Reclaiming the Aesthetic in the Foreign Language Arts

【Articles】

Reclaiming the Aesthetic in the Foreign Language Arts
David KENNEDY

Contents
Introduction
A Broader Definition of Aesthetics
Language Learning Industries/Culture Industries
Conclusion: Toward an Aesthetics of Memory

Abstract
This article explores the impact of digital technology on the experience of being in the world,and particularly on the experience of language learning in Japanese higher education. Working from the late philosopher Bernard Stiegler’s broad conception of ‘the aesthetic’ asknowing how to live, it is argued that neoliberal economics and algorithmic technologies
have anaesthetized individuals to the point of anxiety, apathy, loneliness, and disempowerment. In short, such forces have greatly hindered the human potential to become and toeffect a social becoming, what Simondon called a ‘transindividuation’. The article implicatesthe language learning industry in this immiseration, particularly in its obsession with quantification of proficiency and with its equation of the English language with ‘success’. The
article concludes with a call for an ontological turn in the foreign language arts, a renewed
focus on the aesthetic and what Stiegler calls a ‘life worth living’.
Keywords: the foreign language arts, the aesthetic, techné, transindividuation, savoir-vivre,
libidinal economies, tertiary memory, neoliberalism, Bernard Stiegler

Introduction
A reality is established in which people flee their incomprehension by retreating
ever further into the anaesthetic world of machines: To people who have grown
weary of the endless complications of everyday living and to whom the purpose ofexistence seems to have been reduced to the most distant vanishing point on an― 59 ―+David KENNEDY様.indd

