Towards a Pedagogical Understanding of Upbringing

Abstract

This concluding chapter reaffirms the book’s purpose as an attempt to bring out an affirmative account of upbringing by drawing attention to less commonly articulated features of it. We bring together the core threads of the book: the use of these films as themselves presenting grammatical investigations in the Wittgensteinean sense that show what it means that we lead our lives within language; the focus on the presentations of upbringing that the films offer through their distinct devices; and the specific capacity of film to make our very subjectivity present to us by showing that world in a particular way. Returning to Cavell, we further elaborate a specifically pedagogical account of the figure of the parent by appreciating the experience of raising children not as a distance between ourselves and our children that we can succeed or fail to bridge, but as separateness. This notion captures the common and natural experience of not being understood by the younger generation, the moment of the uncertainty of the passing on between generations and the anxiety this possibly entails, and is understood here as an inescapable aspect of our existence.