Abstract
In this article, we examine how Boaventura de Sousa Santos' Epistemologies of the South speaks to a needed dialogue on US educational and curriculum policy in which capitalism and colonialism produce youth and teachers as nonbeings -- another insidious form of nonexistence. We analyze (a) the construction of the dichotomy of Western and non-Western in the context of abyssal thinking and educational policy; (b) the complexities of epistemicides and coloniality in US schools as related to educational reform movements. This analysis reflects the need to struggle for social and cognitive justice and to use the democratic imagination to engage in a praxis for a world of social equality and justice.
It may be true that Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide – by Boaventura Sousa Santos (2014) will only be read “by those who least need it” (Santos, 2014: 3). The truth of the matter is that Epistemologies of the South (hereafter EoS) is not just another text. It is a crucial approach that sets the ground for the regrounding, or rather ungrounding, of curriculum studies and other epistemological work that no longer begins and relies totally within the hegemony of Western modernity’s rationale. EoS allows one to perceive how the battle against the epistemicide relies heavily both within the dominant and counter-dominant Western Eurocentric episteme.
Santos (2014) claims that the epistemological terrain has been divided by an abyssal line in which the global South has been made non-existent while those on the other side of the line, global North, produce epistemologies that create the necessary unequal power dynamics for the hegemonic production of this non-existence, despite the fact that the capital wealth of the global North is due to brutal exploitation of the global South. This is the un/hidden narrative of Western modernity, or one of the enzymes of the anatomy of colonialism as Bragança and Wallerstein (1982) would frame it – so accurate more than ever before, despite the global crisis and its severe local consequences (Bauman, 1998). This is the un/hidden eugenic narrative of Western modernity that judiciously assembles and controls the circuits of cultural production (Johnson, 1983) so well-tuned with the framework of a capitalist society whose existence is also only possible through the legitimization of specific forms of knowledge and science
Santos examines how Western modernity is based off Eurocentric rationality that focuses on linearity of time in contraction of present through the enlargement of future, while also silencing the histories and knowledges of the global South in order to fuel the capitalist and colonial position for production. In so doing, Western modernity was also able to conceptualize a particular mode of production with specific conditions legitimized not necessarily as a primus inter pares, but the only one possible to humankind. While examinations on the relation between the modes and conditions of production and curriculum has been ignored by the majority of educational and curricular scholars (on the left inclusively), a few of them still stubbornly yet felicitously refuse to capitulate and maintain such relation as the cordis of their agenda (see Apple, 2013; Aronowitz, 1991, Au, 2012; Darder, 1991; Giroux, 2012; hooks, 1994; Macedo, 2006; Paraskeva, 2011; 2014; Saltman, 2010).
In fact, the global elite have made the majority of the world's population has become disposable as they fulfill capitalist purposes, which is why, following Santos, we need a sociology of absences and a sociology of emergences that allows for an ecology of knowledges that may be accomplished through intercultural translation. Otherwise, we ossify in the abyssal thinking that has contributed to an impoverishment of knowledges and histories because what is on the other side of the line is made non-existent as scientific hegemony legitimizes this abyssal thinking by providing the truth that negates the knowledges and experience of the other. In light of this, Santos calls for cognitive justice and social justice that begin with his conception of the global South. Interesting to notice here how Santos helps us complexify the battle for curriculum relevance – one of the justifiable flags of the radical and critical educators and social movements since the end of the nineteenth century in the US (see Kliebard, 1995). While the battle for curriculum relevance was undermined by a myriad successive conservative eugenic waves, such as “the race to space”, “back to the basics”, and the more current “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top”, the fact is that, as Paraskeva (2011) was able to examine in great detail elsewhere, a specific armada of radical and critical educators always challenge schools and the curriculum’s lack of relevance. What they did not emphasize – and many of them did not even pay attention – is something that Santos astutely brings to the fore. That there is no social justice without cognitive justice – related with the “hegemonicity” of Western modernity that systemically belittled and regarded any reality beyond the global North as non-existent. With Santos, the battle for curriculum relevance achieves a different refined and superior level. One that is impossible to defuse (see Paraskeva, 2011; 2014).
This review challenges the divide of North and South in which even that divide is based off a Eurocentric construction of the directional naming of the world via the cardinal points. This has to do with the hubris of zero degrees in which “the invisibilization of a particular place of enunciation, which is then converted into a place without a place, into a universal. The tendency to convert local history into global design runs parallel to the process of establishing that particular place as a center of geopolitical power” (Castro-Gómez, 2008: 279). Similarly, Santos’ abyssal line runs the risk of turning local histories into bi-global design. As the boundaries of the world become liquid, there is an invisibilization because land no longer means a concrete reality but can rather signify the denunciation of that reality. Globalization has meant the civilizing of the world, masking the (very anatomy of) colonization of space as well as the colonization of time. Following Santos, we must think beyond a line in the age of liquid modernity (Bauman 2013), perhaps thinking instead in spheres or planes. In addition, EoS speaks to a needed dialogue on US educational and curriculum policy in which capitalism and colonialism produce youth and teachers as non-beings – another insidious form of non-existence. Furthermore, these policies, which are experienced within the US through Common Core and Race to the Top, (which is basically No Child Left Behind on steroids) are exported to and in some cases imposed on some nations as a commodification of colonization through programs like IREX and ILEP, but also they are forced down the throats of schools within the US as part of an increasingly privatized public educational system, an internal (re)colonialism. In light of this, we agree with Santos that we need to struggle for social and cognitive justice and use the democratic imagination to engage in a praxis for a world that naturally emanates social equality and justice. A world in which equality and justice are not distant utopias; conversely they are the real(ity) upon which the human being built new utopias.
