A social foundations for the future: A note from the grave

To appear in: Diem, J. (Ed.). The social and cultural foundations of education: A reader for the 21st century. San Diego, CA: Cognella Academic Publishing. Do not cite without author’s permission.

1

A social foundations for the future: A note from the grave

Abraham P. DeLeon University of Texas at San Antonio


2

Death has so many uses. Joseph Roach (1996, p. 59). Yes, imagination is the only good thing which heaven vouch-safes to the skeptic and pessimist, alarmed by the eternal abjectness of life. J. K. Huysmans (1928/1972, p. 181). This was no Sith trick. Not an instance of feigning death, but one of succumbing to its cold embrace. The being who had guided him to power was gone. Wry amusement narrowed his eyes. The Muun might have lived another hundred years unchanged. He might have lived forever had he succeeded fully in his quest. But in the end—though he could have saved others from death—he had failed to save himself. James Luceno (2014, p. 3).

In Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2011), the brilliant director takes

us into the caves of Chauvet in France to show the viewer the oldest known drawings in

existence. His film is a glimpse into humanity’s past from 30,000 years ago; ancient

humans speak to us through their pictorial imaginations, in which they depicted

nonhumans of the region and some of their cultural practices. These drawings emerge as

a deep connection that early human beings had with their natural world. The cave

paintings are not only a testament to the creative impulse within humanity from the

beginning, but also a pseudo time machine: a vessel in which we have received a message

from our ancestors. As a critical foundations scholar who is situated in the past, present,

and future, my attention is theirs. I begin with Chauvet simply because this chapter wants

to assume a similar stance as those caves for a people yet to materialize; this tale exists as

the vision of a rhizome with no preconfigured endings or aims; a disruption to empiricism

that sees no value in thought that cannot be measured or quantified, especially within

traditional educational research (Grossberg, 2013).

This tale of delinking (Mignolo, 2011) from master narratives, this writing on the

electronic cave wall thus begins like this: Hello, reader of the future. I write this from the

21st century as a situated historical subject; a subject produced by discourse, practice,


3

history and other larger social forces found uniquely during my current historical

conjuncture (Barker, 2012; Grossberg, 2010). My goal is to leave you an archive of

possibilities for an imagined future not yet written, conceived in an age and era apart

from yours. Not to evoke a macabre vision of the potentials that the future holds, but I

write this to you from the grave; a finality of life that sought to escape the historical

configurations of my own limited era. Maybe you will read this vision from the confines

of a space vessel hurtling through the cosmos; maybe you are reading this from the ashes

of a future society destroyed by the narrow-mindedness of a reconfigured form of

capitalism; or even better, maybe you are engaging this writing from the rubble, “the

ruptured multiplicity … constitutive of all geographies” (Gordillo, 2014, p. 2), finally

given the chance to build a society apart from what fell or came before.

Whatever the case or context of this future yet to materialize, this note from the

ashes of the society in which I live is to think of the potentials of the social foundations

outside the pre-given; this call to a future action is to bring to light theoretical visions that

might not have been engaged by you, the future subject. I want a conversation that

bridges the past, the present, and the future potentials of a story that is not finished; a

story without an ending; a finale yet to be performed. This cross-time encuentro (Hayden,

2002) is written amongst a growing attack on ways of knowing that fall outside of

empiricism, scientific management, and the devaluing of research that does not deploy a

quantitative approach. This impetus to quantify is so intense that empiricists want to

measure “evil” intent and help locate the future criminal, dictator, or tyrant (see the work

of Dr. Michael Welner, for example).


4

This scream (Holloway, 2010a, 2010b) that emerges from the rubble

acknowledges that indeed the humanities, and critical thought in general, is quite literally

under attack, because “the question of the future is becoming increasingly urgent because

of growing anxiety about the status of the humanities” (Bono, Dean, & Ziarek, 2014, p.

1). It is amongst anxiety that this piece was written; an anxiety about a society obsessed

with engineering and science as the way to understand truth and reality, all at the expense

of the historical traditions that we foundations scholars pull from. Measurement trumps

creativity in my era, future human.

It is under an assault that my imagination wants to break free from the confines of

the corporate university; conservative oversight on research funding agencies; the

pressure to produce article after article; the erasure of foundations from schools of

education; the chase for grant procurement. The imagination at work inside me is radical

and wild, influenced heavily by the rebel spirit found within anarchist theory, French

social critiques, and the artistic imagination that yearns to paint, write, draw, sculpt, and

design. I want to break the machines (DeLeon, 2015). I want to exist in the middle

ground of social experiences and reality (DeLeon, 2010a). I want to imagine history as

another possibility, resisting viewing it as causal linearity to become a new form

(DeLeon, 2011a). I want to assume the nomadic spirit, animating new ways to conceive

of pedagogical moments (Burke & DeLeon, 2015). I seek to demystify the perpetual state

of crisis that categorizes neoliberal capitalism to one that envisions alternative practices

of social, educational, political, personal, and economic organization (Cazdyn, 2012). I

want to give birth to new imaginal machines (Shukaitis, 2009), born from the desert

where life springs eternal (Lopez, 2014). I want to cross the spaces of death (Taussig,


5

1987), becoming a transformed subject outside the discourses, practices, and catastrophes

of the State (DeLeon, 2011b). I want to become posthuman (Snaza et al., 2014).

