List of Tables
Chapter 4: Grappling with critical education: Origin, purpose and return
4.2 Understanding and responding to crisis in educational theories This section offers three entry points into the structures and mechanisms of colonial
litter, or to lovingly engage a non-reified notion of structure. (Lotz-Sisitka, 2016b, p.
322)
- Encounters may locate agency somewhere between voluntarism and determinism (Lotz-Sisitka, 2016b, p. 322), hereby working out what is possible in context with the resources and agency available.
Thus, environmental education takes place both implicitly and explicitly and building a reflective practice involves an attentiveness to dogma, interdisciplinarity, multiple nested scales and assumptions about individual and collective power.
Being aware of the relationships and theories invoked in practices of environmental education relies upon reflexive capacities that can facilitate emergence and working out. This process can be assisted by concern for epistemological orthodoxy, bringing other knowledges in, embracing scales and structure, and locating agency in real understandings and practices of the world. These might help us to embrace the ways in which environmental education is concerned with all that is in the world, and yet needs to bring focus to the intentional work of
“absenting of harmful culture-nature or eco-cultural relations in modernity” (Lotz-Sisitka, 2016b, p. 319).
From describing and opening up environmental education I move to an exploration of critical pedagogy. Critical pedagogy has long included or emerged from a critical analysis of
capitalism, and in particular racial capitalism (Lange, 2012; Carpenter and Mojab, 2017).
Within this positioning or framing, environmental destruction is seen as a collective, systematic externality of extractive racial capitalism. Our individual and collective
consciousnesses are sites from which to build emergent or reproductive power and re-make the world. Critical pedagogy has yet to merge with functional ecological literacies that are needed to make stronger arguments about ecological crises (Kellner and Kneller, 2010). It is the transformative and change oriented impulse of critical education praxis that this study engages with. Before this, however, I outline three descriptions of the depth crisis that lies behind our social and ecological crisis.
4.2 Understanding and responding to crisis in educational theories
Understanding the mechanisms behind the increasingly obvious global crisis is important for conceptualising a life affirming responsive pedagogy. Indeed, the conceptualisation of problems or what is often a taken for granted common understanding of the root cause, can lead to several problematic ‘solutions’ or exploitations, and therefore further divisions in a polarised world. This section probes how the crisis system emerged in our constellational reality (Bhaskar, 2016) and how we might engage pedagogy in a way that is responsive to this. This question leads us to some analytical tools that can serve to direct change-oriented action including education.
This understanding of the mechanisms is part of what Bhaskar (2016) argued in his
philosophy of critical realism: that we need to make explicit and review our theory of what is real – “ontology”. When Bhaskar began his inquiry, the theory of what was real “presupposed that the world was without structure or depth, difference of context, let alone the possibility of emergence, change and development”. An important conclusion of Bhaskar’s philosophy is the “theorem of irreducibility of structures, mechanisms and the like to patterns of events (or the domain of the real to that of the actual) and of patterns of events to our experience (or of the domain of the actual to the domain of the empirical)” (Bhaskar, 2016, p. 7). This is a reality that is structured and differentiated.
Then from these we have emergence, which is the unfolding of things unilaterally dependent upon levels below but with the possibility that higher order levels might impact lower order levels (such as climate change where human activity has impacted the structure of the atmosphere) (Bhaskar, 2016, p. 32). With the concept of emergence explaining the
relationship between structures, mechanisms and events, constellationality then names the notion that parts of the real are contained in other parts of the real. The example Bhaskar uses in his explanation is that the study of knowledge is constellationally contained in the realm of ontology – the study of reality (Bhaskar, 2016, pp. 92–93).
This theoretical analysis sets the scene for understanding our reality as influenced by structures that we are not necessarily able to witness in the same way as events are. It also implies that we cannot become dogmatic about our analysis or rely on the fact that our knowledge captures our ever-changing realities, always and entirely. However, building knowledge about phemomena in our world is part of living and acting in it.
