Within educational philosophy and theory there has recently been a turn to propose, examine, distinguish, and expand on distinct elements of different modes of educational engagement. The political thrust for this research has been the rise of the learning society and the dominance of a confined operation of learning in which education is collapsed into socialization and qualification (Biesta 2006). Both socialization and qualification refer to the inauguration of a subject into the already-existing order of things. Thus, learning is about inculcating students into a predetermined role in society, limiting education to the goals of social efficiency and the dictates of human capital. Learning is about transferring the skills, knowledges, dispositions, habits, bodily comportments, and so on that will facilitate the transfer of the student into the world. Thus, there is a violence done to both the student and the world within the learning regime, wherein the student and the world are deprived of the opportunity of the event—the birth of the radically new. This violence can happen through various forms of education, including constructivist, progressivist, and critical ones.

Educational philosophers and theorists have thus been seeking to investigate the learning regime and to explore and articulate alternative educational practices that might push back against the contemporary order of things. In particular, an array of scholars has turned to the concept and practice of studying as an alternative or oppositional educational logic (Ford 2016, 2017; Harney and Moten 2013; Lewis 2013; Rocha 2015). Whereas learning is a strong educational logic that involves the acquisition of predetermined knowledges that can be measured and quantified, studying is a weak educational logic that shuns predetermined goals and cannot be easily measured and quantified.

While promising, we believe that this research has been limited in a few ways. First, while the ontological aspects of studying have been examined in a thorough manner, the general affective dimension of studying has not yet been investigated. Second, while a diverse range of theorists have been called upon to articulate studying, the philosophical resources out of which studying has been shaped have remained trapped within the western canon. Partly as a result of this lineage, the relationship between studying and learning has predominantly been theorized in oppositional and binary terms, presupposing and corroborating metaphysical presence as the foundation of identity. We seek to address these limitations in this article by turning to some literature on affect theory, Daoist wind-stories, as well as the Yijing–Daoist Yin–Yang movement. In doing so, not only do we make contributions to research on studying, but we also contribute an educational understanding to affect theory and draw out important affinities between affective study and Daoist wind-stories. In other words, this paper moves to both articulate the affective dimensions of studying and illuminate a particular pedagogy of affect.

More important, we move one step further to re-conceptualize learning and study, figuring them not merely as alternative or oppositional orderings, but as a Daoist Yin–Yang movement wherewith learning and studying, analogous to the Yin–Yang elements, always happen together, mutually informing, confronting, and transforming each other. Dao De Jing tells us that “what is opposite to the norm re-activates the dao movement, and what is weak sustains the dao movement” (Chapter 40). If we analogize learning as the prevalent yang-norm and studying as the weak yin-element that turns over the norm, the questions then become: How it is possible to discern certain educative moments whereupon the learning dynamic is loosened up and turned over towards a clearing for or opening to the happening of the studying? How does the perpetual generation of studying periodically crystallize into a process/trope/dogma of learning? Furthermore, how can a Yijing–Daoist paradigm of change, as a radical explosion of the Western pinnacles of presence and identity, re-inform our understanding of learning and study into a dynamic Yin–Yang movement, shedding new light on our educational thinking on study, affect, and learning? In closing, we animate our affective wind study by turning to a subtle yet radical pedagogical gesture performed by a principal in China. A methodological precaution is needed before proceeding, though. That is, in juxtaposing and dialoguing these distinct cultural styles of reasoning as well as their grounding onto-epistemological worldviews, we do not intend to reduce one to the other, as they are not mutually reducible. Rather, we set them together for reciprocal clarifications.

Affective Study in Western Scholarship

Tyson E. Lewis has undoubtedly undertaken the deepest and most methodical production of a theory of study, often by way of collective studying with friends. He has also approached the affective dimension of study most closely by examining the mood of study. This examination takes place in the context of Lewis’ (2013) inspection of the poetic aesthetics of study, which we bring in here as an introduction to studying. The rhythm of the studier is a poetic rhythm, a cadence that is concurrently futural and inverted, progressive and regressive, repeated and different. As he puts it, this “rhythm is not outside chronological time but rather is a disruption of linear time from inside its own chronological unfolding” (p. 55). As the poem unfolds it anticipates what has come before as it recalls what may come next. There is no ultimate conclusion, no progression of logic, no developmental series of claims. The poem dwells within a space of no longer and not yet and refuses actualization. This is why one is never quite satisfied reading a poem, and also, we suggest, why many of us in the learning society may find poetry frustrating: it hinders any search for conclusions. This does not, of course, mean that poetry is meaningless. On the contrary, poetry is rich in meaning and this richness is owed squarely to the enigmatic dance of its lines.