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endless horizon, it must come as a tremendous relief to find a way of life in which
everything is solved in the simplest and most comfortable way . . .
Walter Benjamin, Poverty and Experience (1933, p. 735)
For those of us old enough to know, it feels far, far different living in this age than living in
the latter decades of the 20th century. This may seem an obvious enough assertion. Timeschange. Although humans are quite good at normalizing their new self-created habitats, thepace of technological development over the past couple of decades has left many of us,
regardless of age, struggling to keep up with the changes. Douglas Rushkoff (2013) has
called this condition ‘present shock’. However, the current anxiety over digital technology’s
encroachment on our daily lives is countered by a steady reminder from industry expertsthat the aggravating kinks will be ironed out as the technology gets smarter. There is an
assumption that the algorithms underlying AI will become better and better at solving problems and leave us humans to do what we truly enjoy. This is a dangerous assumption for anumber of reasons, but most fundamentally for this one: the natural world, including us, does
not operate according to machine algorithms. The natural world is based on a creative resistance to entropy. There is will, there is spirit, there is intention. And in the case of humans,
there is desire to rise above the entropic forces of the machines we create.
There is no doubt that the most salient difference between humans and their animal
counterparts is the ability to exteriorize themselves in technology, in organized inorganic
matter. Other animals do not exhibit themselves in the world prosthetically: in cities, factories, art galleries, military installations, fast food chains, interstate freeways, classrooms,
internet search engines, social media, political institutions, chatbots, and so on. The ancient
Greek myth of the titan brothers Prometheus and Epimetheus illustrates a fundamental realization forever at the heart of our human consciousness: we are technical creatures.
According to this myth, while the rest of the animal kingdom is bestowed with each-to-theirown innate abilities (the cheetah its speed, the chameleon its ability to change color, the bird
its ability to fly, etc.), humans have been overlooked by the gods and are belatedly offeredbut one gift: fire̶or in other words, the gift of technical know-how̶savoir-faire̶or inancient Greek, techné. In short, we humans are what we can create, what we pass on to thenext generation, and what we accumulate for our species over the long term. The late French
philosopher Bernard Stiegler refers to this as an epiphylogenesis (a genesis of the species
occurring outside the body) unique to humans. Our social and cultural memory is exteriorized through inscriptions, i.e., those technologies and artifacts which record the past andwhich enable humanity to maintain some sort of shared creative momentum, across generations, for continued vitality and transformation. The long-held progressive view of educationis that institutions of learning are vital organs for such a curation of memory and, consequently, the facilitation of future possibilities (see, for example, Arendt, 2006 [1961]).
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Through his reading of Plato, Stiegler views our ‘gift’ of techné as a pharmakon, i.e.,
both cure and poison. While techné provides the only mechanism for the uniquely humannegentropic impulses toward becoming-other, for imagining possible futures and subsequently for the “feeling that life is worth living” (2013), it simultaneously contains theinherent possibility of leading humanity to states of uncontrollable disaffection and immiseration (2013; 2014a). This emphasis on the bifurcated nature of our technological existence, its
simultaneously utopian and catastrophic possibilities, gives Stiegler’s philosophy a distinctly
moral dimension that is evident in the vocabulary that pervades his corpus: spirit, care, attention, belief, transformation and a pronounced resistance against malaise, disindividuation,
misery, shock, etc. It is a dimension of his work that brings an urgency, and arguably something of a utopian vision, to the subject of education (Bradley & Kennedy, 2021).
Stiegler (2013) frames this attention to possibility and transformation in the object relations theory of Donald Winnicott (1971), whose psychoanalysis focuses on the transitional
object, that which enables the healthy psychosocial development of a child within a social
ecosystem. However, Stiegler extends Winnicott’s transitional space, or potential spacebeyond child psychology to describe an environment of security in which a healthy transindividuation̶a lifelong and indeterminate creation of both self and world̶is allowed to thrive.
This transitional or potential space does not represent any sort of necessarily delimiting deficiency, but, again, in Stiegler’s pharmacological sense, a default of the human condition to bewanting of something, of needing to overcome the slide toward entropy and meaninglessness.
It is a negentropic impulse, constituting a space for the incalculable imaginary, a desire for“that which does not exist” (2013, p. 75) and “the play of permanent revolution” (Stiegler, 2011,
p. 59). This paper asks to what extent the language learning industry, particularly its manifestation in higher education in Japan, has abandoned this space, and how this space might
be reinhabited.
The incalculable imaginary is, of course, dependent on the state of individual and collective desire. Stiegler (2013) argues that the algorithms put to use by the monolithic neoliberal
obsession with profit have dampened not only our shared retentions (i.e., the accumulation ofmemory), but also our protentions, our ability to to imagine possible futures that are worth
cultivating and caring about. Globalism, neoliberal capitalism, the attention economy, theascendancy of the haves over the have-nots and that of AI over human cognition̶these are
all widely perceived as inevitable (e.g., Margaret Thatcher’s infamous neoliberal slogan“There is no alternative”). But just as absolutely no one yearned for an iPhone prior to its
launch in 2007, these near-universal technological, economic, and cultural trends are notsomething that the broader public necessarily desires, but they are marketed to them by continually appealing to and feeding the basest drives. From a psychoanalytic point of view, suchconditioning leads to a ‘symbolic misery’ marked not only by the loss of libidinal desire to
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effect), but also by “the loss of participation in the production of symbols” (Stiegler, 2014a, p.
10). Walter Benjamin (see epigraph above) described this as an anaesthetic, a numbing of thesenses, a deadening of the aesthetic. Fitzpatrick (2014) explains how in the current culture
and attention economies “‘available brain time’ is bought and sold as a commodity” and “theprinciple role of the individual is as a consumer of commodities” (p. 120).
As will be discussed later, it has become abundantly clear that while foreign language
education (particularly that of English) in Japan is increasingly thought of as a necessary
endeavor for participation in the global financial economy, its role in what Stiegler terms‘libidinal economies’ (2013)̶i.e. the organization of individual and collective desire̶islargely ignored. The question, then, is to what extent foreign language education becomespart of the circuitry that creates ‘positive protentions’, opening doors to the possibilities ofincalculable and open futures of psychic, social, and cultural transindividuation; or to what
extent it precludes such possibilities by becoming complicit in the economies of big data
algorithms and the “automatized production of protentions” (Stiegler, 2014b, pp. 4–5). This
article, therefore, attempts to apply this cultural critique to the language arts in Japanese universities, framing it as a crisis of the aesthetic.

A Broader Definition of Aesthetics
It is first necessary to clear up any misunderstanding of the word aesthetics as used in thisarticle. What is not meant here is the colloquial usage of aesthetics handed down through a
centuries-long emphasis in Western philosophy, a usage roughly meaning the study ofbeauty and/or the ‘finer’ things in life, a usage that is “synonymous with art theory” (Highmore, 2010, p. 122). To understand the much more inclusive, and arguably undervalued,
implications of the ancient Greek root word aisth sis, it is instructive to contrast the aesthetic
with its very opposite: the anaesthetic. In the epigraph at the beginning of this article, Benjamin is referring to a condition (already apparent in the early 20th century) brought on by thetechnologies of mass production, mass reproducibility, and mass calculability̶a condition
wherein Benjamin argues we become anesthetized, put under as it were, increasingly distanced from the senses and sensibilities that make life worth living. In other words, what weare increasingly facing is a crisis in the value of our human consciousness̶individually,socially, and ecologically.
One of the main arguments of Stiegler’s later work echoes Benjamin’s concern, that ourown current technologies̶while undoubtedly expanding human potential̶also threaten
humanity with a general crisis of savoir-vivre (‘knowing how to live’), a proletarianization (i.e.,
immiseration) of human sensibility. In setting up his thesis of ‘symbolic misery’ (2014a),
Stiegler traces the word aesthetics (again, aisth sis) to its origin in Greek antiquity andascribes it “its widest sense, where aisthēsis means sensory perception, and where the ques総合文化研究第 30 巻第 1 号（2024.6）+David KENNEDY様.indd

