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The Loss of the Modern Project of Future, Humanity and Individuality: The Philosophy of Education in the Plan of Immanence

Cestari Luiz Artur dos Santos, Gouveia Gleidson*

University of Iowa, Iowa City, USA

Abstract: This text aims to discuss a purpose to present a philosophy of education based on the arguments from Deleuze and Gutarri’s thinking, specifically about the concept of plan of immanence. Two tasks are playing at this context. First, the evaluation of modernity will put in debate three important notions from it: the modern project of future, the humanity and individuality. Then, it will point out the end of the modern promises as emancipatory discourses to be achieved in the future and consolidated during the history, as well as the process that have transformed at same time the human beings in subject and the individuality in individualism. At the second task, it will talk about the terms by which we can present a proposal to philosophize in immanence of life, thinking about how education can working as line of escape of the ephemeral capitalist socialization and discussing two concepts of Deleuze and Guatarri’s thinking: affections and perceptions.

Keywords: humanity, individuality, plan of immanence

Citation: Cestari Luiz Artur dos Santos, Gouveia Gleidson, The Loss of the Modern Project of Future, Humanity and Individuality: The Philosophy of Education in the Plan of Immanence. American Journal of Educational Research, 5 (7). 747-751. January 2017. doi:10.12691/education-5-7-8

1. Introduction

Michel Foucault [1] on his text "The subject and the power" affirms that the problem he had put is not directly related about the phenomenon of the power, such as the title has suggested, but he had talked about the modern and institutional process that has transformed the human being into subject, i.e.: “… My objective, instead, has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects.”

Foucault in order to discuss the problem of the human came to show that there are few spaces to construct a project of individuality in contemporary ages because the advent of the capitalism modern and its instrumental-logical process in all sphere of live had made modern institutions a space of objectivizing.

At the same way, the process of schooling during the modern times had made the education a process to objectivize subjects and although schools would be a place to transform the subjects in free individuals based on a modern discourse of education, unlike, they have become a space to exert the political power on individuals in order to make them obedient subjects.

This text will understand that the capitalism culture has created new ways to keep individuals in submission. First, at the establishment of the disciplinary society at the end of nineteenth century to the first middle of the twentieth century, and second, when the societies start to assume new forms to do it, as a society of control from 1950’s to nowadays. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri have called attention to more flexible forms of control in contemporary institutions in which subjects have believed that are a free individuals but they are only doing choices on an indicated options.

This text has argument the conceptions of humanity and individuality in the project of modernity has lost senses on contemporary times. The history of modern societies have shown a society that is more and more influenced and oriented by a capitalist instrumental-logical process in which all sphere of life are made with the marks of economical meaning and all things in society are buy or sell for everyone. Houses, cars, foods etc. are sell at the same way like education, God, a body, a felicity; affecting three important senses in the project of modernity.

The first sense is the loss of the project of future because the strong influence of the capitalist instrumental-logical process has transformed the project of future in a presentification life. Second, following the same Foucault’s argument, the sense of humanity has been made in form of subjectivities (made human being in subject), and third, the project of individuality has been transformed in individualism.

This text aims to discuss a proposal to point out aspects of a philosophy of education that will put in debate those three senses and the answers to respond these problems are not seen as a new discourse to recreate or overcome the project of modernity but how educators can face these situations in a world of life that is colonized by the capitalist meanings and at same time must be the a place where they will find reasons to educate in a daily life.

Therefore, this paper will rest on what Gilles Deleuze and Guatarri had named plan of immanence, i.e. the ground where the knowledge will sprout from the historic time, paying attention what about Silvio Gallo’s highlight that it could be multiple plans of immanence on Deleuze’s sense. On this way, it will follow the argument: if you think in other plan of immanence you must displace education of the capitalist instrumental-logical process.

2.The Loss of a Project of the Future during the Modernity

The birth of modernity is a resulting of many changes that will mark the end of the middle ages such as the great navigations and the discovery of the new colonized world, the revival of classical culture, the protestant reform etc. Then, two demands during the advent of the capitalist society in seventeen century will make part of the modern project of future: the rationality and the subjectivity. The searching for a life guided by the reason was at same time a way out from the unstable pre-modern world that was influenced by religions and non-grounded believes, as well as the base to present a project of the future that will announce promises to achieve the human emancipation.