Through this short chapter and radical intervention, I hope to unearth a new tale,

in which I imagine connecting the future human with the voices from the past that

influenced this scream to emerge. Or to put it more poetically, as Taussig (1997) can, it is

with “the magical harnessing of the dead for stately purposes, that I wish, on an

admittedly unsure and naïve footing, to begin” (p. 3). Cazdyn (2012), in a brilliant

analysis of the links between politics, culture, and medicine, analyzes terminal illness that

is managed, rather than cured, as a “meantime that functions like a hole in time, an

escape route to somewhere else and a trap door to where [s/]he began” (pp. 4–5). This

unbearable state means “we cannot help but act toward another way of feeling and being”

(Cazdyn, 2012, p. 5). This chapter seeks to escape the management of a social pathology

to one that brings to life new ways of acting and being, giving birth to new ways to exist

in this particular reality; an archive of radical thought that can be engaged in a different

era apart from the one in which these ideas emerged to demonstrate that the scholarship

done by social foundations scholars is socially meaningful outside the logics of empirical

research.

Taussig (1997) reminds us, “language depends on this lingering on as an idea

tracing an outline around a once solid, breathing form, troubling the body’s once

bodiedness” (p. 3). It is within death, future human, that the “sterilization” (Taussig, 1997

pp. 4–5) of a truth event such as death can bring forth new ways of being/acting/doing in

this corporeal reality, as language is what’s left once the body is gone from this world;

the dead acting as a sage long passed from her/his era (Berardi, 2009). Berardi (2009)


6

treats the radical academic as one of the multiple sages of wisdom in which something

can be learned autonomously; the lines of potentiality that s/he imagined is where to

situate this particular chapter.

To point toward this possibility, indigenous paths outsides of Western science will

be highlighted to demonstrate where humanity began, future human. I then move toward

exploring works of Georges Bataille, a French social theorist who has remained in the

shadows of thinkers such as Michel Foucault or Jacques Derrida. As influential and

important as even mainstream critical educational scholarship may be, the voices of those

in the margins remain a powerful force in my own work, tempting me to take intellectual

roads less traveled that span the archaic, the profane, the magical, and the provinces of

the mad, even within a “critical” milieu. This, future reader, may be an exercise in which

you are acutely aware, or this may even be the new common sense that reigns in your

existence, but this paper attempts to resist “common sense” that is privileged in today’s

neoliberal university. So please be patient as this situated historical scholar begins to push

through the muck of the present to give birth to a future-oriented theoretical form suitable

to your needs; a body long dead that speaks from the grave to produce sensations and

affects possibly unknown to you, possibly saving a future, ourselves, and the potentials of

the social foundations in the process.

Beginning in the Beginning: Indigenous Ways of Knowing

The caves of Chauvet still haunt my imagination as a testament to the birth of

humanity. My radical imagination is at work when the question arises: did these ancient

humans want to leave an archive of their knowledge, or was the impetus to represent their


7

world so strong that they had to create their world in their own form of ancient

communication, on their own terms? My current mind can never reach the answer to this

question, unfortunately, but this wondering has left a space in which this chapter can be

more explicit: This is a mark on the wall to tell a tale of ways in which the current

conjuncture can potentially produce new ways of knowing for a future that remains still

in question. I want the future to know who we were on our own terms; through ways of

knowing that existed in the intellectual fringes of our contemporary society and through

an academic tradition that is in the throngs of extinction with dwindling resources and

few full-time academic or tenure track positions at universities.

Critical, connected to a larger picture of the environment and ourselves, along

with being interdisciplinary, indigenous scholarship provides us with glimpses of what

knowledge means outside of a strictly empirical context that frames much of the way

knowledge is conceived at the corporate university (Abdullah & Stringer, 1999). Taussig

(1997), I believe, might call this “strange beauty,” producing the conditions for new ways

of being and knowing to emerge.

Not life after death … but more edge to life, now they’re pure, pure image, these spirits

stalking there where together Europe and its colonies, white and colored, reflect back

stunning fantasies of each other’s underworlds from conquest and slavery onward,

brimful with the vivacity of treachery and obscure design. (Taussig, 1997, p. 6)

Even amongst the terror and death of European colonization and the practices it

engendered, possibilities remained.

Although the university is part of the contemporary efforts at colonizing and

appropriating how we think about past/current/future possibilities, work has been done to

ensure that indigenous researchers can “formulate and implement modes of inquiry that

are specifically relevant to the social and cultural needs” (Abdullah & Stringer, 1999, p.


8

146) of their specific indigenous contexts. In this way, indigenous modes of

understanding the world happen through a deep connection to the land, to each other, to a

communal history, to nonhumans, and to the natural world, informing a way of knowing

that intimately ties us with the environment that springs forth life itself. As Semali and

Kincheloe (1999) argued:

indigenous knowledge reflects the dynamic way in which residents of an area have come

to understand themselves in relationship to their natural environment and how they

organize that folk knowledge of flora and fauna, cultural beliefs, and history to enhance

their lives. (p. 3)

However, to begin to define what indigenous knowledge is becomes a difficult process

because its diversity in practice/thought/context/application makes a totalizing way of

naming, in the singular sense, indigenous thinking as a colonizing project itself. I want to

specifically avoid the cliché of turning indigenous representation into a metaphor instead

of a political/activist/epistemological point of attack toward action (Tuck & Yang, 2012).

