Teaching Ignorance by Emile Bojesen

‘Teaching Ignorance’

This record is a somewhat antagonistic companion piece or counterpart to the thinking and writing that became my book, ‘Forms of Education’, while also taking forward an approach to research I developed in a more recent article ‘Ignorance: Aesthetic unlearning’, which draws from Nietzsche, Lyotard, and Stockhausen.

‘Teaching Ignorance’ is a form of research that aims to neither rely on nor produce a clear ‘knowledge’ output, only the work itself. Following Nietzsche, the researchers ego itself becomes subordinate to the overwhelming forces (effects, for Lyotard) it experiences and by which it is conditioned.

By purposefully utilising aesthetic ignorance as a means of individual creativity and cultural production, education and research for knowledge is deprioritised and oriented away from education’s predominant emphasis on ego and knowledge development as mastery of factual resource.

Intuition as an effect of education can be understood loosely as deeply embodied knowledge but also as its conceptual reverse: responsive experience in the absence of knowledge.

Engaging with material intuitively, as opposed to doing so with the aid of factual resource, implies a restricted mode of cognition, which might be described as more responsive than reflective.

Attempting an intuitive engagement with electronic music production software, ‘Teaching Ignorance’ was constructed as a single long piece subsequently split into sections as ‘songs’, as they seemed to present themselves on completion. The only ambition was to create some ‘work’ in a responsive and intuitive manner, undirected by an external conceptual frame or obvious sonic reference. The effect, as least in my reception of it, is that of a single piece of music with multiple movements that carry forward, without much recourse to formal song structure. Each movement evolving into the subsequent movement, which then takes its own direction.

With hindsight, it has become apparent to me that this approach produced a more ‘autobiographical’ result than other approaches I have taken. I produced the entire record within a few days in August 2022 on the Danish island of Møn, a street away from where Henning Christiansen lived, and where I grew up as a child in the school holidays away from the UK. At the time, as well as listening to various contemporary classical and experimental music (Ligeti organ works, I remember especially), I was running to and from the beach, listening to the new Hudson Mohawke record and some Scorn. The imprints of these sounds, memories, and geographico-cultural context definitely seem to have made their way into ‘Teaching Ignorance’.

The titles I have given to the songs are slightly arbitrary, in that they reference key sections or words from ‘Forms of Education’ that I felt they somehow reflected. The title of the record, ‘Teaching Ignorance’, which is also the title of an important Barbara Johnson essay, attempts to present the work as something that might draw the listener away from thought, towards an intuitively receptive disposition.

This research has taught me that my previous work has not adequately explored intuition, philosophically and educationally. And that this oversight on my part might itself have been an effect of the relative absence of engagement with intuition in educational practice and philosophy. Intuition, I now have come to understand, is both educable and fundamental to responsive experience. Teaching ignorance might have more to do with teaching intuition than one might expect.

– Emile Bojesen, 2023

concrète - minimal - drone

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