4.2.1 Demi-reality
Bhaskar developed the concept of demi-reality which is quite useful in understanding the way in which false ideas about our reality are firstly, real and secondly, have an impact or in Bhaskar’s words are ‘causally efficacious’ (that is, they have consequence in the world).
They matter in their falseness ... demi-reality is ‘constellationally’ related to the domain of the real (inclusive of all other domains) and emerges contradictorily from the possibility that the real is under, in and against the actual as it is experienced (Bhaskar, 2016, p. 139).
How is demi-reality established and maintained? This question is like the question of stasis:
How is it that dominance, or power over false ideas and their impact, is maintained in the world? The common stasis that “There Is No Alternative” (TINA) is maintained through a theory-practice contradiction. One example is that it is only possible to argue that the industrial capitalist system is the only option because it is supported by the invisible work, where women are ironing shirts and looking after children. If this work, and the resultant suffering from inequality was factored into the argument, capitalism could not be similarly argued as efficient.
This demi-reality is maintained by the domain of duality: “It is a ‘meshwork of concatenated TINA compromise formations’ in which categorical error is compounded on categorical error as attempts are made to patch up our theory/practice ensembles in the fact of the inexorability of ontology and alethic truth” (Bhaskar, 2016, p. 156). Demi-reality is established in
particular epistemological modes where erroneous categories make up more erroneous categories. These mutually reinforcing erroneous categories can be understood in part as the dominance of duality in social sciences where categories, identities and differences are reified rather than the relationality, and more generally reified over the nature of emergence in open systems.
How can demi-reality be responded to? In the light (or dark) of demi-reality there is a
new/clarified way of seeing the critical education project underlaboured by critical realism as Re-enchantment: “Re-enchantment means to see the world once again through the smog of the demi-real, as it is always already – intrinsically valuable and meaningful – and to relate to it as such in our practices” (Bhaskar, 2016, p. 169). This sentence reveals re- enchantment as a multi-dimensional process. Firstly, it is about seeing the world. Secondly, it is about seeing the world “through the smog”, which implies that it is not without the smog that we see it. The smog does not dissipate magically, nor is it blown away by an educator,
but the smog is seen for its obscuring effects. But what is it that we see through the smog?
Thankfully, the answer is hopeful. Demi-reality conceals the way in which the crisis system is underpinned by continual acts of love and peace (Bhaskar, 2016, p. 171). Thus, it hides the foundational operations of good as well as the operations of bad. This echoes the notion that the demi-reality is “a meshwork of concatenated TINA compromise formations”. In this seeing of the world through the smog, we see what is “valuable and meaningful” – we do not dehumanise what we see. Finally, we relate to what we have seen “once again” as “valuable and meaningful” “in our practices” (2016, p. 169). Importantly, seeing through the smog to the love and peace that is foundational to our existence is as important as seeing what is oppressive and obstructive to our flourishing.
It is seeing, relating the smog and its effects and what is meaningful and valuable beyond it and embodying that in practice, that is a re-enchantment. With its multiple dimensions
articulated in the description above, re-enchantment grapples with a number of contradictions emerging within the critical education tradition: contradictions that emerge, as Bhaskar has shown, in the absence of clarifying ontology behind a theory.
4.2.2 Abstraction
Demi-reality is echoed in Carpenter and Mojab’s (2017) Marxist feminist theorising of the process of ‘abstraction’. Abstraction is a key process in Marxist theory and serves to explain an underlying mechanism of capitalism which is manifest through the relationship between ideas and human experience in an historical material context. It is similar to alienation (a process whereby we are separated from our sense of becoming and in relation with the four planes, which both Lange (2012) and Bhaskar (2016, p. 72) noted constitute the system of capitalism) although ‘abstraction’ refers more specifically to the relationship between sense experience of the material and ideas which contribute to alienation.
In their explanation of abstraction, Carpenter and Mojab begin by inviting a reflection on breakfast as a way of accessing processes of abstraction. This is a grounded and tangible basis from which one can start to think about how we think in our world – which is otherwise quite an abstract idea. It is common today that there is a distance between the experience of breakfast, and our ability to reflect upon the fullness of relations and processes that
materialise one’s breakfast, and are in one’s consciousness. The distance between our experience and the full knowledge of our breakfast – historically materially, socially... is
representative of both “a mode of thinking” which disconnects from “a mode of life”
(Carpenter and Mojab, 2017, p. 16).