The diversity of thought/practice from, say, the Aboriginal peoples of Australia to

the indigenous peoples of North America demonstrates how distinct these ancient ways

of knowing are, because in the end we must avoid “generalizations, simplifications, or

half-truths” to avoid the historically toxic relationships between “indigenous peoples and

Europeans” (Semali & Kincheloe, 1999, pp. 11–12). Although I self-identify as a man of

color residing in the Western world who has indigenous roots and history, this does not

mean I do not have a role in playing how these dominant frameworks are reproduced.

Understanding this makes it pertinent to summarize some of these indigenous practices

(that have been kept in the written tradition, so I recognize that others existed outside of

written language) as outlined by indigenous scholars across a broad range of disciplines


9

that can help us envision the future potentials of foundations scholarship. Here are

characteristics, future human, that seem to encompass some of the diversity of indigenous

thought and practices that have been gathered from the literature (see Brayboy [2005] for

a good example of this):

1. Intimate knowledge of nature, community, personal relationships, the natural environment, and personal habitats 2. Empathy for, relationship to, and knowledge of nonhuman life and fauna 3. Colonization and settler ideologies/practices have been an integral component in the rise of Western society and have been enacted on the bodies and social systems of indigenous peoples in a way that has been socially/politically/economically/epistemologically detrimental 4. Multiple forms of societal, communal, group, and familial ways to be/act among each other and neighbors 5. Sophisticated ways of knowing (bodily and otherwise) that include multiple dynamics (that is, nature, personal experiences, ancient wisdom, storytelling) that arise solely from indigenous perspectives, values, and habits of thought and epistemologies 6. The existence of narration, narratives, and storytelling as valid ways to understand the past, present, and future 7. Wisdom of ancient ways of communal and societal organization that arise from a deep respect for the natural world and a consciousness constructed through this lens

One can see immediately then how these types of practices and ways of being in/part of

the world contradict the empirical vision Europeans inhabited intellectually and socially.

Influenced heavily by the Enlightenment, empiricists sought to uncover Truth

with “objective” methods and approaches steeped in the discourses/practices of Reason.

With these practices ensconced in the very essence of how Europeans interacted with the

“new world,” they would come to see these indigenous practices as invalid, constructing

the peoples they encountered as savage, deficient, childish, and dangerous (Césaire,

1972; Chaplin, 2001; Taussig, 1987; Tuhiwai Smith, 1999). These were, according to

Moraña, Dussel, and Jáuregui (2008), “aggressive strategies used in imposing material

and symbolic domination on vast territories in the name of universal reason” (p. 2). Not


10

buying into these aggressive Western modes of knowing that are privileged in spaces

such as schools, universities, medical facilities, and through various State apparatuses, we

need to try to think outside of these discourses and practices; a middle ground of sorts

that exists where dominant ideologies can collide with those experiences and perspectives

on the fringes (DeLeon, 2010a). As Firth and Robinson (2013) so eloquently claim,

“possibility should not be limited to the present frame” (p. 2). We must begin with

narration and storytelling as powerful ways in which to resist these Western, empiricist

incantations, and as a foundations scholar, positioning ourselves within a narrative

approach offers us new ways to think of our work and its applicability in rethinking

educational realities. I want to specifically highlight the work of Barry Lopez, future

human, an apt place to begin within one indigenous storyteller’s imagination.

For Lopez (2014), the Earth is a vibrant, living thing. As he tells us in “Desert

Notes,” “I know what they tell you about the desert but you mustn’t believe them. This is

no deathbed” (Lopez, 2014, p. 15). Lopez begins first with the suspension of disbelief,

urging his fellow traveler to already question dominant narratives about life inherent in

the desert. Disbelief brings forth in our era, future human, an already assumed stance

toward authority, harkening the way current anarchists distrust State and other

authoritative discourses/practices/institutions, viewing these as inherently problematic

(Amster, DeLeon, Fernandez, Nocella, & Shannon, 2009). It is within disbelief that the

radical imagination must blossom, as it positions us to already question the pre-given and

taken for granted; the master narratives found throughout the production of knowledge,

the corporate media and standardized testing.


11

It is not only the disbelief that is shown toward authoritative interpretations, but

also Lopez’s capture of the life of the desert in the quote above. As a fellow desert

dweller, his point is well understood. The desert—from my era, future human—is a

vibrant place of life that spurns forth from the cacti, sage bush, and other fauna of the

region. The nonhuman life is beautiful and intrepid, learning to thrive in what can seem

to be a hostile environment. The rocks, seemingly immobile and ancient, tell a story of

weathering and time; a time that exists outside of the logics of capital; an “eternal present

… from a particular point of view” (Firth & Robinson, 2013, p. 4). The heat does not

discriminate, but life still exists and thrives, or as Lopez (2014) states, “dig down, the

earth is moist” (p. 15). The desert, underneath (as both figurative and metaphorical

description), captures the life giving of what the desert offers its animals (human and

nonhuman), its fauna; the spiritual essence of the desert. It challenges the body to endure

heat, but with the heat comes an awakening of the body through sweat and the quest to

cool our bodies. But that is also what Lopez pushes us to understand, that life exists out

of what we consider solely the organic; what lives and breathes amongst the world

outside the purview of humanity. It demonstrates a deep connection to nature and respect

for what the Earth provides its inhabitants. The boulders indeed possess something that

remains hidden, the “music before the dawn”: in essence, “the sound of the loudest

dreaming, the dreams of boulders” (Lopez, 2014, p. 17). You may notice immediately,

future human, I discuss the desert in its affective terms and through a deep connection to

the actual land, not relying on scientific discourses to classify or interpret through an

empiricist lens that seeks to “study” the desert as a mere object of scientific inquiry.