The studier, too, resists conclusions and refuses actualization, remaining instead in a state of im-potential, retaining potentiality in all of its fullness. To get at this, Lewis calls on Agamben, who draws out two types of potential in the work of Aristotle. On the one hand, there is generic potential, which is potential as it is commonly thought. This exercise of potential is the passage from potentiality into actuality, the transition from “I can” to “I am.” While in itself this movement is certainly not solely destructive, there is a certain paradoxical destruction in its logic, for potentiality itself is destroyed through the process of fulfillment. In other words, once “one is,” they are no longer in potential to be; the “I can” has been destroyed. Moreover, when this is the reigning mode of potentiality, then it is no longer the case that one can, but instead that one must. Otherwise, potential is merely wasted. It is not hard to see this as the prevailing educational logic at work today in the learning society. The student who doesn’t fulfill the task assigned to them by the teacher, professor, boss, or social worker is only comprehended through the negative frames of lack and squander. Many students are even understood as lacking potential itself, and these students and their educational opportunities are quite often subject to disinvestment from the state.

Agamben brings out another exercise of potential, however, and this is the exercise of effective potential. Effective potential is a kind of potential that remains immanent to itself, that is potential insofar as it is not actualized. Thus, rather than the transition from “I can” to “I am,” effective potential moves back and forth between “I can” and “I cannot.” This is the potentiality of freedom. As Agamben (1999) writes, “To be free is not simply to have the power to do this or that thing, nor is it simply to have the power to refuse to do this or that thing. To be free is, in the sense we have seen, to be capable of one’s own impotentiality, to be in relation to one’s own privation. This is why freedom is freedom for both good and evil” (p. 183). There is thus a different ontology at play here. Whereas when generic potential is operative the realm of what is dominates, when effective potential is operative the realm of what can be opens up. This is precisely why the poem is rich in meaning insofar as its meaning remains indeterminate, and does not automatically pass into actuality and realization. The poem remains derealized.

So, too, remains the studier. The studier is one who “properly resides in the most improper of locations: the space and time between subjectification and desubjectification, oscillating between poles to the point of indistinction” (Lewis 2013, p. 58). What we have in this oscillation is the “suspension of the subject as defined by measurable mental mastery, definitive judgments, reliable capabilities, or professional accreditation.” It is easy to understand at this juncture why studying is so antagonistic to the learning regime: it denies the ends that the regime demands. It is a radical denial too, for it is not just particular ends that studying denies, but ends in general and in toto. When the studier is engaged in the sway of the act a certain mood takes hold. It is not “an internal emotion of the studier” but instead “the atmosphere produced by and through engaged studying” (p. 60). For Lewis, study bleeds over into two related moods: hesitation and boredom. Hesitation is a mode of engagement produced strictly through the state of im-potentiality, wherein one sways between “I can, I cannot.” I can yet I hesitate to do, I cannot yet I hesitate to not do. Hesitation would be the dotted lines in the expression “I…can…I…cannot…”. The subject itself, that is, loses its sense of self, its sense of certainty, autonomy, and coherence.

Lewis further argues that as hesitation stretches out temporally it becomes a type of boredom. Boredom gets a bad rap most often because of the way it is comprehended through the frame of the learning society, wherein when one is bored one is not inspired, not inclined to do anything. While bored, nothing strikes my fancy. Yet Lewis shows that when we are bored it is because the pre-established connections between objects, ideas, and actions have been severed or exhausted. I no longer want to play with my soccer ball because I have exhausted my interest in the way that I play with the soccer ball. It is in this state of feeling that I am most open to other ways of engaging the ball: engaging the ball as something other than the ball. Thus, the prolonged hesitation that is boredom births the possibility of the new through shifting, tinkering, and altering slightly the received order of things. Lewis and Friedrich (2016), for example, posit tinkering and hacking as two other educational logics that suspend and render inoperative the impulses, expectations, and evaluative metrics of learning.

