In Emile, Rousseau says that, just as is the case for nature’s love, there is no substitute for a mother’s love. Such love does not need to be supplemented. It suffices and is self-sufficient. For that reason, it is irreplaceable. (Mother)Nature does not supplement itself: it is not 'lacking'; it is not 'wanting'; it 'wants' nothing.
Nevertheless, education, a keystone of Rousseauist thought, is presented by Rousseau as a system of substitution. Although supplementary, education reconstitutes nature’s edifice in the most natural way possible. The first chapter of Emile announces the function of this pedagogy. Even though there is no substitute for a mother’s love or nature’s love, Rousseau suggests that it is better that a child should suck the breast of a healthy nurse than a “petted mother". Culture or cultivation must supplement a deficient nature [which we might call, building on the equivalence of 'nature' and 'mother', 'mamanque', the mother-lack or the missing mother that drives the desire for plenitude in the play of absence-presence].
In Rousseau’s view, childhood is the first manifestation of the deficiency which calls for substitution in nature. Pedagogy sheds light on the paradoxes of the supplement, posing the question of how a child, embodying natural weakness, is possible. Without childhood, no supplement would appear in nature.
This substitution always has the form of the sign. A sign, as image or as representation, becomes force and makes the world move. For Rousseau, the concept of the child is inseparable from the concept of the sign. Childhood is the non-relation to the sign as such. However, there is no sign as such: if the sign is considered as a thing, it is not a sign; if it is a reference, then it is not itself. The child is the name of that which should not relate in any way to a signifier separated from a signified or a thing, loved in some way, like a fetish.
Reason, in the form of a logic of identity, is unable to think this double infringement on nature, i.e. that there is a lack in nature and that, because of that very fact, something is added to it, but which yet is still part of it. The supplement, through the principle of sameness, comes naturally to put itself in nature’s place, as the image and the representation of nature, neither inside or outside nature but the same as nature.
For Derrida, the same is the supplement is différance which, as he says, is a question of the imaginary. The supplement that ‘cheats’ maternal nature operates as ‘writing’.
In consequence, the art of pedagogy is a calculated patience, a system of delays permitting the work of nature time to run its course and come to fruition, respecting its rhythms and the sequence of its stages, possibly as a process of becoming adumbrated by the pedagogical relationship as described by Nohl: a loving relationship of a 'mature' person with a 'developing' person, entered into for the sake of the child, so that the child can discover her/his own life and form. (Spiecker, 1984: 203-204, citing Nohl, 1957: 134)
This supplement, i.e. education, with or without the Nohlian pedagogical relation, ‘breaks’ with nature while being neither the same nor other, a moving away that can be captured as a theatrical scene, the scene of teaching standing in the place of, substituting for, the experience of learning.
The setting for this scene is the moment when the mother, when the natural, disappears, at which instant substitution becomes possible and necessary. The play of maternal-natural presence and absence, the alternation of perception and imagination, corresponds to an organisation of spatiality and of temporality and of spacing and timing, as well as of emotion, doubling processes of distancing and drawing close, waiting and arriving, of forgetting and recalling.
Such an organisation occurs through the temporal, rhythmic alternation of spatial presence and absence that marks out a distance, as non-presence and non-absence, as timing and as spacing and subsequently as time-space in the form of the medium, or rather set of media and mediations, between presence and absence.
Intermediacy, as mid-point and as mediation, is the middle term between absence and presence, a little bit absent, a little bit present. Mediacy, Derrida suggests, is the name of all that Rousseau wanted to efface, the name of all the supplements seeking to replace a mother or nature. All that Rousseau wished to efface, yet, in the form of education, all that he, at the same time, sought to establish.
This putting in doubt of a system of gradable contraries, such as absence and presence, Derrida argues, means that we must begin wherever we are, in medias res, and furthermore that the thought of the trace has already taught us, in the context of a pedagogical relation, as supplementarity, that it is impossible to justify a point of departure absolutely. Gradable contraries are not contradictories, such as absence and not-absence, in a logic of identity. In a graphic of supplementarity, presence is not simply identical to not-absence.
Wherever we are, where we already believe ourselves to be, caught or suspended between perception and imagination: we are there/then/here/now/there/then, a little bit present and a little bit absent, a little bit past and a little bit future.