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tion of aesthetics is, therefore, that of feeling and sensibility in general” (2014, p. 1). Thisframing of aesthetics has ample resonance in the philosophical canon, from Dewey (e.g. Art
as Experience, 2019 [1934]) through to a more recent philosophy of ‘everyday aesthetics’that encapsulates the entirety, whether positive or negative, of seemingly mundane sensory
experience (e.g., washing dishes, commuting to work, doing homework, killing time on TikTok) and seeks to defamiliarize this familiarity. For a solid overview of this tradition, see
Saito (2021), but for this section I wish to focus on (in addition to Stiegler) two mid 20th-century thinkers who, through their own very different interpretations of techné, describe themodern technological milieu and its impact on the aesthetic, and ‘becoming other’ mostsaliently: Gilbert Simondon and Günther Anders.
Relatively unknown in his own lifetime, Simondon’s thought posthumously (firstly
through Deleuze and later through Stiegler) came to have significant influence in the philosophy of technology, particularly regarding the concept of individuation. Simondon’s highly
complex and oft discussed theory of individuation can roughly be thought of as the processes by which a person becomes individuated̶i.e., differentiated from others̶processes
that occur relationally within one’s Umwelt (one’s world of engagement). Thus, we are always
in an incalculable process of ‘becoming other’ through our social experience. The term‘socialization’, more common in the social sciences, has some overlap with the concept ofindividuation, although the former could be read to be more programmatic in its connotation.
The connection between individuation and the aesthetic is this: Individuation is dependent on larger ecological (including sociocultural) wholes̶i.e., it is relational̶while theaesthetic serves as the primordial nexus in which shared meaning is created. As Lemke(2015) succinctly puts it, “We do not make sense without the integration of feeling” (p. 600,
italics mine). Lemke, building on von Uexkull’s notions of Umwelt, argues that just as meaning-making (semiosis) is not merely confined to what happens within the brain but isdistributed, situated, active, and culturally specific, so also is the aesthetic (or feeling). Or in
Simondon’s articulation:
The aesthetic impression implies the feeling of the complete perfection of an act, a perfection that objectively gives it a radiance and an authority by which it becomes a
noteworthy point of lived reality, a knot of experienced [éprouvée] reality. This act
becomes a noteworthy point of the network of human life inserted into the world; fromthis noteworthy point to others a superior kinship is created that reconstitutes an analogue of the magical network of the universe. (MEOT p. 180 [cited in Michaud, 2012, p.
124])
The aesthetic, then, is characterized as a unifying and transindividuating (fostering a becoming-other through and with a community) force that lends resonant form and signification to― 63 ―+David KENNEDY様.indd