We would argue that in these writings on suspending hesitation and boredom Lewis comes closest to addressing the general affective dimensions of studying. Elsewhere, educational philosophy has addressed the love and eros involved with studying. Igor Jasinski and Lewis (2016), for example, have critiqued traditional conceptions of educational love, demonstrating how they are actually tied up with learning, not studying. They distinguish between three kinds: “tough love,” wherein the teacher makes the student actualize a potentiality against their desire, will, or inclination; “love actually,” wherein the teacher loves the student as they have already been actualized; and (new) world love, wherein the teacher loves the student for their potential for bringing something new to the world in general, and the teacher’s world in particular. In place of these three loves, they propose whatever love, an im-potential love that is not attached to the actualization of potential and is indifferent to the predicates of the student. Calling on the writing of William James, Sam Rocha (2015) has proposed studying as eros, as a “force that comes and goes, but never leaves us altogether” (p. 73). Studying is a force in the world to which we respond and from which we can never escape, a fundamental passion of life. Studying here is not really an educational endeavor, and in fact Rocha explicitly states that it cannot be engaged with intention.

Thus far in the research on studying, however, the affect of study has not been explicitly considered. To begin, then, we need to feel around for a definition of affect, which is an admittedly difficult task. Affect has diverse epistemological and theoretical genealogies. For some it is strictly synonymous with feeling and emotion (e.g., Ahmed 2010), while others consider affect to be sometimes the same as and sometimes different from feeling and emotion (e.g., Sedgwick 2003). In the latter usage, affect tends to be the base from which feelings and emotions arise. There are others, still, who provide no definition of affect (e.g., Ruitenberg 2015; McPherson and Saltmarsh 2016). While we think there can be value in each of these three approaches, affect names something particular that bears a relationship to but cannot be reduced to emotion or feeling. In this, we follow most closely on the heels of Teresa Brennan and Lauren Berlant.

For Brennan (2004), affects are charged, energetic, mutating transfers that flow through spaces and bodies. Affects are charged in that they elicit responses, ones that expand or contract the subject, bind or divide collectives, build up or tear down the dramatic scenes of life. They are extensive and intensive. As physical things they contribute to literal atmospheres from which we draw somatic and cognitive information (Ford 2015). While affects are physiological sensations, feelings are “sensations that have found the right match in words” (p. 5). Throughout her book, The Transmission of Affect, Brennan conducts what she calls a “battle” between feelings and affect by turning to psychoanalysis. At one point, she writes that feelings are “educated” affects, or affects that have been discerned and brought to signification. Love, then, can be both a feeling and an affect, both something that we know is there but also something that escapes and resists that knowledge but still haunts us. The impetus behind Brennan’s work is to make affects intelligible and to aid in their discernment so that we can rid ourselves of bad affects (demons, as she calls them) and open ourselves more to good affects. As Brennan closes her book, “Of that we cannot speak, thereof we must learn” (p. 164).

Berlant (2011) makes a similar distinction between affect and feeling, wherein affects are attachments that sometimes attach to particular feelings but are in no way continuous with any emotions or feelings: “pleasure does not always feel good” (p. 159), for example. There is something about affect that escapes, resists, is prior to, or bigger than feelings. While Brennan looks to the psychoanalyst’s room, Berlant conducts something of a historical materialist reading of affect. She insists that “affect theory is another phase in the history of ideology theory; the moment of the affective turn brings us back to the encounter of what is sensed with what is known and what has impact in a new but also recognizable way” (p. 53). In this investigation, Berlant tracks the historical evolution of things like habit and intuition, the latter of which she defines as comprising “the education of embodied intuition in a transforming world situation” (p. 52). Like Brennan, the hope is that through this work we can learn about the circulation of affect—cruel optimism in particular—so that we may engage in an affective pedagogy that produces new forms of publicness and being together.

