Per un’ermeneutica delle pratiche educative concrete. Il contributo della psicoanalisi allo studio della materialità educativa

Towards a materiality-oriented educational science. In the educational field, the question of educational materiality (2004) was introduced by Riccardo Massa around the 1980s and 1990s and then developed, following diversified currents of research, by his pupils of the so-called school of “clinic of education”, to which the writer also belongs. Massa (Riva, 2000), in the great eclecticism of his thought, took many suggestions both from Marxist thought and from Foucault as well as from structuralism. At the same time, he also realized the importance of the critical theory of society, of phenomenological-hermeneutic thought and of psychoanalysis in its different variants. Studying his works, it can be asserted that, throughout his research, he tried to create a dialogue between anti- and post-humanist approaches and knowledge attentive to the subject, to the search for meaning and to listening to emotions present in the concrete, material educational and formative practices (Massa, 1993). Running through his research interests there was always the idea of constructing an educational science that could establish the discourse around education going beyond the relationship alone, the idealization of the mission of educating, the intentionality of an educational discourse (Palmieri, Prada, 2008). Traditionally, education was oriented to fixing once and for all, all the axiological or value frameworks, a priori preceptist systems, regulations and rules that the educator had to impose/propose and the pupil accept/undergo (Cambi, 2002). *Pedagogical device and educational practices Massa theorized pedagogy as that type of knowledge which identifies the heart of the educational discourse in the so-called ‘pedagogical device’, for the construct of which he is debtor to Foucault’s studies on the concept of device (Foucault, 1976). For Massa, the pedagogical device defines a field of experience – in which “experientially significant things” take place -, structured thanks to an internal organization of a series of material variables such as space, time, the arrangement of bodies and objects, activities, relations, emotions, rules and values, the rituals and the Weltanschauungen. Thanks to the variable organization of these transversal dimensions, which he defined structural and invariant, educational events take place in their concreteness and materiality, through the recursive circuit of educational theories-practices (2004). This circuit uses the pedagogical device and the practices it produces to produce in the here and now mentalities, systems of thought, beliefs, pedagogical theories and models and implicit pedagogies. The device is the product and, at the same time, the producer of the ‘bundles of relations’ (Foucault,1976) which structure power. Power is not incarnate in a single individual – king, monarch or manager – but is given through a system of subtle relations and micro-relations. Thanks to the presence of the device and of the setting, which allow at the same time subjecting and subjectification of individuals, there is the possibility of implementing concrete and material educational practices. Therefore, relations, practices, power, setting and device are united in a whole, supported by a series of internal threads that are supported by one another. *Hidden dimensions and device The dimensions of the hidden, the tacit, the implicit, the camouflaged, the in-the-shade, the unaware, the invisible and the unconscious envelop devices and individuals, systems and practices, organizations and institutions, values and intentions (Foucault, 1976; Riva, 2008). Although many decades have now passed since the discovery of the Freudian unconscious, the main collective movement today still moves in the direction of their negation. Even today, in 2014, the “not immediately” visible is frightening, and so it is preferred to do “as if” it had no existence, consistency or performing capacity. On the other hand, here, we want to maintain that the hidden dimension, in its multiple variants, constantly produces practical and material effects, i.e. that they have a strong impact on the level of reality, modifying behaviour, choices and decisions, inducing positive and negative dynamics, guiding and manipulating the destinies of individuals and of communities. In short, the hidden dimensions also belong to the nature of the devices, which are always shown only in part. *Deconstruction and interpretation: instruments to interrogate the devices In line with hermeneutic thought in various fields of knowledge, it is a question of implementing as many concrete and material practices of deconstruction and symbolic interpretation of meanings which are not immediately explicit in the events, actions and behaviour that have become real thanks to the combination of device-individual. Hermeneutic thought (Riva, 2004; Martini, 2005; Ricoeur, 2008), perceived by fine psychoanalytical sensibility (by multiple psychoanalysis), can allow members of a society, from its adult members, to set themselves the problem of meta-communicating around the characteristics of the container-device through which they have been able to form themselves, as subjects who are members of a society and, currently, thanks to the Internet, of the whole globalized planet. Foucault (1978) recalls that power is not completely omniscient and omnipotent. In fact, power relations have produced disciplinary fields of knowledge, forms of investigation, forms of documentation and also, on the other hand, many systems of control and forms of surveillance because power itself was in an impasse. Therefore, although hermeneutics and psychoanalysis are, from Foucault’s point of view, forms of knowledge and models of analysis produced by power – and in their turn produce other bundles of power -, they set radical questions from the existential point of view – listening to the emotions and the experiences of bodies (Bonetta, 2014; Riva, 2004)-, which can in part represent possibilities of “making cracks” (Morin, 2008) in the general container constructed by power