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shared experience.
The aesthetic is also necessarily nested in a body of memory that extends across generations, carried on from the past, interpreted, sifted, and curated for the cultivation of possible
futures. Simondon posits that the aesthetic impulse thus “aims at restoring continuities”(Michaud, 2012, p. 124) through “the gesture of placing, inscribing, inserting a mark in thenatural or technical or religious world” (ibid. p. 125). Stiegler argues that in an algorithmic
milieu where “aesthetic conditioning . . . has replaced aesthetic experience” (2014, p. 3),
maintaining this throughline requires care, vigilance, and concerted action. He calls for atransformation of desire̶through a disciplined cultivation of thought, critique, and dialogue̶in order to produce what he refers to as ‘long circuits’ of knowledge and memorythat are able to sustain infinite, intergenerational transindividuation (Stiegler, 2015; 2013).
By ‘long circuits’ Stiegler here means the perpetual carrying forward of accumulated aesthetic memory. These long circuits of desire can be ‘short-circuited’ when dominant ideas ina society are not created through sharing and dialogue but rather through individuals submitting to them (Stiegler, 2013). In essence, the algorithmic ecologies that we are immersed
keep us clicking and scrolling in subservience to the industries that thrive on data harvesting. In education, students are in danger of being treated with the logic that, in Kate
Crawford’s summation, “you shall know them by their metadata” (2021, p. 185).
To pause for a moment: I am emphasizing the relationship between these two terms̶
aesthetics and individuation̶in an attempt to describe a particular crisis of spirit brought onby our current milieu of constant connectivity, distraction, and manipulation, i.e., “the trickeryof machines at work in the depths of the human soul” (Müller, 2016, p. 3). This crisis affects
not only how we live and feel our everyday lives, but also how we learn, how we remember,and therefore how we create possible futures for ourselves, our descendants, and the planet.
It is a crisis many decades in the making, but with the exponential spread of artificial intelligence technologies, its severity is becoming ever more pronounced and alarming. We now
spend a great deal of our lives̶and arguably the most consequential hours of the day̶
online, eyes glued to a screen of one kind or another, interacting with a manufactured
simulacrum that has for all practical purposes come to eclipse our natural interactions. Whateffects can we expect to be visited on us? And are we at all concerned? Have we become
inured to the alarm bells rung by̶to name but a few̶Horkheimer and Adorno in the 1940s(‘culture industries’), Marcuse in the 1960s (One Dimensional Man), Postman in the 1980s(Amusing Ourselves to Death), Deleuze in the 1990s (‘societies of control’), Rushkoff in thedigital age (Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now). All of these ideas are in popular
circulation. And yet the severity of our crisis leaves many of us unfazed.
Our numbness or apathy might be better understood through the thought of the philosopher and critical theorist Günther Anders, whose highly unusual work has enjoyedsomething of a revival of late. Coincidentally a cousin of Walter Benjamin and married to
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Hannah Arendt (both referenced in this paper), Anders had a significant influence on the
Frankfurt School, though he was never a member. What sets Anders apart from other philosophers of technology is his preoccupation with “the normative power of technology”(Liessmann, 2014, p. 75). We have, for example, become anaesthetized to the act of swiping
up, down, left, right on the prosthetic device we carry with us day and night: the smartphone.
We are also increasingly numb to our physical surroundings, as what happens on our handheld screens unremittingly demands our attention.
Anders is particularly known for his idea of ‘Promethean shame’ or, later, “‘a Promethean slope or gradient’ (prometheisches Gefälle), a growing rift between our
technologically mediated ability to collectively influence the world and our individual capacity to feel, and to emotively apprehend, what we are doing” (Müller, 2016, p. 12). While
Simondon (and Stiegler) focus most of the blame of this condition on higher manipulative
powers (industry, capitalism, society, media, etc.), and thereby suggest a certain degree of
optimism for overcoming it, Anders takes a more pessimistic view. Anders posits thathumans actually prefer the numbness of our artificiality. We want to blot out our natural
selves, as our innate lack is too uncomfortable to live with. As Babich puts it:
What we much rather want to be instead, and there is always an instead, is the machine:
perfectible, replaceable, immortal . . . our desire is to be manufactured, to be fabricated,
to be a product, maybe one with serial numbers, perhaps an ISBN, quite such that we
can market and upgrade ourselves. (Babich, 2022, p. 29)
Anders argues that increasingly intelligent and capable technologies do not merely remind
us of our own human limitations, they at the same time distance us̶in increasingly profound ways̶from the tasks they do for us (Müller, 2016). Let’s take ChatGPT as an
example. Not only does it confront us with the fact that we are nowhere close to competingwith its information processing capabilities, we also begin to lose interest in the acts ofresearching, thinking, and writing. Likewise, GPS navigation technologies have decimatedthe experience of orienting oneself within the physical world and, as recent research strongly
suggests, actually leads to a shrinking of the brain’s hippocampus (Dahmani & Bohbot,2020). Perhaps more alarming, the ‘intelligent’ algorithms used in popular social media platforms, particularly Instagram and TikTok, are having devastating effects on the mental
health of teenagers (see Haidt, 2024), whose savoir-vivre (knowing how to live) seems to beeroded by anxiety, loneliness, alienation, and hopelessness.
As the following section will illustrate, this self-anaesthetizing force also underlies muchof the language learning industry. Besides acknowledging the obvious nihilistic and shortcircuiting environments that machine translation services such as Google Translate foster(e.g., reduced desire to learn and to know), we must also look at the top-down narratives,― 65 ―+David KENNEDY様.indd

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agendas and practices that anaesthetize the processes of learning and becoming.