During the modernity, the human being became the center of the world and he was the measure of knowledge because everything was directly linked to the reason. Since this moment, it became the condition to organize the world and give sense to all sphere of life, submitting to the test of reason all it needs to be legitimated.

One of these promises was express by the idea of the progress based on a theodicy conception of the history that had been presented by Germany philosopher G.W.F. Hegel. He had distinguished three methods or modes of doing history, named Original, Reflective and Philosophical History. [2]

At first, based on Herodotus and Thucydides, original history was a contemporaneous writing that refers to deeds, events and states of society which they were able to see with own eyes and whose culture they wanted to share. Second, a reflective history was written at some temporal distance from the events. On Hegel’s sense this form of history had a tendency to impose the cultural prejudices and ideas of the historians upon the past history over which the historians reflect.

The philosophical history was the third mode to do it. Hegel maintains that the historian must bracket his own preconceptions, finding the overall sense and driving ideas out of the very matter of the history. On this conception, Hegel affirms that the philosophy of history must bring the thought to the history and the role of it is finding the rational nexus of the historical events that are unconnected, isolated and individual. The history must be more closely linked and rationally ordered.

The Hegelian philosophy was clear to say that the reason govern the world and the history is a rational process, like he expressed:: “…I have been unwilling to leave out of sight the connection between our thesis — that Reason governs and has governed the World — and the question of the possibility of a knowledge of God, chiefly that I might not lose the opportunity of mentioning the imputation against Philosophy of being shy of noticing religious truths, or of having occasion to be so; in which is insinuated the suspicion that it has anything but a clear conscience in the presence of these truths” [3]

As a one of the most important philosopher of the Aufklãrung, Hegel was strongly influenced by the French revolution and understood the modern world is rational. He had affirmed the reason is only not an ideal that will not be attainment but it has an infinity content, all essence and true. Then, Hegel believes that the reason is in the history and the role of philosopher is discover the laws that has carried out the history and made it a necessary and rational process to the encounter of the universal spirit with itself.

This conception of the history was a ground to construct the promises of the modernity as emancipatory discourses to be achieved in the future and consolidated during the history. For instance, one of these important ideas was the liberal discourse in favor to construct a subject's project based on the principals like the universal rationality, autonomy and enlightenment.

The better theory elaboration of this discourse is at the text that has been wrote by Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant in 1784 in which he has claimed for the human courage to acquire enlightenment: “…Enlightenment is mankind’s exit from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to make use of one’s own understanding without guidance of another” [4].

Nevertheless, this project of future put in question by its own history because the history of the modernity and its establishment will be different of its project. Unlike it could be expected, the emergent capitalist society will work in favor to develop the instrumental rationality that was a base to accomplish many process in all sphere of life, losing consequently the emancipatory dimension of the reason.

The twentieth century was a moment to put in proves the effectiveness of the reason. During the modernity, we have testified the important and good uses of the reason to develop societies, like the more organized process to work in factories (Fordism for example), the implementation of republican education in many countries, the advanced of scientific knowledge in many areas of scientific research and their contribution to many dimensions of life like health for instance etc.

Conversely, at this same century we have still seen the bad side of the reason. Among two world wars and other conflicts, we could testify the ethnical persecutions like for example the concentration camps established by the Nazis in Germany and occupied Europe in 1933–45, the atomic bomb using by United States on the Japan people at the end of the second war, and the consequent nuclear arms race during “the cold war” that has divided the world in two blocks of countries between capitalist and socialist societies. Moreover, we still pointed out the consequences of these conflicts to the contemporary ages like the cold-blooded massacre in many ethnical conflicts around the world, the advanced of all kinds of terrorisms and murdered originated from prejudices, as well as the ecological damages that was a result of the advanced means of production.

The evaluation of the reason in twentieth century rises at same time with the debate about the use of reason and its historical impoverishment announced by Horkheimer and Adorno in “Dialetic of enleigtenment”[5]. These authors understanding that the use of the reason along the modernity reduced it to its radical form, guiding by its instrumental function. The relation between means and ends is on the base of efficiency idea and it is the form to express the instrumental reason. Their results are the attainment of what the society it will hope. On this way, human being can satisfy their natural needs through the social instances and the utility is the social category to adjust the subjects and affirm this society.

