Once life is recognised under exposure, the next unavoidable pressure appears in the sphere of knowledge: teaching, transmitting, and engaging others. Authority can no longer be presumed, nor can it serve as shelter. Knowledge circulates only insofar as it is enacted responsibly, not declared or imposed.
The Collapse of Conventional Authority
Traditionally, teaching has relied on authority: the teacher as source, the curriculum as shield, the method as guarantee. Exposure dissolves these protections. Ground, certainty, and procedural insulation are unavailable; neither credentials nor ideology can substitute for recognition of consequence.
To teach without authority is not to abandon guidance, but to situate knowledge within the field of responsibility created by exposure. The teacher becomes a participant, not a guarantor, in the ongoing enactment of distinctions.
Knowledge as Perspectival Practice
Under exposure, knowledge is always perspectival. It is inseparable from the practices and positions through which it is produced and transmitted. There is no neutral standpoint from which to teach; every articulation carries the trace of cuts and consequences.
This requires humility without passivity, articulation without pretense, and engagement without shelter. Teaching becomes a negotiation of perspectives rather than a declaration of truth.
Against the Comfort of Pedagogical Mastery
The temptation is to insist on mastery: well-structured curricula, assessment metrics, or hierarchies of competence. These provide comfort but cannot absorb responsibility under exposure. They relocate it instead.
True pedagogy here is attentive, responsive, and constantly re-evaluated. It acknowledges that students, ideas, and environments co-constitute the teaching situation, and that consequences flow from participation rather than instruction alone.
The Second Unavoidable Pressure
The pressure of teaching under exposure can be stated simply:
Knowledge must circulate without shelter, and teaching must participate without imposing.
This is neither easy nor comforting. It demands attentiveness, engagement, and humility. It asks the teacher to remain exposed alongside those who receive, interpret, and act upon knowledge.
The next post turns to the structures that sustain this engagement: how institutions can operate as perspectival fields rather than shelters of authority.
Next: Institutions as Perspectival Fields.
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