There is a clear but latent educational project in this strand of affect theory that we want to open up. Both Berlant and Brennan use words like education, learning, and pedagogy throughout their theorizations, but in a general and not specific way. Thus, we want to propose that by elaborating the affective dimensions of studying we will, at the same time, illuminate a particular pedagogy of affect. Stated simply, we proffer that studying is the educational engagement of affect while learning is the educational engagement of feeling. We submit our theory of affective study as a way to purposefully enact this distinction.

While engaging in learning the goal is to overcome the state of latency and ignorance as quickly as possible to actualize and to gain mastery. We have to perform and we have to know. We need to signify emotions and name feelings. Only then can we figure out what is going on, only then can we solve problems and manage disputes. There is nothing wrong with naming feelings and resolving disputes, of course, but the problem is with the rush to actualize and to name those feelings. The rush to signification not only violently ossifies the affects actually in circulation into emotions, but also cuts the subject short by foreclosing the realm of potentialities. We are confined to the world as it is, including the feelings and emotions available in our cultures, classrooms, and so on.

Studying, by contrast, is the state of being given over to affect and its opacity, of dwelling within the realm of possibilities to which affect can give birth. The affective dimension of study is a sort of interminable openness before the world and our contemporary moment as it is expressed in our cultures, our classrooms, and so on. The subject pauses but does not remain inactive. Instead, they are naked in the middle of an infinite sphere of potentialities. Importantly, this sphere is not limited to the already-existing, but opens into heretofore unthought and unfelt feelings, formerly impossible combinations of emotions, and profane sensations.

However, the way in which we have set up our formulation of affective study remains problematic insofar as it risks (re)-instituting an ontological binary between learning and studying and between emotion and affect. Our re-envisioning of study and learning, affect and feeling into a Daoist Yin–Yang movement in the last section of this article is undertaken to eschew such an ontological bent. A note of clarification is henceforth needed here that the oppositional logic laid out above needs to be understood as an analytical strategy, and such an analytically bound binary is an antagonism that is inherent in the act of study itself. As Agamben (1999) acknowledges, the one who exercises effective potential “already possesses knowledge” and for this reason “is not obliged to suffer an alteration” (p. 179), an alteration he identifies with learning. Moreover, we insist that the act of study is useful in that it generates new opportunities for realization. In other words, the point of studying is not merely to be open to the world, but also to be able to act on that openness, to inaugurate events, ruptures, to make the strange familiar, and the familiar strange. It is for this reason that we are interested in articulating what the heterogeneous blocking together of studying looks like. While studying has been richly theorized as an alternative or antagonist to learning, we want to think and feel through how these two educational exercises can flow together. To do this, we want to turn to the Daoist wind-stories and a Yin–Yang style of reasoning.

Daoist Study and Affect as Exemplified in a Wind-Story

Zhuangzi and Laozi are the two most well-known ancient Chinese Daoist thinkers, and their rich and thought-provoking wisdoms are respectively nurtured within, hinted at, or directly expressed in the texts of Zhuangzi (witty paradoxical stories) and Dao De Jing (pithy statements). Witty and pithy as they are, these books are intellectual resources from which multi-layered interpretations can be drawn out incessantly. Their statements often bracket our taken-for-granted commonsense, engendering aporia-like moments whence suspense, doubt, wander, and wonder may happen and move together. Dao De Jing, for example, says, “a follower of learning gains each day whereas a follower of dao loses each day” (為學日益為道日損). A dao-follower, then, can be analogically treated as a studier, the nuances of which we explicate in relation to study and learning, affect and feeling.

To that end, we scrutinize a wind-story which Zhuangzi narrates to begin his second chapter in the book also titled Zhuangzi. With the wind-story, this chapter conveys a theme of equalizing all myriad things such that all-things in the cosmic world, whether human or non-human, are ontologically equal, albeit epistemologically different. We would like to understand this wind-story as an exemplar of daoist study, one that unpacks the dao-studier’s affect as well as a kind of losing pedagogy. Drawing upon Nan’s (2007) holistic interpretation, we translate the wind-story, i.e., a dialogue between a master and his disciple, below (with some explanatory notes in brackets):

  1. 1.

    Nanguo Ziqi was sitting (on the floor) by a (coffee-table-like short) table (kind of sluggishly sliding down half-under the table), looked up and blew out a long whistle, then lowered his head and looked like detached from everything around him.

