Dialectic of the Event

This article aims to compare Gert Biesta’s, Hartmut Rosa’s and Thomas Kuhn’s perspectives on how transformative “events” emerge and become possible, and to relate their viewpoints to an educational context. The article shows how Biesta’s concept of subjectification, and Rosa’s idea of resonance, depend on viewing contemporary education as a state of status quo that is disrupted by a transformative event. Although their diagnoses of the contemporary and views on individual agency differ to some extent, Biesta and Rosa respectively place emphasis on the relationship between the subject and the world as the “space” where these events emerge. Subsequently, the article turns to Kuhn to propose another approach to understanding the dialectic of status quo and events. Through Kuhn, it is possible to introduce a more affirmative way of looking at how a state of status quo can underpin events, and how these events take place on a collective level, rather than in encounters between individual subjects and the world.