12

Finding life within what seems to be the inanimate contradicts the current logics

of the neoliberal university, future human. It forces us, as foundations scholars engaged

with the life world, to see beyond the impetus to measure and standardize; the impetus to

control what seems to be out of our grasp. It forces us to take a stance toward the natural

world that falls outside the discourses of science to see the world through alternative

ways/practices. Thinking through these types of lenses offered by indigenous ancestors,

and those still trying to live a life outside of neoliberal capitalism and Western ways of

being, offers us hope that we can connect with something much larger than some notion

of “individualism” (Lopez, 1986, p. 154); that we can become something larger than our

singularity. Hope resides that the multitude can emerge from the ashes and rubble that

Western society engenders; remembering that connections to each other and communal

ways of living is what builds the seeds for alternative future possibilities through

boundless, decentered multitudes (Hardt & Negri, 2004). The beauty is that our

indigenous ancestors have already laid the practices for us to pull from, as it is up to us as

scholars to help uncover these ancient ways of knowing.

Engaging with these that often stand apart from the knowledge regime propagated

in most current corporate university models allows us to remember that the pain and

alienation of the present can be overcome with not only a closer link to different ways of

being, but confidence in knowing that whatever the State delivers shall pass. “Whatever

their horrors, whatever afflictions they deliver, pass away. What endures is simple

devotion to the question of having been alive” (Lopez, 2004, p. 4). This notion of living

is what I want to capture. The life that exists outside of the empirical world that demands

objectivity and a colonizing approach to what we think we know about the world. This


13

life that brims under the empirical microscope “streams past in infinite profusion” and

you would “find life under the glass” (Bradbury, 1953/2012, p. 83). The inherent

contradiction in using the microscope, the tool that represents Enlightenment thinking

and scientific inquiry, is what can be embraced; using the tools of subjugation toward one

that empowers us in new ways. Thinking about this within the context of schooling

prepares us to imagine the possibilities within hierarchical schooling mechanisms and the

chances of escape that potentially exist. For foundations scholars who yearn to embody a

rebel and critical spirit, embracing the contradictions of everyday life is paramount in

rethinking future possibilities.

Conjuring the Magic of Unearthed Ways of Knowing: Social Foundations From the

Margins

Immediately looking at the section title, it should be a warning, future human, we

are treading down a different intellectual path. The research, and I write this with great

trepidation, “intellectual production” done within mainstream academic circles focuses

on studying the effects of the institutions humanity has created or the world as we think

we understand it to be. In other words, it becomes a cyclical process in which academics

are tasked with studying only that which is considered to be verifiable and thus socially

constructed; that is, the practices of the State, institutional realities such as examining

schools, neoliberal economic incantations or other practices grounded in what is

considered “normal.” This prompts me to take seriously the claim made by Simon

(2006), a practitioner of ancient rites of magic and divination, who opined, “those who

take the occult and the paranormal seriously are committing what is essentially a political


14

act, and are in danger of being considered insane at the very worst, or at best, being

simply out of touch with reality” (pp. 5–6). This diagnosis of insanity is actually one that

I wish to embrace and will guide the way in which this chapter will finish, future human,

“conjuring up more things than any ordinary mortals can dream” (Mauss, 1972, p. 41).

This idea of conjuration is an apt metaphor and will be discussed in a moment.

First, because of this approach, we are working now within the fringes; even

amongst French social theory and literature that has gained an interdisciplinary following

in areas like education, cultural studies, or sociology. I want to escape the empirical role

demanded of me by the current knowledge regime, future human, acting as an academic

magician conjuring forces from scholarship that circumvents the logics of quantifiable

research. For a critical social foundations scholar, this is invaluable because maybe the

fringes is where we belong, finding new ways to occupy academic positions and still do

the kinds of critical scholarship we know to be of intellectual and social value. Works by

Georges Bataille, for example, exist within the fringes of French social theory and are

secondary to Michel Foucault or Jacques Derrida, who are relied upon within a milieu of

educational theory and research. But theorists/artists that exist in the margins have much

to offer in terms of escaping the normal/abnormal binary that litters Western thought,

taking intellectual risks that are necessary to circumvent and expose power/knowledge

dynamics (Foucault, 1980).

Georges Bataille (1985), for example, tells us that art has the potential to “create

from itself its own reality” (p. 242), escaping the binaries of truth and beauty. When we

escape these binaries, future human, we can see new ways of being in the world that can

be dreamed and produced; opening a new way to view the world, or a “field—a field


15

perhaps of violence, perhaps of death, but a field which may be entered—to the agitation

that has taken hold of the living human spirit” (Bataille, 1985, p. 242). This living spirit

cannot be captured with academic measurements or controls, nor can it be domesticated

to those institutions or belief systems that structure life for many in the West. This is

especially relevant for social foundations scholars, as the institution itself is so taken for

granted that to even question its validity places you within the realms of the mad.