Santos begins with a minifesto and a manifesto connected to good living/buen vivir, which is the underlying current of the book. In the introduction, the Portuguese public intellectual frames his argument in terms of the need for rearguard intellectuals and the epistemologies of the South. He defines Northern epistemologies as dominant epistemologies and epistemologies of the South as Southern epistemologies (Santos, 2014: x). At a superficial reading this seems to be a linear view of the power dynamics of epistemologies; while using two of the cardinal points to dichotomize what is truly the hydra-headed dynamics of epistemological power, the fact is that Santos never denies the existence of “Souths in the North” and vice versa. Quite the opposite. In fact, if we are truly to work towards intercultural translation and look at the sociology of absences, then we need to reconceptualize North and South, which is also described as West and East, hence Santos’ reference to Western modernity. This abyssal line is a hegemonic construct that has often been used by cartographers in the mapping of the world. But we must challenge ourselves not to forget what was below the shading of the map – oppressive invisibilization, as well as what was above – an equally invisible hand of power that symbolizes the metonymic reason (Santos, 2014: 169) of a network of colonial and capitalist power. We will develop this more after reviewing Santos’ main claims throughout the book.
In the closing of the introduction, Santos asserts that “the antinomies, difficulties, and hard cases analyzed in this introduction demand that at the beginning of the new millennium we distance ourselves from Eurocentric critical thinking” (Santos, 2014: 43--44). However, to distance ourselves from such Eurocentric perspective is not ignoring, otherwise we would be silencing a conception of the world that we need to understand in order to create an intercultural dialogue for counter-hegemonic globalization. Santos in fact helps deepening our understanding of Eurocentric critical tradition by conceptualizing a world with new and “old” knowledges abolishing/ breaking down the boundaries – distances that Eurocentric critical thinking established, which is why we agree with Santos that “the most crucial theoretical task of our time [is] that the unthinkable be thought, that the unexpected be assumed as an integral part of the theoretical work” (Santos, 2014: 44). It is here that Santos notes that the element of surprise is crucial in this process, which is why we need rearguard theories that are based off the ideas of “craftsmanship rather than architecture, committed testimony rather than clairvoyant leadership, and intercultural approximation to what is new for some and very old for others” (Santos, 2014: 44). In short, rearguard theories are “actions of theoretical interventions woven inside forms of life” (Santos, 2014: 13). Intervention cannot be done at a distance. On the other hand, Santos purports that “the aim of creating distance in relation to Eurocentric tradition is to open analytical spaces for realities that are ‘surprising’ because they are new or have been ignored or made invisible, that is deemed nonexistent by the Eurocentric critical tradition” (Santos, 2014: 44). There is an infinite space for ideas. The challenge here lies in how can you quantify the space of the imagination? This particular point brought to mind the battle faced by the great German mathematician Georg Cantour. Cantour battled to address a simple question: “How big is infinite?” In so doing, Cantour claimed that he was able to perceive the finitude of infinite. Although he was labeled as a maniac and ended up demented, what scholars were trying to address is “what did Cantour actually discover that drove him to insanity”? Santos insightfully helps us address infiniteness as part of an epistemological picklock. He claims that “[all] possibilities are finite, but their number is infinite” (Santos, 2014: 15). He develops his claim more that “keeping a distance allows for what I call the double transgressive of sociology of absences and emergences. Such transgressive sociology, is in fact, an epistemological move that consists of counterposing the epistemologies of the South with the dominant epistemologies of the global North” (Santos, 2014: 46). The concept of “keeping a distance” implies a challenge that intercultural translation will need to overcome in order to be successful. We must deconstruct it and transform it, relating back to Santos’ notion of how “[t]he twentieth century proved with immense cruelty that to take power is not enough and that, rather than taking power it is necessary to transform power” (Santos, 2014: 28). Santos does claim that the North and South that he speaks of are political, not geographic locations (Santos, 2014: 10), but even the polarizing naming of North and South occludes a narrative(s) that is not dichotomous.
In the first chapter, Santos analyzes two historical narratives of the twentieth centuries: European-American and Nuestra America, while recognizing that there have been other twentieth centuries beyond these. He explores the hegemonic globalization that is occurring and the rise of societal fascism. In addition, he develops the concept of baroque ethos in looking at the political spaces for transformation, with its openness for surprise and possibility as well as centrifugal imagination. He claims that “this form of baroque, in as much, as it is manifestation of an extreme instance of the center’s weakness, constitutes a privileged field for the development of a centrifugal, subversive, and blasphemous imagination” (Santos, 2014: 57). The necessity to imagine what has not been conceptualized although experienced is crucial in understanding abyssal thinking and fighting against hegemonic globalization. When looking at the anesthetizing process of culture and power, we can more clearly analyze the normalization, and legitimization of the criminalization of poverty (see Wacquant, 2009) within the US as part of a larger neoliberal hegemony dispensed through globalization. Santos sees the comparison of the baroque with social sciences as a way to analyze the spaces for the possibility of this centrifugal imagination. Furthermore, Santos establishes two concepts: sfumato and mestizaje. Sfumato acting like a magnet brings together different knowledges and fragments to allow for an open space of cross-cultural dialogue (Santos, 2014: 59). Mestizaje catalyzes sfumato in which it destroys the “logic over the formation of each of its fragments and the construction of a new logic”, making way for “the creation of new constellations of meaning” (Santos, 2014: 59). This is connected to transculturation, which is “the synthesis of the utterly intricate cultural process of deculturation [/sfumato] and neoculturation [/mestizaje] that have always characterized urban society” (Santos, 2014: 60). Transculturation is often oppressive in that an individual’s knowledges and cultures are stolen through deculturation and replaced by hegemonic forms of representation; within the capitalist, neoliberal narrative; this is part of the colonial matrix of power, and in particular the coloniality of being (Mignolo, 2011). Neoliberal globalization has intensified this process through even stronger currents of deculturation that inculcate a global amnesia in which the subaltern relinquishes their agency for the sake of the capitalist choices that are really “choiceless choices” (Macedo et al., 2003). Intellectuality is smothered and replaced by the enticing aroma of consumerism, with an enormous human waste. This is the characteristic of the European twentieth century, but Nuestra America can be a counter-hegemonic, transnational political culture by: (1) Identifying the multiple local/global linkages among struggles, movements, and initiatives; (2) promoting the clashes between hegemonic globalization trends and pressures on one side, and the transnational coalitions to resist against them on the other this opens up possibilities for counterhegemonic globalization; and (3) promoting internal and external self-reflexivity so that forms of redistribution, recognition, and accountability inside the movements mirror the forms of redistribution, recognition and accountability that the insurgent cosmopolitanism and its emancipatory politics wish to see implemented in the world. (p. 68)
One of Santos’ main points of his decolonial rational is this need to see that the struggle for social justice is also the struggle for cognitive justice. This is a major issue within the core of the curriculum field. As one of us was able to examine elsewhere (Paraskeva, 2014), the struggle for curriculum relevance – a towering issue with the radical critical curriculum river since the end of the nineteenth century – which is a struggle for social justice, needs to be taken to a deeper level, which is, following Santos, a struggle for cognitive justice. This is not an attack on the Judaic-Christian tradition as some of us have been accused of.