Such a pedagogy cannot but help encounter the problem of imitation and in doing so raise a number of questions, such as those in the second book of Emile, Derrida (1976: 204) suggests:
“What is example? Should one educate by example or by explanation? Should the teacher make an example of himself and not interfere any further, or pile lesson upon exhortation? And is there virtue in being virtuous by imitation?”Is the example a particular case of a practical rule (Exempel) or is the example the particular instance of the purely theoretical presentation of a concept (Beispiel)?
The problem for this Rousseauan pedagogy is first how to teach generosity or 'liberality' to the child, recognising the ineffectiveness, emptiness and incomprehensibility of the injunction, 'Be generous'. To teach generosity, to inculcate generosity, is to ensure that the child is not content only to imitate or mimic generosity. To imitate generosity is to give (empty) signifiers instead of real goods. What one gives easily is devalued signifiers, in a kind of 'emotional plagiarism' or parasitism. What one gives with difficulty is signifiers that are inseparable from signifieds or things, in short, that the child holds dear, that with which the child associates and identifies or makes an identification, a part of the child's reality, initiating an opening towards the possibility of a common real.
Thus, in Emile, Rousseau hesitates between, on the one hand, considering imitation as good, such as at that time in a child's life when everything begins with imitation and the child learns only by example, as if the child experienced the feelings that are exemplified by following the example; and, on the other hand, considering imitation as corrupt, a possibility that already exists within good imitation, such as when the child feigns feeling from the heart when actually contenting him/her self with imitating according to the signs of memory.
At what 'age', at what stage of becoming, does the heart move from being incapable of feeling anything, a stage when the child must display emotion enactively by copying the deeds the pedagogue wishes to instil in the hope they grow into habits, to being capable of performing ('genuine') acts of generosity and acts of civility with understanding and for the love of what is good. (Derrida, 1976: 205, citing Rousseau, Emile, 68)
This mimicry, this imaginary play-acting, unfolds in more than one dimension. The infant becomes human because s/he is spoken to as if s/he were already a person, as if s/he already possessed speech, as if her/his actions were already intentional (Spiecker, 1984: 208).
The pedagogue mimes or mimics a pedagogical relation, until such times as it comes into existence. The child, through imitation, acts as if s/he understood her actions, knows what s/he is doing; the pedagogue, through mimicking a communicative relation, addresses the child as if s/he already understands what is being said. Because spoken to and acted towards as if s/he were already a person, the child becomes a developing person, though her/his imaginary relationships with those others who serve as pedagogues.
For Rousseau, evil results from a form of perversion of imitation: that of imitation within imitation. This perversion is an inherent possibility within art, where, because it is mimetological, everything signifies. Thus, equally in the pedagogic experience as in the case of the aesthetic experience of art, we are affected by signs, not things. Pedagogy, in unavoidably encountering the problem of imitation and the sign, is a kind of aesthesis, marked by ambiguity.
The thing affects us in as far as it is a sign (a supplement). The sign (a supplement) affects in as far as it is a sign-of-a-thing. The thing supplements the sign which supplements the thing, a process without an absolute point of departure. Where there exists a ground, it is because this circle or spiral is cut short, abbreviated or punctuated, in other words, decided. How can we, how do we, distinguish between a ‘good’ imitation or supplementation and a ‘bad’ or ‘evil’ one? Do we conclude that the theory of pedagogy, like the theory of art, is a theory of mores (norms), as decision-making or punctuation devices?
Yet the sign, as supplement, signifies nothing. It is not a lack, absence without difference; nor is it a plenitude, presence without difference. Imitation redoubles presence yet, as supplement, cannot allow itself to be appreciated as a simple act, for example that of doubling, repeating or imitating an assumed prior presence. The iteration, the imitation, alters, presence and absence as well as presence and repetition, as each re-calls and multiplies the other, re-addresses the other, directing it elsewhere, recalling a decision that is already made but also always in the making, a condition in which one cannot simply 'know' or 'not-know', since such ignorance is itself a knowing decision.
References
Derrida, J. (1976). Of grammatology. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Nohl, H. (1957). Die padagogische Bewegung in Deutschland und ihre Theorie. Frankfurt-am-Main: Schulte-Bulmke.
Spiecker, B. (1984). The Pedagogical Relationship. Oxford Review of Education, 10 (2), 203–209. Available from http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0305498840100209 [Accessed 14 July 2017].
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