Language Learning Industries/Culture Industries
Having spent their formative years surrounded by the cultural apparatuses that ‘sell’ English
in all its ambivalent allure, and after at least six years of being taught English as a necessary
requirement for entrance to university, Japanese students who manage to matriculate into
university arrive with a wide range of understandably conflicting attitudes and motivations
toward English. It is obviously outside the scope of this article to discuss them all. Nor will
this article attempt to explore the so-called ‘effectiveness’ (or not) of various language pedagogies, or more broadly the relative ‘proficiency’ of Japanese as speakers of foreign
languages. What is more important is to recognize the power of the social imaginary (Castoriadis, 1998 [1975]), particularly society’s shared feeling of future possibility, purpose, andtransformation. This is, per Stiegler, a question of libido̶of desire̶and of individuation.
For this, we might begin by evaluating how the ineluctable ubiquity of foreign languages(particularly English) in public life is framed within government and institutional goals andinitiatives, and how such discourses enable or disable potential for a healthy transindividuation of the person and society.
Japan’s education policymakers have for decades now unabashedly linked English language policy goals with the demands of economic globalization. Principally, the Japanese
government’s push for a more communicative approach to language pedagogy is explicitly
focused on national economic interests (Yonezawa, 2014), but not on the attributes of selfreflection, criticism, empathy, or openness that need accompany the transformative
processes inherent in becoming a more global-minded citizen (Aspinall, 2011; Yamagami &Tollefson, 2011). English is presented as primarily an instrument of economic growth, andas such the government’s policy is oriented toward individuals who are already gifted withgreater foreign language proficiency, or who have the financial resources to meet the quantified targets as determined by MEXT, the top universities (who generally set the pedagogicaldirection for other schools to follow), cram schools, and the language testing industry.
Although language teaching professionals, including many in Japan, have since the late
1990s been heavily influenced by the ideals of a so-called ‘social turn’ in language pedagogy(Block, 2003)̶i.e. an effort to situate “the learner as a whole person, not a grammar production unit” (Van Lier, 2004, p. 223)̶EFL as a pedagogical discipline has in practicenonetheless struggled to counter the expectations of anxious students and their caretakers,
the economic goals of concerned commercial and bureaucratic entities, and the survival
instincts of a cram school industry whose clientele is rapidly shrinking due to demographic
changes̶all of whom demand quantifiable results. Just as the algorithms of AI preclude
open futures of possibility in favor of pure calculability, the language teaching industry has
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followed the neoliberal agenda of (in Stiegler’s words) replacing “the power to decide withthe power to calculate” (2020). We can see this evidenced, for example, in the seemingly
inescapable tendency, for a variety of self-serving ends, to conveniently partition the creationof meaning̶semiosis̶in foreign language pedagogy into distinct and empirically measurable modes (e.g. listening, speaking, reading and writing), divisions which by and large
define language curriculum design in Japanese universities as well as the channels that feed
into to this apex. Toh characterizes the ‘professionalism’ of EFL as a practice of “reductionism
and control” (2016, p. 54), what Freire would include in “the praxis of domination” (2000[1970], p. 126), that which in Japan is especially regulated through the watchful eye of highstakes language tests (Toh, 2016; McNamara & Roever, 2006) such as TOEIC, Eiken,
IELTS, and GTEC. Even current discussions about Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL)̶a movement supposedly modeled on a more holistic view of meaning-making̶
have, in Japan, foundered in clearly articulating a raison d’être for such an approach beyond
that of affording elite students the ‘21st-century competencies’ necessary for assimilation
into the global network of neoliberal affluence (see Ikeda, 2016; 2015). CLIL has, for the
moment at least, been reduced to merely another intellectually fashionable manifestation of
language pedagogy as an industry of calculable outcomes.
Stiegler (2014) characterizes the current state of the university as a failure to effectively
combat the “cultural hegemony over retentional apparatuses” (p. 60)̶i.e. a short-circuitingof psychosocial memory̶that contributes to an anaesthetized self that is unable “to project
itself into a world which has become for it an unworld” (p. 62). In other words, the individual
self loses its sense of connection to the collective whole, which leads to a dis-individuation.
Indeed, among new Japanese employees aged 18 to 26, the percent who do not wish to work
abroad rose from 28.7% in 2004 to 58.7% in 2013 (Yonezawa, 2014, p. 46). That the majority
of university students seem to lose their purpose and motivation for studying English after
passing the university entrance examination (Matsuda, 2011) further corroborates this point.
English language education is widely perceived (and correctly) as primarily an index of anindividual’s value in an abstract global economy, but not so much as a mechanism for libidinal transformation, or as a path toward a life more worth living. The vast majority of Japanese,students or not, are keenly aware of the disparity between educational policy ideals and thereality of English use in personal and professional life (Kubota, 2011; Seargeant, 2009).
Although university students tend to accept the government’s emphasis on regarding English as a necessary tool for participation in the globalized economy in the abstract, they see
globalization as something that can be opted out of (Morita, 2013), a process that belongs tosomeone else (Burgess, 2013). Ironically, the Japanese government’s concern about this disconnect, what it terms “inward-looking attitudes”, is one of its rationales for an increased
effort to foster “global human resources” within the university (Yonezawa, 2014, p. 46), an
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place.
Even though ‘competence’ or ‘proficiency’ as measured by tests have been a priority in
English language instruction in Japan for many decades now, this focus has only beenstrengthened by an increased consternation in government and industry that Japan is seen
to be lagging in global economic competitiveness (Yonezawa, 2014), particularly as its worldwide GDP ranking has fallen from second to fourth place over the past decade and a half.
And nowhere is the use of English proficiency as a gatekeeper of inclusion or exclusion fromparticipation in this economic race more evident than in the education ministry’s various
recent initiatives to ‘internationalize’ Japanese higher education, most notably The Top
Global University Project, or Global 30 for short. The root of this government initiative(funded from 2014 to 2023) was the long-running preoccupation among those in power(since at least the Meiji Era) with rankings̶of prestige, status and economic power̶vis-àvis the mirror of the outside world, particularly the West, and more particularly the Englishspeaking West. According to the highly influential Times Higher Education World Reputation
Rankings (2023), 57 of the world’s 100 highest-ranked universities are to be found in justfour Anglophone countries (the USA, 40; the UK, 9; Australia, 5; and Canada, 3). (The entire
continent of Asia meanwhile is represented by only 20 schools, and Japan̶the second largest economy in Asia̶by 5.) It is no wonder then, as Piller (2016) argues, that education
planners come to associate academic superiority with English. The late Prime Minister
Shinzo Abe, notably, made explicit and repeated mention of his goal to improve Japanese universities’ worldwide ranking through English language education (Taylor, 2014). The Global
30 program became the cornerstone of this effort. It was established as a block of government grants to 37 selected universities to implement English as a medium of instruction(EMI) with the intent to promote international exchanges with universities in “strategicallyimportant countries and regions” (MEXT, 2017, p. 13), to nurture ‘human resources’ who
can meet the joint goals of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) and MEXT
(Yonezawa, 2014). It was designed to be an educational agenda built on attention to competition, to supply and demand, what Stiegler calls “the commodification of knowledge” (2015, p.
169). Regardless of the relative ‘successes’ or ‘failures’ of these initiatives in higher education (see Toh, 2016; Aspinall, 2011), foreign language education incorporated into such aknowledge industry remains inherently nihilistic. It presents not a mechanism for incalculable possibility, for imagination and empathy, for long-term transindividuation, or for criticalparticipation in the industries that have become the profit-driven producers and caretakers ofsocial memory. Rather, it perpetuates the short-term ‘fix’, replicating the machinery of selfinterest, addiction, envy and misery̶‘short-circuiting’ the possibilities for change and thecreation of a sustainable culture.
As Giroux (2015; 2014; 2011) has noted, neoliberal ideology has presented itself instark opposition to critical pedagogy and the utopian possibilities of education̶the con総合文化研究第 30 巻第 1 号（2024.6）+David KENNEDY様.indd