The second chapter begins to frame how we must re-envision the social justice that we are fighting for by conceptualizing cognitive justice beyond the abyssal line. According to Santos, chapter two focuses “on the problems that such an abyssal line today creates for the social conditions prevailing on this side of the line. The most important problem is the collapse of the social emancipation into social regulation” (Santos, 2014: 71). This framework is quite crucial to understanding what one us has called elsewhere the Itinerant Curriculum Theory [ICT] (Paraskeva, 2011). Drawing heavily on Santos’ work, Paraskeva (2011) argues that ICT as a future path for curriculum theory needs to take the battle for curriculum relevance to a different level beyond the Western epistemological framework. In so doing an ICT implies working at the very core of Santos’ “epistemicides”, annulling the eugenic abyss (or abysses) and consciously assuming that there is no curriculum justice without cognitive justice. This is not an easy task, especially in an educational system driven by market desires, which concomitantly define students by its deficits.
In the current market-driven society of modernity, it is easy to conflate social emancipation with social regulation. The regulation of society needs to break free from this capitalist-driven means, and we need to struggle for social emancipation outside these boundaries. However, the precarious state of the economy and humans’ constant struggle to live in the present makes an incessant construction of urgency that denies individual agency beyond what is placed in front of us. In other words, we live in a time that is dangerously urgent in which we are constantly acting for the constructed present immediacy of the future due to its slippery uncertainty. Santos reiterates the time--space relationship in the age of globalization, which connects to Bauman’s concept of liquid modernity.
This is a consumer culture that can be seen in the use of credit cards. We buy an item for the present with a future debt, unknowing whether that item will still be available in the future or if we will need it. Credit cards give a false sense of ownership, of property – so dear to the capitalist system – and security that, even if you cannot afford this item now, we, that corporate collective with a pseudo-generous persona, will cover you until you can. US consumers feed off the instant satisfaction that these items bring, blindly only seeing the future of the constructed happiness that the item will give them, not the future of debt that it may also bring. Welcome to the subjectification of debt (Lazzarato, 2011; Paraskeva and Macrine, 2014), in which education plays a key role. Paraskeva and Macrine (2014) claim: We live in a system that needs to fabricate more debt to sustain its financial system that pushes society into more and more oppressed status. Democracy that supports a middle class condemned to disappear. The neoliberal pedagogy of debt teaches individuals their place, their roles, and their responsibilities as economic pawns in this global financial chess game. (Paraskeva and Macrine, 2014: 143) Viewing debt as the archetype of social relations means two things. On one hand it means conceiving economy and society on the basis of an asymmetry of power and not on that of a commercial exchange that implies and presupposes equality. On the other hand, debt means immediately making the economy subjective, since debt is an economic relation, which in order to exist, implies the molding and control of subjectivity such that labor becomes indistinguishable from work in the self. (Lazzarato, 2011: 33)
This is the anesthetizing colonization of the future by capitalism, a neoliberal silencing of other futures as well as (un)happy presents. Happiness in the present is only satiated through instant gratification. Davies (2011) frames this issue within the political economy of unhappiness; that while capitalism “requires an optimal balance of happiness and unhappiness” (Davies, 2011: 70), it seems that neoliberalism is engaged in a creative destruction of such balance promoting a specific hegemonic subjectivity(ies) that exists in depression. Unhappiness, Davies (2011) argues, “has become the critical negative externality of contemporary capitalism” (Davies, 2011: 68).
The credit--debt wrangle can be seen at a deeper epistemological level. We are within a hegemonic present that is constantly mirroring a future that reflects a past constructed on an abyssal line. As Santos claims, the “hegemonic powers that govern consumer and information society have been promoting theories and images appealing to a totality, whether of the species, the world, or even the universe, that stands above the divisions that constitute it” (Santos, 2014: 90). “The histories, realities, and identities of those on the other side of the line mean that roots and options are subject to the caprice of the dominant class. The subalterns are part of an internationalization that denies their locality while oppressing them within that location—new cultural imperialism” (Santos, 2014: 90).