  2. 2.

    Yancheng Ziyou, standing in attendance before him, said, “What’s going on?! Your body looks like some life-less dried-wood and your heart-mind seems like dead ashes? Your sitting-posture today is very different from your past sitting-postures.”

  3. 3.

    Ziqi answered, “Yan, is it not indeed wonderful that you asked of this?! For a moment, I lost/forgot my body-self. Do you understand this? You may have heard of the panpipes (sound) of humans, but not the panpipes (sound) of Earth; Or you may have heard of the panpipes (sound) of Earth, but not the panpipes (sound) of Heaven!”

  4. 4.

    “May I boldly ask you what this means?” asked Ziyou.

  5. 5.

    Ziqi answered, “Now the Great Clump (Earth) spits forth its breath-energy (qi) which then becomes wind (air movement). Now if only this would not blow-work! For once it blows-works, then the 10,000 crevices and holes howl forcefully (with different sound features). Have you not heard of the nice liaoliao-sound of wind in high and spatial places? Yet, in the mountain peaks and forests, some giant trees have holes and crevices in the varied shapes of noses, mouths, ears, vases, cups, mortars, mud-holes, puddles. And their winds sound like murmurers, whistlers, yellers, suckers, shouters, wailers, resonators, screamers. The first-earlier gusts of winds resound with a yuuuu and the later-following winds chime in with an ouuuu. With a light-breezy wind there comes a pleasant-light harmonizing chord/movement; with a gale wind, there comes a loud-noisy harmonizing chord/movement. However, when the violent wind comes, the tree crevices become sheer silent as if all stuffed to a limit, and then you start to see the wavering and quivering of the trees (after the limit is transcended).”

  6. 6.

    Ziyou said, “Ok, the panpipes (sound) of Earth refer to the varied sounds from the crevices, and the panpipes of man are aligned bamboo tubes. May I venture to ask about the panpipes of Heaven?”

  7. 7.

    Ziqi answered, “Blowing forth the 10,000 different sounds and engendering the latter as being themselves. All things self-become things as they are and what is it that causes them to become themselves?! (On this ontological level, everything is equally different and differently equal)”.

Here Zhuangzi depicts wind as the material qi or air in movement (physical wind), a sound-generating condition of the natural wind-sounds (panpipes of Earth) and the cultural wind-instruments (panpipes of humans), and an expression of panpipes of Heaven. The panpipe of Heaven, historically controversial in meaning, could be understood as an embodiment of the invisible-ineffable dao, or the dao movement, which transforms-generates-permeates everything into everything as it is (Zhao 2011). Seen this way, Zhuangzi paraphrases the 10,000 material forms and shapes of sounds/winds as the 10,000 myriad things in the cosmic world, and in so doing, argues these things, albeit epistemologically different, are ontologically equal, all being one expression of dao or the dao movement. Please note that ancient Chinese thinking uses “10,000” as a generic nomenclature for myriad things, humans included as one thing, in the cosmic world. More importantly, dao is not something that exists outside us that we can learn to obtain as an object, but an invisible presence within which we are already embedded, a mode of being that we can be thrust upon, be ex-posed to, or encounter suddenly, if a clearing toward that happening occurs.

In this story, Zhuangzi proffers a losing/forgetting pedagogy, as opposed to a presumed gaining principle in the learning logic, as a clearing for the master-studier to get ex-posed to the panpipes of Heaven or the dao movement. Furthermore, this losing/forgetting clearing opens up a Daoist affective pedagogy of study, suspending cognition toward an opening or awakening to the bodily senses. Master Ziqi said “for a moment, I lost/forgot my body-self,” and it was at this moment that his body looked like lifeless dried wood and heart-mind dead ashes, detached from everything around him. It was also at this moment that Master Ziqi was opened to the panpipes of Earth as a dynamic expression of the dao movement. Specifically, his varied senses were aroused such that he ‘imagined’ the rising qi-energy turning into wind, ‘visualized’ the high plateaus, mountains and forests, varied shapes of the tree crevices, ‘heard’ distinct sounds, ‘tasted’ the pleasant or noisy harmonizing chords/movement, ‘felt’ the stuffed crevices and the sudden silence when the violent wind came, and ‘saw’ the wavering of the trees after the limit was overcome. These bodily senses in happening and awakening, often eclipsed or actualized into emotions in a cognitive learning dynamics, bring out the affective dynamics of study.