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certed and limitless drive for agency, creative participation, challenge to power and socialchange. Dewey voiced this educational ideal as “a widening and deepening of conscious
life̶a more intense, disciplined, and expanding realization of meanings” (2004 [1916], p.
344). Education for Dewey was not simply a preparation for the utilitarian necessities of theeconomic order, but the essence of a life lived, a never-ending process of re-imagination, i.e.
an aesthetic endeavor. In a similar vein, Stiegler (2015) reminds us that the origin of philosophy, in Plato, is rooted in the question of education, conceived as a disciplined and yettherapeutic struggle with the implications of a technically exteriorized social memory.
Stiegler, then, sees the academy as a necessary caretaker of social memory against the disindividuating forces of neoliberal economics:. . . the ‘market’ dissolves social structures and psychic apparatus, and subjects the evolution of the global technological system to the exclusively adaptive and speculativeimperatives of an economy of carelessness and neglect. This leads to generalized disinvestment and renders impossible the curative adoption of contemporary pharmaka . . .
This ‘Market’ is inherently a process of disindividuation, that is, a process that destroys
all institutions and discredits every form of authority̶recognizing the violence of thelaw but not its symbolic force, which one calls its authority. (Stiegler, 2015, p. 184)
Here we can get a hint of Stiegler’s pairing of the aesthetic (the psychosocial organization of
the symbolic) and the political (see also Stiegler, 2014). It is my contention that the foreign
language learning industry in Japan, as well as many who engage in language pedagogy
here, have overlooked this crucial political aspect. For as language learning has an aesthetic
dimension (again, in that it is a sensate experience), it involves the libido (desire), and therefore it is subject to political forces (i.e., who or what regulates that desire).
Although one might argue that the framing of foreign-ness and foreign languages inJapan represents a kind of therapeutic pharmakon̶a cure and poison̶such an argument
would have to overlook the issue of the individual’s self-investment in this machinery of
resistance and desire, in other words this person’s anamnesic (i.e. self-remembered) capacity for care, or for attention to that which is worth caring about. However, foreign languages
in Japan, as techné, are by and large positioned to be neither enablers nor recipients of thiscapacity. They have instead been historically placed as objects of manipulation by the stateand by industry, objects of a drive for consumption, for something that is different, new,desirable̶or, conversely, as a reminder of the glaring contrasts between Japan and nonJapan̶but not necessarily as enabling of long-term, sustainable transindividuation. That is,these programmatic positionings of foreign languages are not sociohistorically robust
enough to support widespread autopoietic (self-creating and sustainable) engagement fromthe population into which they are transplanted. Foreign languages are widely conceived as― 69 ―+David KENNEDY様.indd