Social contracts of reason have been replaced with social contracts of consumerist choice that may be irrational, yet are legitimated as rational within a neoliberal colonial matrix of power. The need for a desired technological device, such as an iPhone6, when an individual already has a concrete technological device, an iPhone5, is an irrational need but is considered legitimately rational, especially if individuals’ only way to access such commodity is via credit.
These technologies are our new roots in which the mind is colonized amongst the liquid currents of the internet and media airwaves. We are actively accepting the passivity of the present for the enlargement of the future. Santos aptly states that “we have lost the capacity for the rage and amazement vis-à-vis the grotesque realism of what is accepted only because it exists” (Santos, 2014: 89). We accept history as is because in a positivist culture that which has meaning must be scientifically empirical (see also Giroux, 1981). Experience has no capital in a society that only values what can be proven via data and scientific words, or as Giroux (1981) framed, via a specific scientificity of science.
However, knowledge, as Santos discusses, is never complete. All knowledges are conceptions of reality which connect to the potential of destabilizing images that “may be made concrete only to the extent that the images are captured by the individual or collective subjectivities that understand correctly the signs they emit, feel outraged at the messages they carry and turn their outrage into emancipatory energy” (Santos, 2014: 96). Consequently, “the destabilizing project must engage in a radical critique of the politics of the possible without yielding to an impossible politics” in which knowledge is engaged not as structure and agency but “rather the distinction between conformity action and what I propose to call action-with-clinamen” (Santos, 2014: 97). Clinamen has to do with the ability of atoms to sporadically move. However, these unexpected moments in which we may find moments of clinamen could mean indefinite waiting for a transformation of subjectivities. How can we move away from hegemonic ideas? How can one interrupt hegemonic formations? Conformist actions have to do with societal and individual hegemonic rationality that controls actions; swerving does not evade hegemony’s ubiquity. Should we not challenge, instead of swerve? Why are we swerving and not creating new spaces? Why it is so tough to create new spaces? Why do those new spaces sometimes end up being perverted, twisted from a radical critical framework? There is not a finite distance in modernity and history; we need to be finding spaces to open, not swerve and distance from a narrative that is exclusive but regardless had a shaping on the present mentalities, which needs to be challenged in order to truly transform power and rationales.
In Chapter 3, Santos poses the question in the chapter title “s There a Non-Occidental West?” He contends that although there is a hegemony of Western or Northern epistemologies in the world that does not mean that there were no knowledges within the West/North that were not acknowledged or accepted since they did not fulfil the needs of capitalist and colonial production. In his words, “many of the problems confronting the world today result from the waste of experience that the West imposed not only upon the world by force but also upon itself to sustain its own imposing upon the others” (Santos, 2014: 102). Particularly, he focuses on the Western-centric hegemony of science as the only knowledge in dismissal of all other ways of knowing, which is a limiting viewpoint that can result in strong questions never being asked because the only way to legitimately question is through science. He discusses orthopedic thinking, “the constraint and impoverishment caused by reducing such problems to analytical and conceptual markers that are foreign to them” (Santos, 2014: 105). Problems stemmed when orthopedic thinking resulted in the fact that the only problems researchers and institutions looked at were the ones that they raised, meaning “academic answers for academic problems that were increasingly more distant and reductive vis-à-vis the existential problems they were meant to address” (Santos, 2014: 106). This is precisely what has occurred in US educational and curriculum policies and practices in which it speaks to realities above and/or beyond youth and communities, educating for a future that will not be theirs (Kozol, 1992; Macedo, 2006; Saltman, 2010). Consequently, there is “the saturation of junk knowledge incessantly produced by an orthopedic thinking that has long stopped thinking of ordinary women and men” (Santos, 2014: 106). What is being taught does not relate to the present but to a future and makes the realities of youth non-existent, including unseen violence within the school. Santos’ critique is accurate and helps one understand the daily life of schools and curriculum in the US.
In the United States, extensive curriculum has been pushed in order to educate youth and teachers to prevent and identify bullying in schools. However, the intellectual and spiritual bullying of teachers and students by educational policy goes unnoticed. In addition, bullying is not understood through the hegemony that continue to consume the humanity of teachers so much so that at a community dialogue in which an educator said that she did not have time to address one student who was having a bad day. Consequently, she had to just send him to guidance, not realizing that, by dismissing/excluding that child from the classroom, she was teaching her students an action of violence that one person can be forgotten and that they don't have a commitment to help him or her. Time again comes up in which we see only a finite time to accomplish set objectives/standards, and we must meet these deadlines or face persecution through standardized tests via value-added measures (teacher evaluation) and PPI (Progress and Performance Indicators, school and student evaluation). These policies and procedures reflect that the “dominant versions of the paradigm of modernity turned the infinite into an obstacle to overcome: The infinite is the finite zeal to overcome it, control, tame it, and reduce it to finite proportions” (Santos, 2014: 110). The rationality of being able to tame or control an individual human being has become logical and failure to do so means the criminalization of a class of people, subaltern teachers and/or parents, depending on the mood of the neoliberal emperors. These finite portions are the way that the intricacies of a language can be reduced to rigid options of A, B, C, D, E without space for the development of argumentation or imagination, the ongoing cultivation of epistemicide (Santos, 2014) and linguicide (Thiong’o 2009) in which the coloniality of being can be seen. Relating to Santos’ discussion of Nicholas of Cusa’s two types of ignorance, the majority of US public education students are packaged and molded into an ignorant ignorance, “not even aware that [they] don’t know” (Santos, 2014: 110). Some when they reach higher education begin to have “learned ignorance, which knows it does not know” (Santos, 2014: 110), but with the continued assault on higher education through homogenization of intellectuality as well as the privatization and inculcation of business values over democratic and humanitarian ideals, the colonization of the university is also being seen (cf. Chatterjee and Maira 2014; Giroux 2007).