Schooling becomes this fixed entity, and an examination of most of the popular textbooks

within the foundations milieu demonstrates that the institution itself has transcended; it

has experienced its own form of becoming to an object of truth; it has assumed almost a

goddess/god-like status.

For Bataille (1985), God is dead; the eternal truths that He provides are to be

resisted, questioned, and eventually overturned.

God represented the only obstacle to the human will, and freed from God this will

surrenders, nude, to the passion of giving the world an intoxicating meaning. Whoever

creates, whoever paints or writes, can no longer concede any limitations on painting or

writing; alone, he [sic] suddenly has at his disposal all possible human convulsions.

(Bataille, 1985, p. 245)

This assertion that God is indeed dead is nothing new for the contemporary critical

scholar, future human, but positions one toward forms of authority found in Western

society. To say that God does not exist, in the minds of mainstream society, is to distance

oneself from a discourse that encompasses the answers for everything; one turns one’s

back on Truth, Justice, and Beauty (capitalization intentional). Although this death of

God for Bataille, and as we will see in a moment, J. K. Huysmans, held meaning on a

spiritual level, I wish to think of this death as one that is experienced by resisting any

totalizing or authoritative discourse, especially the institution of schooling. In other


16

words, future human, the authority of God can be understood to be a metaphor for the

death of any hierarchical and authoritative system that produces Truth statements that

subjects must take up and perform.

Bataille, despite being located in a different historical time and space, found the

death of God to be a liberating experience, allowing artists to escape the confines often

imposed by a canonical Christian society and ethos. This speaks to my earlier claim,

linking the death of God to that of other discourses/practices such as empiricism, or the

ways in which we conceive of schooling because these types of Grand Narratives (again,

the capitalization is intentional) give to speaking subjects claims of Truth in which to

position themselves; a positionality in which to speak from that is unquestionable. The

death of empiricism, for example, would free artists and other cultural creatives from

constraints, setting the affective experiences generated by art free from any moral or

political limitations. The death of schooling would provide new avenues in which to

rethink not only the nature of education, but also its possibilities. It would free us from

the institutional walls to run amok in the fields of alternative ways of educating

ourselves. It would free scholars like myself to forgo the chase for grant procurement and

focus on scholarship that produces social change, rethinks education, or tries to improve

life. It would allow critical scholarship to flourish, what Antonin Artaud (1932/1976)

might have called “spontaneous conjurations” (p. 92) that could be explored in

meaningful ways through pedagogical encounters/theoretical interventions/experimental

writings. It could allow a new form of ethics to be produced.

Literary forms also expose those bodies on the fringes, such as J. K. Huysmans in

Là-Bas (Down There) (1928/1972). He indeed saw, future human, an alternative


17

understanding of the binary of good versus evil that Christians propagated. He found

comfort in the death of metanarratives, but still could not find peace in this world.

Whereas the Devil for Christians was the ultimate villain that must be rooted out,

resisted, and eventually destroyed by the grace of God’s love, the Devil for Huysmans

became “not … the champion of the rich, not as the vassal of the banker, but as the

spokesman for the ostracized” (Ziegler, 2012, p. 9), the infernal being who welcomed

those who indeed suffered. What this would look like for the social foundations is where

my imagination takes me. Maybe the need to renew the anarchist argument about

resisting schooling as a compulsory experience is where we might turn our attention. This

would seem to mirror the metaphor of the lure of the infernal, where Huysmans was

drawn, within the logics of schooling and education. To turn our backs on schools is

paramount to heresy. Thus, the infernal had a lure to answer ancient questions of meaning

and truth that fell outside the dominant conventions of that historical era and location.

Indeed, Paris of the 19th century produced the conditions for this type of understanding

to emerge.

Durtal, the main protagonist in Huysmans’ novel, finds the emptiness of

contemporary Paris to be unbearable; a world filled with the possibility of love but one he

could never obtain because of the restlessness of a body that could not be quenched by

any sort of real feelings of love or adoration. He found his life empty, devoid of any

emotional attachment. I quote Huysmans (1928/1972) at length:

It was his own fault if everything was spoiled. He lacked appetite. … He was used up in

body, filed away in soul, inept at love, weary of tenderness even before he received them

and disgusted when he had. His heart was dead and could not be revived. … For a man in

his state of spiritual impoverishment all, save art, was but a recreation more or less

boring, a diversion more or less vain. … With death in his heart he said to himself, “Yes,


18

I was right in declaring that the only women you can continue to love are those you lose.”

(p. 181; emphasis added)

To combat this emptiness, he studied the occult, and specifically the Middle Ages,

researching the infamous serial killer Gilles de Rais, drowning himself within infernal

knowledge and artistic creation that revived his spirit; art being Durtal’s only respite.

Through this, Durtal discovers a hidden underworld in Paris; an underworld teeming with

intrigue, ancient rites, and a Satanic revival, eventually leading him to document the first

Black Mass.