However, this Daoist study seems to embrace a paradox: Master Ziqi as a dao-follower loses and forgets his bodily, cognitive, and emotional attachments, yet, his self-losing/forgetting doesn’t lead to an inertia but a full sensitivity to the Dao movement. How can a self-abandonment engender forceful activity rather than an inertia? This question brings us back to the dao-follower Daodejing statement and this time in its complete form, “a follower of learning gains whereas a follower of dao loses, losing upon losing reaches wuwei (nonaction), and wuwei (non-action) to wubuwei (non–non-action, i.e., full activity) (為學日益為道日損損之又損以至於無為無為而無不為)”. The last statement seems to say paradoxically “by not doing, everything is done” (see, Moon 2015, p. 455). However, such wuwei (non-action) doesn’t register an inertia or physical non-activity in and by itself; instead, it gestures and moves toward a higher level of action, a wubuwei (non–non-action), by re-turning to the root, the yin-like weak and empty, a presence of absence, which has an active and positive force.

To relate this to Agamben’s thought, wuwei (non-action) is a deliberate deprivation of potentiality, opening and relating itself to im-potentiality, the permanent precondition of potentiality. A Daoist forgetting or losing is neither a cognitive state nor a psychological willing, but a disrupted mode of being, conducible to but not necessarily engendering the happening of the new, the possible, the non–non-action (full activity). Master Ziqi, through self-forgetting and self-losing as deprivation, reaches a state of wuwei (seemingly detached from his own self and everything), which is actually a pure being open further to a higher level of wubuwei (full activity), an awakening to the dao movement. Agamben (1999), in turn, can help us see that this new level of full activity entails a higher level of freedom, freedom as to “be capable of one’s own impotentiality, to be in relation to one’s own privation” (p. 183).

Seen in this way, the Daoist losing/forgetting is not a total abandonment of the subject. Rather, the daoist-studier is given over to, subjected to, the wind, and thus is caught desubjectified—while remaining a subject. The claim is thus not that the subject is completely dissolved, but rather that it enters into a state of incoherence, wherein they are open to the Dao movement. It is not a coincidence, then, that in her examination of affect, Brennan (2004) turns to the atmosphere in its literal sense. When we enter into an atmosphere it, at the same time and in the same movement, enters into us. In literature that has explicitly or implicitly addressed the transmission of affect, sight and sound have featured most prevalently. Yet Brennan insists that this implies a different operation than transmission: mimesis. The idea is that when one hears or sees something, one then becomes or acts like that person and, as such, “our boundaries stay intact” (p. 10). Smell, by contrast, literally enters into the body through the nose or mouth; “Smell and various forms of neuronal communication are not such respecters of persons” (p. 10).

As one paradigmatic example, Brennan turns to pheromones, which are faint excreted chemicals directed toward others that communicate various things like fear, excitement, or anxiety to others of the same species (pheromones are thus distinguished from hormones in that the latter act as internal communicators and the former are external communicators). These “act as direction-givers which, as molecules, traverse the physical space between one subject and another, and factor in or determine the direction taken by the subject who inhales or absorbs them” (p. 75). It is through the movement of the air—the physical wind—that we exist in the whole of the social, in the dynamism of the cosmos. Thus, a fundamental implication we draw from linking Daoist thinking, affect, im-potentiality, and wind is that if we want to engage in comprehensive and transformational educative processes, then we have to theorize entrance points or clearings for the happening of study, and Daoist losing/forgetting as expressed in the wind-story is one such powerful opening. Studying is a way of entering into this space so that we can lose the self-mind and inaugurate a state of vacillation between subjectification and desubjectification. To engage in a process of losing oneself is, after all, not to say that one actually does lose the self completely.