Santos adds to this discussion in Chapter 4 when he talks about the return of the colonial, although it is debatable whether the colonial ever really left. Santos states that “[t]he return of the colonial is the abyssal response to what is perceived as threatening intrusion of the colonial into the metropolitan societies. Such a return comes in three main forms: the terrorist, the undocumented migrant worker, and the refugee” (Santos, 2014: 125--126). He explains that “in different ways, each carry along with her the abyssal global line that defines radical exclusion and legal nonexistence” (Santos, 2014: 126). Odd as it might be, “radical exclusion and legal nonexistence” also speak to two other main social forms – youth and teachers. Both are criminalized within the current neoliberal rhetoric of Western modernity. Youth and teachers are denied constitutional rights within schools for the sake of “security” framed by societal fascism as part of what Santos called postcontractualism in which they are “expelled from social contract through the elimination of social and economic rights, thereby becoming discardable populations” (Santos, 2014: 131). This is the ideology of disposability (Giroux, 2009) in which youth and teachers are made disposable, trashed. They are replaceable or at least forgettable in the present and expendable for the future. But, as Santos claims, when referring to rubbish: “The epistemology of trash cannot be discarded as easily as the trash to which it refers” (This is the ideology of disposability (Santos, 2014: 149). In addition, the trashing of certain knowledges, such as philosophy and literature for the sake of technicalized subjects such as science, math, and technical English text, relates to his conception of precontractualism that “consists in blocking access to citizenship to social groups that before considered themselves candidates for citizenship and had the reasonable expectation of acceding it” (Santos, 2014: 131). Youth have their access to citizenship blocked by the inability to understand their rights as citizens and equal access to an education that is rich with imagination, critique, and meaningful action. In this way, despite high literacy rates in the US, illiteracy is rampant through a smothered political consciousness and agency as can be seen statistically in the low number of youth who vote: 62% of youth (18--24 years old) did not vote in the 2012 presidential election. 1 Santos states that “[r]ather than sacrificing democracy to the demands of global capitalism, it [societal fascism] trivializes democracy to such a degree that it is no longer necessary, even convenient to sacrifice democracy to promote capitalism” (Santos, 2014: 131). In fact, youth don’t see democracy as merely trivialized; they often confuse (rightly so) democracy with capitalism – it is produced as non-existent unless seen through capitalism, i.e. the freedom of “choice”.
The anti-democratic state of schools and youth and educators’ non-existence from the protection of the law, but not non-existence from the infliction of the law, makes them extremely vulnerable to the vagaries of those in power. Democracy is the shocking normalized absentee of the US educational system (see Chomsky, 2012). With teachers considering that over three-quarters of teachers are female in the US, 2 the issue is also laced with teachers as a gendered class. This is also a race/ethnicity issue through the exclusion of racial/ethnic “minorities” in teaching and administrative positions: fewer than 20% of teachers are from racial/ethnic minorities. 3 Also, consider that only 13% of females are superintendents and only 5.1% are from racial/ethnic minorities. 4 With this in mind, we need to consider not only the deskilling and deprofessionalization but also the criminalization of teachers, as well as how youth are also commodified and often criminalized -- to rely on Wacquant (2009). This is done to youth and teachers through neoliberal policies, such as Zero Tolerance, high-stakes testing, and Common Core, and contributes to the constructed voicelessness of both youth and teachers against the booming commands of educational reform and policy. In particular, teachers’ knowledge of pedagogy and content is dismissed for the pre-packaged “teacher-proof” curriculum that is scientific, thus superior to their knowledge. Santos’ words add to this that “the scientifically unascertainable truths of philosophy and theology that constitute all the acceptable knowledge on this side of the line. On the other side of the line, there is no real knowledge; there are beliefs, opinions, intuitions, and subjectivities, understandings, which, at the most, may become objects or raw materials for scientific inquiry” (Santos, 2014: 120). This is an abyssal line that Western modernity has constructed. However, we must challenge ourselves to see beyond this and ask what counts as science? Santos later gives the example of modern science’s intervention for the improvement of the irrigation of rice fields that failed miserably, so they had to return to the traditional system (Santos, 2014: 205--206). Modern science caused a disaster, but subaltern science worked. Western modernity’s definition of science, and about the scientificity of science (Giroux, 1981) needs to be interrupted and reconstructed to include subaltern voices and knowledges. Societal fascism controls not only our beings but also our knowledges.