Interesting in its scope and its portrayal of its main protagonist’s longing for

meaning and Truth in this world amidst the city of Paris transformed by technological

innovations, Là-Bas complements the work of thinkers like Bataille because it steps

outside the boundaries of what is seen as “normal”; it pushes us to explore the limits of

what we think we know about the world through an investigation of forbidden discourses,

often revealing deeper meanings than intended. Magic, divination, and those occult

practices vilified by a canonical and conservative Western society are practiced by those

deemed “mad”; a profane approach to the logics of science and democratic life practiced

through the State. In my own teaching within the social foundations, for example, my

anecdotal experiences have found that tasking students to rethink the structure of

schooling is a difficult task akin to questioning the unquestionable; the logics of

institutional schooling so ensconced within their imaginations that escaping that reality

proves to be quite difficult.

However, taking them through the exercise of building an imaginal vision of other

educational realities forces them to confront their own educational philosophies and

hopefully pushes them to become more self-aware of the logics that may guide their own


19

teaching practices. Through example and readings, I build a case for a rigorous critique of

the practices of standardization and the logics of privatization. Resting on quantification

and economic theories to understand how capitalism operates, these types of privileged

forms of knowledge should be distrusted. Resistance must blossom from this type of

oppressive reality, potentially occurring through various channels outside accepted ways

of doing politics, as academics work within their strengths and ways of knowing. But

what has become apparent is the sheer tenacity and resilience of a borderless and global

capitalism, what Vandenberghe (2008) described as its ability to produce boundless

networks that cross time/space; existing outside the borders humanity has created that

keeps bodies chained to their country of origin.

It is within the assumption that this reality exists as an eternal system also proves

to be its greatest weakness. As Botting and Wilson (1998) argue, “The more a system

seeks completion and absolute self-identity, the more it dedicates itself to a closed

perfection, metastability, pure functionality, or cybernetic operativity, the more

susceptible it is to total collapse from a sudden reversal” (p. 17). With this absolute

presence our reality demands, there may be only left laughter: the realms of the affective.

Turning to Borch-Jacobsen (1998) to explain the affective sensations that cannot be

captured, he wrote, “could laughter … then be the only ethics remaining to us, the correct

ethics for an era which decidedly can no longer believe in happiness, in the Sovereign

Good?” (p. 147). Borch-Jacobsen points to a “correct” ethics, but that still positions us

within the binaries that litter Western thought. I want to think and construct new ways of

imagining educational experiences in terms of conjuration.


20

When we then speak of conjuration, we leave the world of quantitative

measurement to enter new realms of knowledge; we leave behind the binaries of

good/evil, this/that and point toward the productive nature of reality in which new

concepts can be produced; we abandon the logics of institutional schooling to think of

new forms of empowering educational experiences. Deleuze and Guattari (1994) claimed

that philosophy should be concerned with producing concepts that can be deployed across

time and space. Resisting the need for a totalizing discourse that stifles creative impulses,

they opted for spontaneous generation.

The task of philosophy when it creates concepts, entities, is always to extract an event

from things and beings, to set up the new event from things and beings, always to give

them a new event: space, time, matter, thought, the possible as events. (Deleuze &

Guattari, 1994, p. 33)

This extraction falls in line with the act of creation, conjuring a new way in which to

conceive of what is possible. Thinking of resistance in this way as a contemporary form

of conjuration places us within a new realm of praxis, future human, that of the mad

magician casting a new spell that abandons empirical thinking. We leave to the

empiricists their laboratories, their statistics, their experiments, their Truths. Their cold

sterility of reproducibility and quantification does not leave room for the imagination to

grow; it murders the creative impetus in favor of a reality that is dead to the senses.

Thinking of the constant drilling of a standardized curriculum seems to be a form of

schooling that prepares us for an existential death that kills the creative impulse; the wild

nature of an education that is unbounded and unscripted proves to be too dangerous for it

to thrive under a neoliberal ethos.


21

Death abounds within the world of empiricism, but a death that brings finality

instead of rebirth. Death not so much as an organic death of our bodies, but also a death

of the spirit, a death of creativity, a death of the Utopian impulse that has animated

radical scholarship. Here Bataille (1985) provides us again with a provocation:

Simple and strong life, which has not yet been destroyed by functional servility, is

possibly only to the extent that it has ceased to subordinate itself to some particular

project, such as … measuring; it depends on the image of destiny, on the seductive and

dangerous myth which it feels itself to be in silent solidarity. (p. 228)

Keen to understand the oppressive nature of measurement (again the world of empirical

research), Bataille thought of a world outside of this impetus. Not as a Garden of Eden

that is perfection incarnate; but a world filled with the beauty of contradictions. He

wanted to envision a world full of sensations existing beyond standardization.

Bataille offers us, amidst these forms of death, an escape that can occur through

the practices of radical love. Not to be confused with the romantic notions sold to us

through Valentine’s Day cards or heteronormative fantasies, but a love that exists toward

radical social change and the potential for a different way to be in this world. For Bataille

points to Vincent van Gogh’s delivery of his ear to his lover as a sign of this radical

potential that exists within love.

It is admirable in this way he both manifested a love that refused to take anything into

account and in a way spat in the faces of all those who have accepted the elevated and

official idea of life that is so well known. (Bataille, 1985, p. 71)

Bataille abandons the logics of his day and advocates for a life outside of the sensibilities

of his age. The ear of Van Gogh then “abruptly leaves the magic circle where the rites of

liberation stupidly aborted” (Bataille, 1985, p. 71). The severed ear, as macabre as that


22

may be, became a signifier for that love that exists beyond the normalcy of institutions,

beyond the normalcy of bourgeois sensibilities.

