The Pedagogical Power of Things: Toward a Post-Intentional Phenomenology of Unlearning

This article attempts to understand how things can act as nonhuman teachers with the ability to suspend the worldly dimension of perception. Expressions of such pedagogical power can be seen in certain forms of visual art and, in particular, in the convention of the contour line. Rather than a reflection of human cultural norms or an accident of human perception, the contour can be seen as ontological research into the vicarious causality between things. In conclusion, Lewis proposes a new kind of art education that is sensitive to the ways in which things teach us to unlearn human-centered perceptual styles.