Beyond Presentism

Temporal Plurality and the Differential Articulation of Times in Educational Work

Abstract

The article explores the temporal dimension of education by addressing the tension between contemporary presentism and the concept of plural temporality. Drawing on Jankélévitch’s notion of the “occasion” as the intersection of heterogeneous durations, it argues that educational practice always unfolds within a web of non-coextensive times –physical, biological, historical, institutional, and symbolic – which are articulated in differential and often conflicting ways. François Hartog’s framework of “regimes of historicity” and Fulvio De Giorgi’s pedagogical critique of presentism are combined here with Louis Althusser’s elaboration of differential temporality and structural causality: the various levels that compose a social formation do not share a fully synchronous present, but are traversed by their own rhythms and sequences, with local fields of linear causality bounded by structural conditions. Within this framework, pedagogical supervision is understood as a device capable of suspending the urgency of the present to reconstruct the genealogies of educational processes, identifying temporal lags, forced synchronizations, and torsions. The aim is to counter the ideology of immediacy and to restore to educational action the historical depth and temporal complexity that are inherent to it, adopting the plurality of times as a critical and operational principle.