Van Gogh’s ear represents that final frontier of the artist’s imagination in which

replication is not intended. This extreme act lives on generations later. To leave behind

this symbol of love conjures historical forces apart from your own reality; imagine the

puzzlement Van Gogh would have felt at knowing this ear symbolized so much, centuries

later! It is the ear that we are left with, future human; the severed piece of a fleshly and

organic love that cannot be measured during this time or during his; but one that

resonates with the beauty of an act that moves beyond the normal, the sane; existing in

the realms of the mad and the absurd (DeLeon, 2010b). The absurd is where I will end

this chapter, future human, because they prompt us to leave the binaries and constructions

of normalcy to exist in another plane of existence shunned by the normalizing practices

that Western society promotes. My imagination points to educational experiences that

become wild and free and social foundations’ role in creating the theoretical opportunities

in which to imagine these types of experiences.

Where to Next, Future Human?

Only time ultimately knows where this tale of delinking will lead. The magic

conjured in this imaginative piece may allow radical scholars of another age to take up

different calls, questioning the fundamental epistemological and ontological ways of

being that neoliberal capitalism and empirical practices demand if they indeed survive

much longer. My hope is this chapter produces a provocation within not only a future

human form, but with those that engage it during our period; a deep connection to the


23

land that Lopez envisioned along with the mad conjurations and the infernal put forth by

Bataille and Huysmans. Jean-Jacques Lecercle (1985) called a madness that escaped

boundaries délire, a “rich and imaginative” process that “calls for respect and attention of

the man [sic] of science, of the psychologies and the philosopher” (pp. 1–2). He wanted a

philosophy that “consorts with the March Hare” (Lecercle, 1985, p. 3), prompting us to

take intellectual risks and thinking outside the frameworks we are given as academics to

reproduce.

The beauty of radical thought, it seems, lies in its ability to produce new concepts

that can be deployed in different eras from the time in which they were created, a délire

for a future that is yet to materialize for us now situated in the present frame. But despite

this possibility of new concepts being forged in the realities of this present day, I am still

left haunted by the caves of Chauvet. I want you, future human, to see this chapter as I do

those early drawings: the spontaneous conjuration of a humanity’s vision that has the

possibility to escape the dogmatic ways of knowing that a disciplined society engenders,

leaving my imaginal machine to you through the words of those that have come before

me.

I want to explore the indigenous imagination for more examples of a life outside

of Western sensibilities that shares a deep connection to the natural world, to ancient

ways of knowing and to each other, forgoing individualism for new ways of being with

each other. I want the natural world and our connection to it as human animals to be

included within radically new conceptions of how we view/construct reality and the

possibilities of what education can mean. This means thinking of nature as not an object


24

to be commodified through the production of knowledge, but in the throngs of producing

and shining light on paths that allows humanity to become a new form.

This seems to suggest being open to new ways to conjure alternative identities

and forms that a future humanity can possibly build from or reflect their relationship to

older identities already in circulation that can be reconfigured anew. It means being

comfortable, future human, in the death of Grand Narratives or any other authoritative

way in which reality is produced as the way to be/act/know in this world. This prompts us

to take intellectual roads less traveled, seeking alternative ways in which to exist amongst

each other and a future that is not yet written. I leave you now, future human, with the

drawings on these electronic cave walls of circuitry and nodes, hopefully with something

to ponder about where we, as a human species, were during the birth of the 21st century.

My hope lies in knowing you may have overcome the eternal search that vexed Durtal,

making new meaning amongst a changed, and changing, future technological world,

creating new ways in which to achieve empowering educational experiences that places

us within the throngs of new forms of becoming.

References

Abdullah, J., & Stringer, E. (1999). Indigenous knowledge, indigenous learning,

indigenous research. In L. Semali & J. Kincheloe (Eds.), What is indigenous

knowledge? Voices from the academy (pp. 143–155). New York: Falmer Press.

Amster, R., DeLeon, A., Fernandez, L., Nocella, A., & Shannon, D. (Eds.). (2009).

Contemporary anarchist studies: An introductory anthology of anarchy in the

academy. London: Routledge.


25

Artaud, A. (1976). Antonin Artaud: Selected writings (S. Sontag, Ed., H. Weaver,

Trans.). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. (Original work published 1932)

Barker, C. (2012). Cultural studies: Theory and practice (4th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA:

Sage.

Bataille, G. (1985). Vision of excess: Selected writings, 1927–1939 (A. Stoekl, Ed., A.

Stoekly, C. Lovitt, & M. Leslie, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press.

Berardi, F. (2009). Precarious rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the pathologies of the

post-alpha generation. London: Minor Compositions.

Bono, J., Dean, T., & Ziarek, E. P. (2014). Future, heteronomy, invention. In J. Bono, T.

Dean, & E. P. Ziarek (Eds.), A time for the humanities: Futurity and the limits of

autonomy (pp. 1–16). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Borch-Jacobsen, M. (1998). The laughter of being. In F. Botting & S. Wilson (Eds.),

Bataille: A critical reader (pp. 1–23). Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Botting, F. & Wilson, S. (1998). Introduction. In F. Botting & S. Wilson (Eds.), Bataille:

A critical reader (pp. 146–166). Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Bradbury, R. (2012). Fahrenheit 451. New York: Simon & Schuster. (Original work

published 1953)

Brayboy, B. M. J. (2005). Toward a tribal critical race theory in education. Urban

Review, 37(5), 425–446.