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something brought from the outside, a forced contact that has been, and continues to be,“ideologically regulated” (Seargeant, 2009, p. 70), a regulation that constantly pits desire
against anxiety. This occurs through the mechanisms of both consumer culture (themeparks, t-shirts, magazines, television, cram schools and language schools, etc.) and themicromanagement of language education, particularly its emphasis on quantification of proficiency. In this sense, mainstream English language education is unwittingly part of themachinery that exploits the short-term drives, but does little to promote a healthy libidinal
ecology wherein there is possibility for sustainable processes of psychosocial transindividuation.

Conclusion: Toward an Aesthetics of Memor yYoung people today are increasingly in danger of falling into a comfortably numb resignation
to a planetary status quo̶a resignation to the apparently unstoppable momentum of dominant economic, technological, social, and political movements; more specifically, aresignation to the seeming inevitabilities of global neoliberalism, the unrelenting distractionsof the digital screen, and a world bereft of alternative futures or utopian visions. The current
milieu is ushering society into a wasteland of its own making, one historically unparalleled in
psychosocial desolation, a landscape in which humanity̶especially the young̶can find neither belonging nor contribution nor growth. The wanderers of this landscape are, in short,lacking futural hope.
Occupationally, the vast majority of us now face a lifetime being regarded as ‘humanresources’ in service to the unfeeling machinery of economic growth. In most of the industrialized world, the bottom line̶financial profitability̶knows best, or at least better than its
citizens do. In China, this principle has taken an even more sinister form: a state-controlled‘Social Credit System’ is now well established, in which big data algorithms assess not only
the economic potential of an individual, but also their sociopolitical pliancy. In either model,
our knowing how to do/make (savoir-faire) and how to live (savoir-vivre) are increasingly
being outsourced to the screens into which we invest our souls hour after hour, as the algorithmic forces behind these mirages have also come to know and to calculate better than wedo.
As has been discussed, Stiegler frames these problems against the very essence of ourhumanity and collective culturing: our technicity (techné) and historicity. What we do andhow we live are inextricably positioned between the accumulations of our shared memory(past retentions) and our ability to imagine and move toward a shared future that is sustainable and worth investing in. These are, ultimately, issues of knowing and of making. Stiegler’slater work emphasizes the making of worlds, the creation of futures. Our technologies situate
us temporally in an eternal moment of incompleteness, in a forever becoming. Stiegler argues,
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however, that the current epoch presents technological innovation at such a pace that we areunable to comprehend what it is making of us. Our technical becoming is outracing our cultural becoming, leading to hopelessness, loneliness, and alienation. We are at great risk ofbeing dis-individuated̶incapable of understanding our place in the world. In such a lonely
wilderness, millennials (especially) are left to seek recognition and acceptance (and a dopamine hit) in tweets, Instagram posts, and TikTok videos. But these digital inscriptions leavenothing for a future becoming. They are ephemera in search of immediate response, and inthat respect empty of significance.
Rather than succumbing to the abject pessimism of Günther Anders’ assertion thathumans actually desire to be replaced and to be anaesthetized, this article is premised on aconviction (after Plato) that it is through education that there must be a radical return to firstprinciples, a recognition of the technical and historical groundings of human culture, i.e., the“play of the world” (Stiegler, 2011, p. 59). Within this framework, education is tasked withnothing less than to be the caretaker of tertiary memory. ‘Taking care’ is a long-term projectof cultivating possible, incalculable futures that are worth living in and that are worth contributing to. Henry Giroux characterizes higher education in the current neoliberal era as
antithetical to such a vision. Instead, it is a “dead zone” where “the future replicates the present in an endless cycle” (2014, p. 31). What is needed is a protentional and contributory viewof higher education, one in which both educators and students are part of a trans-generational project toward social semiosis, of co-creation of meaning, a return to the roots of ournegentropic spirit, what the biologists Maturana and Varela termed our natural impulse
toward “bringing forth a world” (1998, p. 27).
What I have attempted to do in this article is to offer a future-looking vision of the liberaland language arts in Japanese higher education as a means for bringing forth worlds throughecologies of contribution (Stiegler, 2015). This involves a re-examination of how we view 1)
individuals who are learning and doing things in new languages, and 2) the purpose of language arts education in general.
First of all, there must be a resistance against an industry that views learners as little
more than consumers. There must be a renewed focus on the learner as a whole person, aperson who feels and lives and has something to contribute to the world. With rare exception, the field of language learning motivation has been an exercise in statistical prediction ofobservable learner behavior. It is primarily the study of cause and effect. Overall there has
been a tendency to view language learning and use as discrete from what is being done, what
is being created, and what is being carried forward through the very experience of being in a
new language. Ema Ushioda’s (2009) “person-in-context relational view of motivation” provides an ontological counterbalance to the positivist establishment in language learning
research. Hers is a ‘teleological’ view of motivation, a shift away from linear cause and effectcharacterizations of what make an ideal or typical learner. She promotes:― 71 ―+David KENNEDY様.indd

