from this book here’’ (Walser

1999, p. 90). Yet behind Kraus’ appearance of meaningful activity, there is a kind of

meaningless excess which Kraus cannot see but which continually attracts Jakob’s atten-

tion. ‘‘Kraus is a genuine work of God, a nothing, a servant…. Nobody will mistake this

person’s plainness, and therefore nobody will notice him, and he will be thoroughly

unsuccessful. Charming, charming, three times charming I find this’’ (Ibid, p. 86). Kraus is

ultimately deformed and destined to fail. His success is precisely demonstrating that the

more one learns one’s craft the more impotent one becomes. And while Kraus is the one

who should be hailed as the outstanding student, it is Jakob who remains privileged in the

school. Herr Benjamenta states ‘‘There’s something important about you, Jakob’’ (Ibid,

p. 100). What is this something? It is whatever life that Jakob has. While Kraus is con-

stantly attempting to demonstrate that meaning, skill, and mastery have been successfully

transmitted, tested, and verified, Jakob is a studier who remains in the state of indeter-

mination between ritual enactment of rules and free play. ‘‘Gymnastics,’’ writes Jakob, ‘‘is

silly, too, and leads to nothing. Does everything I love and prefer have to lead to nothing?’’

(Ibid, p. 127). The nothing is not an absence, but the presence of an absence in the form of

a potentiality that has been given back to itself. This is a potentiality freed from any

relation to future actualization—potentiality as such. Thus Jakob can write, ‘‘I hate all

future success’’ (Ibid, p. 133). He insists that ‘‘…the nature of childhood will cling to me

always…’’ (Ibid, p. 154). Indeed, he informs the reader, ‘‘I don’t develop’’ (Ibid). There is

only the dwelling in a kind of creative, excessive present, full of observations and expe-

riences that do not bloom or blossom into anything in particular, into identifiable or

marketable skills, dispositions, traits, and so on. Jakob remains de-subjectified, always in

deferral, and therefore contingent. His life can perpetually be rather than it currently is. If

Kraus prefers to develop skills and find employment then Jakob prefers not to, remaining in

potentiality without end. As Kraus leaves the school for a life of service, hoping that

Jakob’s ‘‘incomprehension gets a few hard knocks’’ (Ibid, p. 165) we find the protagonist

daydreaming, lost in a misty realm between reality and fantasy, studying the world as it

unravels around him.

In fact, Herr Benjamenta urges Jakob to ‘‘stay on a little longer [at the school]. I would

even like to advise you to be a little torpid, forgetful, lazy-minded…. Hang your head, be

pensive, look gloomy, won’t you?’’ (Walser 1999, p. 137). Here slothfulness is not a vice

but a virtue that reveals what is most special about Jakob: his indeterminate potentiality. In

fact, Jakob’s interminable study (best captured in the fragmentary nature of his memoir)

leads to the strange suspension of divisions between school and society, opening up a field

of possibilities where life in school mimics life outside without any of the ‘‘real world’’

consequences. Yet this mimicry is not a mere reproduction of life outside the school.

Rather it is a new life or coming life where consequences are suspended ushering in the

potentiality of free use. ‘‘We’re all, superiors and pupils, all nearly living somewhere else’’

(ibid, p. 135). The institute is no longer an institute and yet not something else either. It is a

school as not a school, a limbo, an inoperative zone, a remnant floating in suspended

animation that lacks destination or determinate relation to past or present uses. The school

has become a kind of toy that transmits nothing beyond its own potentiality for trans-

mission without preconceptualizing the content or form of this transmission.

As the institute seems to become increasingly inoperative to the point of disappearing

entirely, Jakob observes that ‘‘Everything’s collapsing, the classes, the efforts, the rules. Is

this a morgue, or is it a celestial house of joy? Something is going on and I don’t

understand it yet’’ (Walser 1999, p. 128). In the stupidity and exhaustion of study

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(‘‘something is going on and I don’t understand it yet’’), the studier suddenly realizes a

kind of radical freedom that oscillates between death and life, terror and joy, ritual and

play. Jakob, like Kraus, could leave, but he prefers not to, and remains in school, studying

its decay, and playing with whatever remains in the ruins. Studious play in this sense is not

mere waiting. Jakob argues: ‘‘One’s always waiting for something, well, that tends to

weaken one’’ (Ibid, p. 135). Instead of waiting for something to happen or for some

outcome, studious play is a pure means without necessary end.

If this state of stupidity seems undesirable, we must remember that at the end of the

book when the institute has all but faded, Jakob proclaims: ‘‘But now I’ll throw away my

pen! Away with the life of thought! I am going with Herr Benjamenta into the desert’’

(Walser 1999, p. 176). In the moment of total exhaustion, the suspended state of studious

play dialectically inverts into an ecstatic joy and creative/inventive possibility for exodus.

So, studious play becomes not simply an undesirable lassitude but rather takes on a

messianic, redemptive quality. The privilege of the studier is nothing more than putting

down the pen in order to conserve the freedom encapsulated in the formula ‘‘I would prefer

not to.’’ It is with this gesture that Jakob becomes truly abandoned…left alone in the desert

with nothing but his last remaining friend (Herr Benjamenta) and their shared toys.

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