In this Daoist wind-story, wind is indeed material wind, i.e., air in movement. Yet, in Chinese culture, the imagination of ‘wind’ also looms large in and across domains of education, politics, poetry, and the Chinese medical body (see, Kuriyama 1994). As one co-author (Zhao Forthcoming) has found through her research, the Chinese notion ‘wind’ (feng 風), nurturing an inherent sense of transforming, has a unique connection to Confucian education and can even be argued to be the language of Chinese education in a similar way that Bildung provides the language for German education discourses. Briefly speaking, Confucius envisions his whole educational thinking according to an image of ‘wind blowing over the earth,’ i.e., the very image of the Yijing guan-hexagram. This hexagram originally depicts a scenario of a right-positioned virtuous King performing the highest-ranking ritual ceremony with his subjects beholding. On its own, this scenario has nothing to do with teaching and learning, but Confucius adds some commentary and envisions it into an ideal teaching and learning movement that happens like wind blowing over the earth.

And yet, the rules for admittance into such a clearing of self-losing/forgetting require that we return to our opposition to the imposition of the binary between learning and study, between feeling and affect. Whereas Brennan insists that we must learn to speak of that which we cannot, we rather insist that the ineffable and intelligible are blocked together, locked in an enduring encounter. The goal of the learning regime is to bring the ineffable to signification, while the goal of the studying regime is to return from the realm of the lucid into that of the opaque, the symbolic to the real. By conceptualizing the affective dimension of study in relation to Daoist wind stories, our intention is to think through more carefully the heterogeneous composition of education, wherein learning and studying co-exist in a sort of struggle, which allows us to conceptualize both educational processes without valorizing one over the other. To make this move more explicit and concrete, we now turn to the Yijing–Daoist Yin–Yang movement, which we figure as one style through which we could engage studying and learning.

Reimagining Study and Learning into a Yijing–Daoist Yin–Yang Movement

If the above analysis focuses upon the styles of reasoning as expressed in certain texts, then we want to begin this final section by further scrutinizing the philosophical underpinnings of the above styles of figuring affect and study. For example, we cautioned that the oppositional reasoning of study and learning, affect and feeling needs to be taken at the analytical level without risking the ontologization of such a binary. One reason for this is that in Western post-turn literatures, it becomes a common analytical or reasoning strategy to explode sameness, identity, and/or presence as the grounding principle of metaphysics by reconceptualizing difference, absence, and the differential as ontogenetic principles (Zhao 2017). In this style of reasoning education, studying becomes the ontological act that learning cuts short. There lurks within this style a conflation between the analytical and the categorical ontological division, which is an expression of the deep-rooted logic of presence and substance ontology in the Western thinking. Yet, the Chinese Yijing–Daoist Yin–Yang thinking burgeons out of a radically distinct worldview and a holistic cosmology, which are constructed upon a “more experiential, comprehensive, human-involved, and experience-directed philosophy of change” (Cheng 2011, p. 342), just as the book title Yijing literally denotes “the classics of/on change.”

The Yijing paradigm of change means that everything in the cosmic world, which are first of all equally different and differently equal as the above wind-story shows, interconnects each other into a dynamic cosmos with dao, not as the logo-like arbiter of the strife of forces, but as a generative and sustaining force (Cheng 2011). Beneath the seemingly chaotic (acosmic) changes are some patterned regularities, which can be experientially observed and analogically depicted, foreshadowed, and/or divined through the Yijing Yin–Yang hexagram arrangement. The Yin–Yang lines are symbolically adopted to show the juxtaposition, constellation, opposition, supplementation, transformation, and translation within and between things, with human beings included as one such thing. Thus, yin and yang don't refer to a certain substance or ontology, but rather embody signs, signals, or elements that can be symbolically placed with-in any-thing and between any-things. Etymologically, yin and yang are shadows and lights on a mountain side and river bank, forming a pair of “opposing forces and momentum as we watch how sunlight gives rise to the darkness of night that eventually gives rise to daylight” (Cheng 2011, p. 343).