To return, to Santos’ discussion of the return of the colonial one must consider that “[t]he colonial that returns is indeed a new abyssal colonial” (Santos, 2014: 125). The colonial now also exists in metropolitan spaces in which “the abyssal metropolitan sees herself trapped in a shrinking space and reacts by redrawing the abyssal line … The line must be drawn at as close a range as is necessary to guarantee security” (Santos, 2014: 126). This shrinking space is already colonized. It is the market that cultivates a fear that my identity within the world (i.e. the economy) will no longer exist unless I reject others’ legitimacy to be with me because there is only so much room – a precarious state that is the life of precariats (Bauman and Donskis, 2013). It is part of the fascism of insecurity, where “discretionary manipulation of the sense of insecurity of people social groups rendered vulnerable by the precariousness of work or by destabilizing accidents or events” (Santos, 2014: 130). This is constructed through the neoliberal narrative of insecurity of the economy and the dangerous nature of humans – in a way well fuelled by a specific subjectification of individuals – in which people try to protect themselves by criminalizing others, connected to the colonization of the state for the sake of security. We should consider the “abyssal metropolitan … redrawing the abyssal line” in conjunction with Santos’ statement that “under the conditions of the new indirect rule, rather than regulating social conflict among citizens, modern abyssal thinking is called upon to suppress social conflict and ratify lawlessness on this side of the line, as had always happened on the other side of the line” (Santos, 2014: 132). In these two instances, one individual and one collective, a line is drawn. We need to think beyond such eugenic lines. The veracity of his claims of the suppression of social conflict and ratification of lawlessness cannot be denied, but here again Santos refers to a modern cartography of “lines”. Some would probably argue against Santos’ rationale, claiming that a framework fundamentally based on lines doesn’t seem sufficient to describe a complex global reality. This is, in our sense, a reductive claim. Santos’ rationale of the abyss cannot be reduced to imaginary lines, planes or spheres. Conversely, Santos’ notion of a concrete metropolitan abyssal line or vacuum illustrates the rapid human movement and solubility within (post)modernity. Moreover, while Santos’ abyss framework establishes a clear division between “this side of the line and that side of the line” this does not mean that we are before a pale dichotomous web that ignores the fluid complexities of existences and inexistences within and beyond such an abyss.
Moreover, Santos’ approach allows one to understand not just “the two sides of the abyss” but the intricacies of the Norths within the South and the Souths within the North. That is, for example, the oppressed live intermixed with the oppressors, and, in many cases, the oppressors are also the oppressed. In the same locality, we coexist in vastly different worlds, and, through technology, we don’t have to even see one another. Social groups are not necessarily those near each other, but those within their “network”, which is both local and transnational. In a liquid modernity, as Santos’ abyssal theory shows, humans and their identities are not static; in fact, due to the ideology of disposability they are also dissolvable, invisibilized, consumed, and exhausted hegemonically and counter-hegemonically. Consequently, to reduce Santos’ abyss theory to a line does not satisfy the multiple realities that are existing within one space or non-existing. Postabyssal thinking “involves a radical break with modern Western ways of thinking and action” (Santos, 2014: 134), and it needs to break from the Western cartography of lines and begin seeing the planes that divide, connect, overlap, occlude, exclude, mirror – holograms of realities at times. These realities occurring in different locations may be parallel by way of experiences, vocalizing the same realities despite their geographic distances through the simultaneity of contemporaneity. This can be analyzed through radical copresence, meaning “that practices and agents on both sides of the abyssal line are contemporaneous granted that there is more than one land of contemporaneity” (Santos, 2014: 191). This “means equating simultaneity with contemporaneity, which can only be accomplished if the linear conception of time is abandoned” (Santos, 2014: 191). Connecting to his previous comments about the need for a sociology of absences and presences, “in the social construction of the destabilizing subjectivity. That dual sociology, which still very much remains to be produced is at the core the emancipatory will of the emergent subjectivity” (p. 97). There is a need to decolonize ``the emancipatory will of emergent subjectivity'' as far as the terminology of both emancipatory and emergent. The conception of emancipation is related to the Eurocentric Enlightenment as other scholars (Dussel 1985; Mignolo 2011) have noted, and it needs to be decolonized. Liberation may be also a good concept to use when discussing the need for destabilizing subjectivity since it refers “to two different and interrelated struggles: the political and economic decolonization and the epistemological decolonization” (Mignolo, 2007: 455). In addition, the conception of an emergent subjectivity presupposes that its non-existence in Western modernity is still being shaped by what is deemed as now emergent within the same Western modernity. You are emerging through emancipation into the same colonial matrix of power. Santos claims that the “sociology of absences will be able to elucidate the limits of representation at work in each situation” (Santos, 2014: 153). However, Mignolo (2014) notes the need to decolonize representation and consider enunciation: ‘Representation’ is a keyword in the rhetoric of modernity, that is, in Western mainstream epistemology. In this regard, thinking decolonially (that is, thinking within the frame of the decolonial option) means to start from ‘enunciation’ and not from ‘representation’. When you start from the enunciation and think decolonially, you shall run away from representation, for representation presupposes that there is a world out there that someone is representing. This is a basic assumption of modern epistemology. There is not a world that is represented, but a world that is constantly invented in the enunciation. The enunciation is constituted by certain actors, languages, and categories of thoughts, beliefs, and sensing. The enunciation, furthermore, is never or only enacted to ‘represent’ the world, but to confront or support previous existing enunciations. (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2014: 198−199)
In order to understand how different knowledges and ideologies are proliferated as relevant, irrelevant, or invisible, Santos notes that “two procedures are used to produce such illusions: scales and perspectives” (Santos, 2014: 141). The process of regulation enacts power because it has the ability to turn objects into trash or gold, urgent or futile: “different regulatory orders operating on different scales translate the same social objects into different relevant objects” (Santos, 2014: 144). This is how the tool of scales distort relevance, but perspective is also key. Science snaps a photo of knowledge from one angle and treats it as unquestionable truth but fails to consider how its perspective blinds it from understanding in ways beyond its position, producing non-existence. Santos explains that “[t]here are at least two ways in which nonexistent entities may “occur” and, accordingly, two ways of trashing alternatives” (Santos, 2014: 153):
alternatives that never occurred because they were prevented from emerging; alternatives that did occur, but the types of scales, perspectives, resolution, time compression, and signature used by science did not recognize them at all or took them for residues.
Here, his discussion turns to the epistemology of seeing, which “inquires into the validity of a form of knowledge whose point of ignorance is colonialism and whose point of knowing is solidarity” as well as an epistemology of absent knowledges, which is “a form of knowledge that aspires to an expanded conception of realism that includes suppressed, silenced, or marginalized realities as well as emergent and imagined realities” (Santos, 2014: 157). Santos proposes a double epistemological break in which a “new constellation of knowledge must break with the mystified and mystifying conservative common sense, not in order to create a separate isolated form of superior knowledge but rather to transform itself into a new emancipatory common sense” (Santos, 2014: 158). This emancipatory common sense must challenge hegemonic rationalities.
