Looking for ‘the common’ in the process of learning: Charles S. Peirce’s community of enquiry and Fernand Deligny’s ‘Arachnean’

Abstract

This article is an attempt to articulate Charles S. Peirce’s ‘community of enquiry’ and the philosophy developed by Fernand Deligny through his longterm work with autistic people. Following Peirce, knowledge is an indefinite, never accomplished, process, increasing with a plurality of voices. Deligny’s perspective allows us to expand the Peircean notion of the community of enquiry and include modes of enquiry beyond the symbolic order. Through notions such as ‘wander lines’, which make visible shared territory without language, and ‘Arachnean’, a network without subjects, Deligny provides a radical conceptual framework for understanding modes of existence and bodily practices beyond the symbolic realm. He proposes the possibility of non-symbolic thought based on indexicality: it is neither speech nor gaze that makes up the common, but shared territory. These two complementary lines of thought provide the philosophical foundation for more-than-human participatory research.