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. . . a focus on real persons, rather than on learners as theoretical abstractions; a focus
on the agency of the individual person as a thinking, feeling human being, with an identity, a personality, a unique history and background, a person with goals, motives andintentions; a focus on the interaction between the self-reflective intentional agent, andthe fluid and complex system of social relations, activities, experiences and multiple
micro- and macro- contexts in which the person is embedded, moves, and is inherently
part of. (Ushioda, 2009, p. 220)
Ushioda argues that traditional dichotomies between internal (the “learner-as-computer”)
and external (context or culture as a “pre-existing, stable, independent background variable”[p. 218]) leads to a tendency of viewing one of the two as objectified by the other. Her rejection of this fallacy thereby promotes a relational, or ecological, view that socio-cultural andsocio-historically situated processes are mutually constitutive with the complexities of self.
This is a recognition of the processes of transindividuation, of the individual becoming otherand opening future possibility in concert with the communities they inhabit.
Second, practitioners in the language arts would do well to recognize that the end goalof their practice need not be ‘fluency’ or ‘communication skills’ or any other type of measurable ‘proficiency’. In fact, there need not be a fixed end goal at all. As this article has argued,
the focus on raw calculability lies at the heart of the dis-individuating algorithms of an industry driven by profit. Ronald Barnett, one of the preeminent scholars in the philosophy of
higher education, has proposed a reimagining of the university as it relates to the world,
arguing that in a world that is changing faster than we are able to keep up with, the teachingof skills has become largely moot (2018; 2004). Rather, he argues for an “ontological turn”(Barnett, 2004, p. 247) in the university, a focus on what it feels like to be in the world:
Now, what we are witnessing is a new kind of world order in which the changes arecharacteristically internal. They are primarily to do with how individuals understandthemselves, with their sense of identity (or lack of it), with their being in the world; thisis a world order which is characterized by ontological dispositions. (2004, p. 248)
We can here associate Barnett’s promotion of an ontological turn with this article’s sense of
the aesthetic. In Barnett’s view, it is the university’s role to enable individuals “to prosper
amid supercomplexity” (2004, p. 252, italics mine), to aim for “the transformation of humanbeing” (ibid., p. 257). This is nothing less than a dedication to fostering a shared world thatis sustainable and enabling, to opening incalculable futures through the inscription of tertiary memory, and to lives that are worth living.
This article has attempted to reframe the underlying purposes for language education,
arguing for an ontological emphasis on the aesthetic̶that which is actively experienced and総合文化研究第 30 巻第 1 号（2024.6）+David KENNEDY様.indd

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felt by the individual and the surrounding community̶rather than on the dictates of the language learning industry. In upcoming work, I intend to illustrate more concretely how this‘aesthetic turn’ might be put into action in the language classroom. This will include examples of how the experience of the language classroom can be a catalyst for personal andsocial development, particularly through the implementation of peer ethnography collaboration, journaling, and the curation of community culture. What is most at issue, however, isthe dynamic that transpires in the classroom involving more than simply language learning,but the cultivation of a shared tertiary memory and a more liveable, ethical, and sustainable
world.

Acknowledgements
This research was supported by a group research grant from Nihon University, College of Commerce for a
project titled 英語教育における理論と実践.

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要旨
この記事では，デジタルテクノロジーが世界の中で存在する経験，特に日本の高等教育における言語学習の経験に与える影響を探る。哲学者の故ベルナール・スティグレールの
生き方を知るという「the aesthetic」という広範な概念に基づいて，新自由主義とアルゴ
リズム技術が不安，無関心，孤独，無力感に至るまで個人を麻痺させてきたと主張されている。要するに，そのような力はシモンドンが「transindividuation」と呼んだ社会的形成への人間の潜在力，および社会的形成に影響を与える可能性を大きく妨げているのである。この記事は，語学学習業界がこの閉塞感に陥っていること，特に習熟度の数値化と英語の「成功」の方程式への執着を示唆している。この記事は，言語教育における存在論的な転換，「the aesthetic」とスティグレールの言うところの「生きる価値のある人生」への新たな焦点の呼びかけで締めくくられている。

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