In Chapter 6, Santos examines the different rationalities used to understand and create power within the world, particularly those that are hegemonic within Western modernity: lazy reason. He proposes that a subaltern cosmopolitan rationalism could counteract the contraction of the present with the expansion of the future as espoused by Western modernity by expanding the present with a sociology of absences and contracting the future with a sociology of emergences (Santos, 2014: 165). Furthermore, he proposes “a theory or procedure of translation, capable of creating mutual intelligibility among possible and available experiences without compromising their identity” (Santos, 2014: 165). Drawing on Santos’ approach, we should also be looking beyond possible and available experiences and also at the unavailable or hidden experiences. What we deem to be reasonable or seen is shaped by our rationale that must constantly be analyzed, deconstructed, and reconstructed. In Western modernity, this is often not the case as lazy reason has monopolized minds. The history of the US curriculum is a clear example of such claim. Since the mind as a muscle metaphor at the end of the nineteenth century, through the heyday of scientific management, until the current NCLB-Race to the Top, the curriculum hegemonic power bloc led by Western conservative views of the world imposed a culture of asphyxiated minds based on the desire to tune humans into one dimensional thinking (see Paraskeva, 2014).
Santos goes over four different types of lazy reason – arrogant, impotent, metonymic, and proleptic – but focuses on metonymic and proleptic. Metonymic reason is dominant in Western modernity and refuses to see a part as separate from the whole, which, in turn, also blinds it to the other parts and keeps it limited within the totality of Western modernity’s epistemologies and experiences, silencing and dismissing the experiences of the others. Metonymic thinking does not use “reasonableness of argumentation, [but] resorts to productivity and coercion” (Santos, 2014: 169). Santos proposes this procedure “to think the terms of the dichotomies regardless of the power articulations and relations that bring them together as a first step in freeing them of such relations and to reveal other alternative relations that have been obscured by hegemonic dichotomies” (Santos, 2014: 171). Welcome to the coloniality of power beyond a single abyssal line. A power that can make histories non-existent and/or irrational thus illegitimate and ultimately occluded from memories.
Metonymic reason produces non-existence which can be understood through these five modes of the production of non-existence: (1) monoculture of knowledge and the rigor of knowledge, (2) monoculture of linear time, (3) monoculture of the naturalization of difference, (4) monoculture of logic of the dominant scales, (5) monoculture of the capitalist logic of productivity (Santos, 2014: 172–174). Consequently, “[t]he social production of these absences results in the subtraction of the world and the contraction of the present, hence in the waste of experience” (Santos, 2014: 174). In order to counteract the waste of experiences, Santos proposes the sociology of absences that inquires into the conceptions of totality purported by the hegemonic production of the present based on lazy reason. There are five main ecologies against the waste of experience: ecology of knowledge, ecology of temporalities, ecology of recognition, ecology of trans-scale, and ecology of productivities. Within these, there are other ecologies such as the ecology of difference: The coloniality of modern Western capitalist power consists of collapsing the difference and inequality while claiming the privilege to ascertain who is equal or different. The sociology of absences confronts coloniality by looking for new articulations between the principles of equality and difference, thus allowing for the possibility of equal differences—an ecology of differences comprised of mutual recognition. (Santos, 2014: 177−178) Epistemological imagination – “recognition of different knowledges, perspectives, and scale of identification and relevance, and analysis and evaluation of practices”; Democratic imagination – “Recognition of different practices and social agents”.
Furthermore, the sociology of emergences uses the sociological imagination in order to expand the present and contains a “[s]ymbolic enlargement of knowledges, practices, and agents”; it intervenes to create real hope, replacing the “idea of determination with the idea of care” (Santos, 2014: 184). The finite future and present that is concerned under modernity’s rationale is problematic and as Santos notes must be replaced with care, a pedagogy of hope that works in the present, enlarging it through a radical and decolonial care. This “symbolic enlargement is actually a form of sociological imagination with a double aim: on the one hand, to know better the conditions of possibility of hope, on the other to define principles and actions to promote the fulfillment of those conditions” (Santos, 2014: 184). As Freire (Horton and Freire, 1990) said: You know that you are very far from realizing your dream, but if you don’t do something today, you become an obstacle for hundreds of people not yet born … We are now dealing with the present to create the future. We are now creating the future present for the new generation, from which they will make history. (Horton and Freire, 1990: 190−191)
In Chapter 7, Santos discusses an ecology of knowledges. Ecology of knowledges challenges the rigor model of knowledge based on the hegemony of science; in sum it is a counter–epistemology. Again, key is that no knowledge is ever complete despite scientific knowledge’s appearance of being the truth, which is totalitarian and absolutist. In fact, “the ecology of knowledges lies in the idea of radical copresence” (Santos, 2014: 191). Furthermore, “rather than subscribing to a single universal and abstract hierarchy among knowledges, the ecology of knowledges favors context-dependent hierarchies, in light of the concrete outcomes intended or achieved by different knowledge practices” (Santos, 2014: 205). A decontextualized hierarchy would hinder intercultural translation and an ecology of knowledges, which are “two central features of postabyssal thinking. Together they seek to create copresence across the abyssal lines” (Santos, 2014: 227).