This distance is like the demi-reality smog, that is against the necessities of life itself; it is against the interdependency with others and our surrounds. This relates to the TINA
compromise which hides the acts of good underpinning the bad, or obscures the real reasons for our life and survival.
Therefore, our use of the concept of abstraction is to indicate the ripping apart of social forms that are necessarily, dialectically related. This process produces a fragmented compartmentalised disembodied ontology and epistemology, hence the violence. Marx attributes to this process as an essential characteristic of capitalism, the challenge for revolutionary feminist education is the task of contending with the complexity of abstraction in which we live. (Carpenter and Mojab, 2017, p. 8) In a way, they are explaining how anti-capitalism must struggle in the realm of ideas as well as the material and active realms.
Capitalism produces an experiential reality of a fragmented social life. It is impossible for any given individual to experience, for themselves in real time, the complexity or entirety of these relations.
Therefore, we cannot know the world simply through sense experience. So, if our sense experience is both a necessary starting point and insufficient to knowing the world, how do we engage experience towards knowing the world better? This again points to the relation between ideas and the material.
This way of thinking, Marx’s theory of consciousness in the time of capitalism and its relationship to historical materialism, is important background to the critical education project. However, Marx’s framework for inquiry (not the deterministic economistic theories that have been developed in Marxist scholarship) needs to be expanded through anti-racism and feminist theoretical contributions. “We know Marx but Marx does not know us” (De Sousa Santos, 2007). Since Marx, the unravelling and expansion of the capitalist project/
modernity project has been understood more deeply by what Andreotti (2011) called ‘theories of institutional suffering’, theories developed by postcolonial scholars that can bring into focus differential world experience of the global South and as they do so, highlight the geopolitics of knowledge. While Marx laid the foundation for a method of inquiry, his theory
can benefit from contact with intellectual struggles of the global South that more rigorously tackle colonial intrusions and their merge with global neoliberal capitalism and patriarchy (De Sousa Santos, 2014).
4.2.3 Abyssal lines
De Sousa Santos brought the idea of ‘abyssal lines’ to this conversation about the geopolitical nature of the world to which education for social change must respond. He introduced the infinite diversity within but also the universal experience of what defines the Global South as it is positioned in the current context of global capitalism.
The abyssal line is an invisible but efficacious line defined by two sides: “one side in an invisible abyss [the other side], and the other side, the norm [This side of the line]”(De Sousa Santos, 2007, p. 2 my addition in italics).
The sides are interconnected through ‘distinctions’ which in some ways mirror Bhaskar’s notion of duality upon which demi-reality rests. This side is characterised by the distinctions between regulation and emancipation. I understand this to mean, through regulating, such as bureaucracy, we develop a ‘free’ ‘emancipated’ society. The so-called free societies and their organisational distinction between regulation and emancipation are premised upon the
distinction on the other side of the line between violence and appropriation. We know that in the name of certain emancipation-based-upon-regulation ideas, much violence (where violence is understood as involving “physical, material, cultural, and human destruction” (De Sousa Santos, 2007, p. 8)) has occurred when there is resistance to the appropriation
(“assimilation or incorporation” (2007, p. 8)) of emancipation as regulation as the way forward. I think each distinction is itself a global abyssal line where appropriation (societies’
co-option into the regulation emancipation but always only partial acceptance) is premised upon the invisible violence, and emancipation is premised upon the invisible regulation. The regulation/emancipation line is premised upon the invisibility of the appropriation/violence line. They are holding each other up with concatenated TINA compromises.
Importantly, these distinctions organising life on either side of the line are “grounded upon the invisibility of the distinction between” each side of the line but can be understood through quality and logics of social organisation (De Sousa Santos, 2007, p. 2). So, if you do not assimilate, you will face violent destruction, if you are not willing to be regulated you will not enjoy the benefits of freedom. Some people in the world are invited automatically into the
emancipation regulation distinction, others receive the invitation only by being appropriated into this logic of social organisation.