Burke, K., & DeLeon, A (2015). Nomadic teaching, vagabond dreaming: An examination

of the spaces that schools might become. Review of Education, Pedagogy, and

Cultural Studies 37(1).


26

Cazdyn, E. (2012). The already dead: The new time of politics, culture, and illness.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Césaire, A. (1972). Discourse on colonialism (J. Pinkham, Trans.). New York: Monthly

Review Press.

Chaplin, J. E. (2001). Subject matter: Technology, the body, and science on the Anglo-

American frontier, 1500–1676. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

DeLeon, A. (2010a). How do I tell a story that has not been told: Anarchism,

autoethnography and the middle ground. Equity & Excellence in Education,

43(4), 398–413.

DeLeon, A. (2010b). Reporting from the realm of the absurd: Rethinking space in a

neoliberal world. Theory in Action, 3(4), 38–58.

DeLeon, A. (2011a). From the shadows of history: The archive, educational research and

imaginative possibilities. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 27(3), 190–208.

DeLeon, A. (2011b). Spaces of terror and death: September 11th, public memory, and

high school imaginary. Critical Education, 2(10), 1–18.

DeLeon, A. (2015). Machines. Charlotte, NC: Information Age.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994). What is philosophy? (H. Tomlinson & G. Burchell,

Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press.

Firth, R., & Robinson, A. (2013). For the past yet to come: Utopian conceptions of time

and becoming. Time & Society, 23(3), 380–401.

Foucault, M. (1980). Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972–

1977 (C. Gordon, L. Marshall, J. Mepham, & K. Soper, Trans.). New York:

Random House.


27

Gordillo, G. (2014). Rubble: The afterlife of destruction. Durham, NC: Duke University

Press.

Grossberg, L. (2010). Cultural studies in the future tense. Durham, NC: Duke University

Press.

Grossberg, L. (2013). Cultural studies and Deleuze-Guattari, Part 1. Cultural Studies,

28(1), 1–28.

Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2004). Multitude: War and democracy in the age of empire. New

York: Penguin Books.

Hayden, T. (Ed.). (2002). The Zapatista reader. New York: Nation Books.

Herzog, W. (Director). (2011). Cave of forgotten dreams [DVD]. United States: MPI

Home Video.

Holloway, J. (2010a). Change the world without taking power: The meaning of

revolution today. New York: Pluto Press.

Holloway, J. (2010b). Cracks of capitalism. London: Verso.

Huysmans, J. K. (1972). Là-Bas (Down There). New York: Dover. (Original work

published 1928)

Lecercle, J.-J. (1985). Philosophy through the looking-glass: Language, nonsense, desire.

La Salle, IL: Open Court Books.

Lopez, B. (1986). Artic dreams: Imagination and desire in a northern landscape. New

York: Scribner.

Lopez, B. (2004). Resistance. New York: Knopf.

Lopez, B. (2014). Outside: Stories by Barry Lopez. San Antonio, TX: Trinity University

Press.


28

Luceno, J. (2014). Darth Plagueis. New York: Del Rey Books.

Mauss, M. (1972). A general theory of magic (R. Brain, Trans.). New York: Routledge.

Mignolo, W. (2011). Geopolitics of sensing and knowing: On decoloniality, border

thinking and epistemic disobedience. Postcolonial Studies, 14(3), 273–283.

Moraña, M., Dussel, E., & Jáuregui, C. (2008). Colonialism and its replicants. In M.

Moraña, E. Dussel, & C. Jáuregui (Eds.), Coloniality at large: Latin America and

the postcolonial debate (pp. 1–20). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Roach, J. (1996). Cities of the dead: Cirucm-Atlantic performance. New York: Columbia

University Press.

Semali, L. & Kincheloe, J. (1999). What is indigenous knowledge and why should we

study it? In L. Semali & J. Kincheloe (Eds.), What is indigenous knowledge:

Voices from the academy (pp. 3–57). New York: Falmer Press.

Shukaitis, S. (2009). Imaginal machines: Autonomy & self-organization in the

revolutions of everyday life. London: Minor Compositions.

Simon. (2006). The gates of the Necronomicon. New York: Avon Books.

Snaza, N., Appelbaum, P., Bayne, S., Carlson, D., Morris, M., Rotas, N., … Weaver, J.

(2014). Toward a posthumanist education. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing,

30(2), 39–55.

Taussig, M. (1987). Shaminism, colonialism and the wild man: A study in terror and

healing. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Taussig, M. (1997). The magic of the state. New York: Routledge.

Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization:

Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1–40.


29

Tuhiwai Smith, L. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous

peoples. London: Zed Books.

Vandenberghe, F. (2008). Deleuzian capitalism. Philosophy & Social Criticism, 34(8),

877–903.

Ziegler, R. (2012). Satanism, magic and mysticism in fin-de-siècle France. New York:

Palgrave Macmillan.

Date post:	02-Mar-2023
Category:	Documents
Upload:	utsa
View:	1 times
Download:	0 times

A social foundations for the future: A note from the grave

Documents