Chapter 8 looks specifically at intercultural translation and the power dynamics with language and translation that subsequently involve epistemologies. Despite the fact that Chapter 3 focuses on the non-occidentalist West within the West, when looking at the two major types of intercultural translation, Santos focuses on translation between Western and non-Western as well as different non-Western conceptions and practices (Santos, 2014: 222). He does mention in a footnote that there may be intercultural translation within “different Western conceptions and practices” but “this debate does not concern me here” (Santos, 2014: 222). Here the abyssal line seems to be clear again. Those within the North, whichever hierarchical position of power they hold, understand that intercultural translation is needed as much within Western languages and knowledges, even just within the United States. 6 Each state educates children in English, in certain states only in English (Massachusetts, California, and Colorado are “English-only” states). There is an ecology of knowledges as well as plurality of languages spoken in the United States beyond the Spanish-English divide. Looking within the contact zone of two “English” speakers, one can see the imposition of power of an upper-class American from affluent Barrington, Rhode Island on a lower-class American from bankrupt Central Falls or nearby Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Without deconstructing the oppressive subjectivities, ideologies, and linguistic blinders that we enter a conversation with, it does not matter if the person is speaking Spanish or English, the result will be the same – a translation of inferiority--superiority, oppressor--oppressed, educated--stupid. In the US, if you cannot master the “high language” then you are subsequently inferior. Santos claims that his focus is on the political motivation of translation, but also notes another motivation which is spiritual, In order to truly have an intercultural translation that works for an ecology of knowledges, then it is political, but the translation also needs to be spiritually connected, by which he means “the search is an act of soul-searching an exercise of profound and existential self-reflexivity filled with anxiety in as much as whatever may be learned from other cultures must be digested, disfigured, and transfigured in order to fit into new constellations of meaning” (Santos, 2014: 221). For example, intercultural translation within English can be seen after a guest speaker from Kenya talks to high school sophomores on colonialism, speaking to these youth in English but, while talking with their English teacher afterwards, many struggled to understand what he was saying. At first, some of these youth blamed the speaker’s accent, but then, as they orally worked through the notes that they had taken down, they began to understand with the teacher. They had copied the words he said but did not understand the meaning, despite the fact that they were spoken in English. These words were outside the ideology of the US schooling system, which is both political and spiritual. Learning what some may call “critical” language, but we will call “decolonial” language even within one language is a rupture from ingrained ideology that is political and spiritual. Without a radical critique of the politics of the possible, we continue the neoliberal dictatorship of time, which Unger (2005) describes as the “dictatorship of no alternatives” (Unger, 2005: 1). In curriculum and educational policy, the epistemological undertow that is perpetuated through these dominant epistemologies must be combatted with the destabilizing potential. The classroom dialogue mentioned above is part of a theoretical undertaking of understanding how the classroom may function as a decolonial contact zone. As Santos describes, “Ecologies of knowledges and intercultural translation can only proceed and flourish in subaltern cosmopolitan contact zones, that is decolonial contact zones” (Santos, 2014: 227). These decolonial contact zones must be made through the work in the present by rearguard intellectuals acting as translators, while constantly decolonizing the epistemologies and power dynamics of translation.
Translation is riddled with power dynamics through the imposition of meaning and knowledge, so researchers and rearguard intellectuals must be cognizant when working in contact zones of the historicity of the people and their language. Intercultural translation contact zones function as the “time-spaces of mediation and negotiation in which the inequality of translational relations are the main conditioning factor of the work of translation” (Santos, 2014: 219). The power of translation cannot be denied and thus analyzing the motivations are crucial for rearguard intellectuals. Translators should act “[a]s rearguard intellectuals, those trained in academic knowledge but solidarily involved with the social actors, their task is to retrain themselves in such a way as to be able constantly to translate academic knowledge in non-academic knowledge, and vice versa, and to do with con passionalità” (Santos, 2014: 231--232). At the beginning of the book, he states “It [this book] will be read by those who least need it. Those who, in my judgment, might benefit from it, will not be able to read it. If they could, they would probably have no interest in doing so, and if they did, they would most probably not understand it” (Santos, 2014: 3). Epistemologies of the South speaks to the realities of educators and youth, but it does not necessarily speak with educators and youth.
Certain youth could be given this book, and they could start to decode it. In fact, a sophomore girl in a school in Massachusetts read a couple of the chapters and used it in a research paper that looked at the ecologies of knowledges. However, this girl is the exception, not the norm-- this is true for educators as well. The fact that educators and administrators when confronted with the language of epistemicide, dialectical hermeneutics, coloniality, etc. turn off, shows the deficient teacher and educator preparation that we have in place. Trained (not educated) in dealing with a numerology cult, teachers and educators codify crucial approaches such as Santos’, as frivolous knowledge. Philosophy has no value to them as they are crunched to work within a scientific paradigm that continuously disvalues their intellectuality. The lack of interest stems in part from the conception of theory and philosophy as a luxury of the past that within a hyper-capitalist present, catalyzed by neoliberal steroids, cannot be afforded. Educators deal with the present knowing the wrath of the future. Teaching and learning in many ways are an act of scourging. Instead of an act of discovering, education is an act of covering. However, teachers and administrators represent the largest portion of intellectual workers in the US; this does not mean that they are not intellectuals.
As Gramsci argued, “all [human beings] are intellectuals”. The same is true of youth who are told that they don’t know because what they know does not fit into a multiple choice test and/or is not scientific. We are before an anti-intellectual intellectualism (Paraskeva, 2013); teacher preparation, the preparation of educational leaders, and the way curriculum has been conceptualized and developed in the US show the accuracy of Santos’ abyssal theory. It is our challenge as rearguard intellectuals to speak with the public in which there is a dialectical engagement with theoretical language and practice that learns from the present.
Footnotes
Funding
This work received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, nor not-for-profit sectors.