This line should not be understood as a homogenising heuristic; it is rather the naming of a structural relationship (emerging from events and feeding back into events) that has
established itself violently in the world today. It articulates something beyond Marx’s
framework which did not extend beyond class and provide a basis for engaging decoloniality, anti-racism and feminism as bound up in the system of capitalism.
Abyssal lines across space: It is my understanding that the abyssal line applies at multiple scales. As De Sousa Santos (2007) explained, those people on the other side of the abyssal line include those in ‘developing’ countries but also factory workers, people living in
precarious conditions in so-called first world countries. In a way, the positioning is dependent upon what experience the world has shaped for you rather than being geographically defined.
Abyssal lines across time: These global abyssal lines have been shaken up and shifted but they are moving in “the same direction” fixed in relation to each other. Understanding these abyssal lines allows us to see how structures persist; for example, the shift from official colonialism saw the physical cartographies become metaphorical – the impact upon those on the other side of the line and the relations held fast. The second tectonic shift of the abyssal lines is happening in the world today, while the lines are still shifting in fixed position in relation to each other keeping the oppressive relations in place on either side of them, there is a larger number of people whose experiences are shaped on the other side of the line. It is in the infinite diversity of the other side of the line where one finds the potential for change.
De Sousa Santos extended this analysis to how this abyssal line structure links with knowledge in the world which brings us back to the point of this section. For example, hegemonic western science has worked with the conditions of this side of the line while premised upon the invisibility of an infinite number of other knowledges. The abyssal nature of the world has produced abyssal thinking and abyssal thinking reproduces a world
conceptualised by abyssal characterisation and essentialisation, echoing demi-reality duality.
A result that I read from this is that we do not adequately understand the world we are living if we are only given the tools of western science which holds fast one frame as the only legitimate condition of knowing, or reality, on which to base our knowing. Limited to this side of the line, we are deeply ignorant of the world and its diversity of experience.
The inexhaustible diversity of the world provides a new set of conditions upon which we might come to understand it better, but this cannot be done with the abyssal thinking. It is with a mode of thinking and practice that learns to re-see the abyssal lines at work in our world that we might find the source of resistance and change led by the subaltern who bring particular sensibilities such as an embrace of “incompleteness without aiming at
completeness” (De Sousa Santos, 2007, p. 10).
Post abyssal thinking is not an argument to discard western science but a demand to use it
“counter hegemonically”. A counter hegemonic guiding principle is a “preference to
knowledge that guarantees the highest form of participation”. Or “knowledge-as-intervention in reality” is the measure of realism, not “knowledge-as-a-representation-of-reality”. The credibility of cognitive construction is “measured by the type of intervention in the world that it affords or prevents” (De Sousa Santos, 2007, p. 13). Post-abyssal thinking amounts to the significant task of “how can we fight against the abyssal lines using conceptual and political instruments that don’t reproduce them?” This is a generative spirit and space in which pedagogy might work.
This contribution brings an anti-racist and feminist lens to Marxist inquiry called for by Carpenter and Mojab (2017). De Sousa Santos distanced himself from traditional Marxism asking for a post-abyssal conception of Marxism, that “... (in itself, a good exemplar of abyssal thinking) will claim that the emancipation of workers must be fought for in conjunction with the emancipation of all the discardable populations of the Global South, which are oppressed but not directly exploited by global capitalism” (De Sousa Santos, 2007, p. 11). Abyssal lines remind us of how experiences, knowledges and people of the world are invisibilised and further exploited towards the ends of global capitalism’s ‘latest incarnation’, neoliberal globalisation.
4.2.4 Summary
This subsection visited three modes of inquiry into the crisis of the world today, and presented a conceptualisation of stratified and structured reality to which education must respond. The world of ideas includes wrong ideas (demi-reality), and wrong ideas are maintained by particular frames of thought that exist in our cultures. Re-enchantment
involves a dual process of seeing firstly the smog and secondly, the world (the smog being a part of the world).