Situated with such a change paradigm and changing-holistic cosmology, we see the hidden conflation between, and the inherent paradox within, an analytical oppositional logic and an ontologization of categorical binary division, lurking in the post-turn literatures. For example, Blom and Lu (2016) intriguingly contextualize postmodernity through the symbolic Yin–Yang ordering. Rather than merely issuing a precaution against the binary ontologization, we want to formulate a fluidification of such noun categories of study and learning, affect and feeling into a Daoist network wherein a Yin–Yang style of reasoning governs and connects every-thing, whether real or imagined, along a multilayered, trans-temporal-spatial, and multiperspectival Yin–Yang movement. In short, the Yin–Yang element mutually exists within, pre-supposes, confronts, informs, negotiates, and transforms each other incessantly. As the 28th chapter of Dao De Jing states, in order “to know the white, one has to remain with-in the black.”

Seen in this way, the interconnection and movement between study and learning, affect and feeling can be further clarified for new understandings that are not easily visible and foregrounded thus far in the Western scholarship. The Dao De Jing, chapter 40, clarifies what we mean by this interconnection and movement: what is opposite to the norm re-activates the dao movement, and what is weak sustains the dao movement (反者道之動弱者道之用). Intriguingly, the Chinese character fan 反 for ‘being opposite to’ is homologous to fan 返 for ‘returning to (root)’. In other words, what is opposite to the norm tends to reactivate the dao movement, gesturing at the same time a re-turning to the root as expressed in such yin-elements as emptiness (to fullness), darkness (to whiteness), weak (to strong).

This has significant implications for our rethinking of study and learning, affect and feeling as a movement of educational praxis. If we analogize learning as the prevalent yang-norm and studying as the weak-yin that turns over the norm, the questions then become: How it is possible to discern certain educative moments whereupon the learning dynamic is loosened up and turned over towards a clearing for or opening to the re-happening of, or re-turning to, the studying? How does the perpetual generation of studying periodically crystallize into a dogma of learning? Furthermore, how can the learning-study movement be sustained in its turning and re-turning?

Elsewhere, one of the co-authors (Zhao 2015; Sloane and Zhao 2014) has given a pedagogical example of one such Yin–Yang dao movement. In China, teachers are historically assigned with a high social status. For example, teachers are ordered right after heaven, earth, emperors, and parents. In accordance, Confucian education features and prioritizes authoritative teachers, to whom students show the highest respect, say, by kneeling-bowing. In order to maintain this authority and its accompanying relationship, under no circumstances can a teacher kneel-bow toward students, since this would discompose the normalized educational dao. However, a few years ago a middle school principal, with no other pedagogical resorts to turn to, dropped to his knees in front of the whole school on the sports field one morning. This bodily act stupefied his colleagues, students, as well as the whole of Chinese society. The students were thrust into a trance-like aporia, one that deprived them of their usual forms of reason and intelligence. The principal’s explosive educational act transformed the being and subjectivity of himself and the students, which reactivated the dao movement. This was, we contend, a re-turning to a co-dwelling and co-being between these agents and human beings.

Looking at this incident from the perspective we have developed thus far, and reading into it a theory of study, it becomes a clear example of the suspension of the operation of received and known feelings and intellectual arrangements and agreements. It was an educational act that inaugurated a clearing for study, one that forced the opening of a shock, a stupefaction wherein one wasn’t sure what to feel or know. What is pertinent to our purposes here is the fact that the principal wasn’t engaged in an intentional negation of traditional pedagogy, nor was he keen on combatting the logic of learning. Born of the pedagogical failure of learning, it was a small, radical gesture that overturned the dominant functioning of the educational system, within the particular school, the Chinese school system, and the Chinese society. The gesture overturned the dominant functioning without overthrowing it. It is important to stress that this does not mean that the act was absorbed within the dominant system, for it triggered a re-ordering of the flow of the system. Like the poem’s rhythm, this educational act disrupted the unfolding of the system from within.

To re-imagine learning and studying, feeling and affect beyond a Western ontology-tint binary ordering toward a Chinese daoist Yin–Yang movement is to eschew the binarizing of studying and learning. This, as we have shown, has not only philosophical but also practical implications and significance. By theorizing the affective dimensions of study, we can move beyond envisioning the happening or event of studying, and toward anticipating, discerning, and leveraging on the moment of study as a turn-in and turn-over of learning. This turn-over reactivates the dao of education, an im-potentiality, helping us conceive of and experience learning not as a dogma that severs our daily educational life into a fixed and timeless fabric, but as a praxis-based Yin–Yang movement.