Horkheimer and Adorno pointed out a certain ambivalence concerning the ultimate source or foundation of social domination. The authors have seen a National Socialism, Stalinism, state capitalism, and mass culture as entirely new forms of social domination that could not be adequately explained within the terms of traditional Critical Theory, mainly in Marxism.

The intervention of state in the economy had effectively abolished the tensions between the "relations of production" and the "material productive forces of society," a tension which, according to traditional Critical Theory, constituted the primary contradiction within capitalism. The market (as an "unconscious" mechanism for the distribution of goods) and private property had been replaced by centralized planning and socialized ownership of the means of production. Moreover, the contrary to Marx’s famous prediction in the Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, this shift did not lead to "an era of social revolution," but rather to fascism and totalitarianism.

Therefore, the first loss during the modernity was the loss of the project of future. The promises of the modernity that the history will carry out societies to more rational stages in spheres of life was finally lost when the hope for new forms of enlightenment were transformed in new forms of domination. Different of what Hegel had thought, history of modern societies do not advance forward to the progress or revolution, and the hope for freedom or an enlightenment subjectivity have been put in question in a society that is reproducing their forms of domination and contradictions, i.e. it need to invent lethal weapons to keep the world in peace, it needs to develop new technologies to produce foods but many people in different parts of the world is in starvation state, as well as needs to deplete the natural resources to improve the consumption pattern of few part of these societies.

3. The Loss of Humanity as a Process to Transform Human Beings in Subjects

The second loss during the modernity was the loss of humanity because the social process to include the human beings in society transformed them in subjects. The adjustment of subject into a social condition through the social institutions is an unavoidable process of internalization named socialization. It needs to accept that social and cultural conditions are established before the subject was born, i.e. contradictions and forms of human possibility are hierarchically, and it must not forget two important features of this process.

First, the forms of domination had already been at the cultural and social process with an intention of to be total although the internalization never will be total. The human possibilities are presented to the subjects as programed options and all things like what they talk, think and intend etc. are not talking, thinking and intend distant of the established social meanings and the conditions that reproduce themselves. The internalization adapts the subjects into its logical process and expected attitudes. Then, the subjects become member of the society and it involves the relationship among the world and the otherness.

Second, the socialization is an unfinished process and it will never achieve a level in which would be possible a perfect symmetry between objective reality and subjectivity. It needs to accept that the initial process of socialization is decisive to establish the conditions of sociability along the lifetime in the later process of socialization like at the division of social work and knowledge.

The subject’s life has become this intense conflict before the forms and contents of the structure of society, and the intention to make as a symmetric the objective reality and subjectivity is a delusion. Adorno [6] named it of reification because this process drives the subject to atrophy their possibilities, transforming the human condition into necessity. As an example, the cultural actions on cultural industry are more and more marked with economical meanings in order to efface the subject’s creativity actions and make to appear in a context of domination many concepts like freedom, democracy, equality and individuality. The options to understand them already had established in this context and the free choose is only free submission.

Adorno had named pseudo-culture (halbbildung) a formative process to mediate a dominant form of awareness or a specific kind of negative-objective spirit (culture) in which all things are trapped on this socialization, transforming a social and historical process into a natural process. Moreover, the pseudo-culture is not only an internalization of a social logic but it is a historical process because the forms of domination are not restricted to the capitalist society.

On the contrary, the forms of domination are still a problem of human in its history and they are imposed with their rules in each moment of the history. Hence, the logic of domination is aggressive and it does not save the human nature because the adjustment of the human being reproducing the self-preservation of domination was established since the starting of human history.

The evaluation of the reason like it has ascribed on this text has been useful in attempt to show the death of the modern project that had put all its confidence on the reason to reach the social emancipation. Foucault [7] affirmed that this relationship between rationality and the excess of politic power is obvious, and it should not allow happening something like concentration camps or the excess of disciplinary power of bureaucracy to note it.

Foucault said the problem is what we have to do before the obvious because we should not judge the reason or affirm it as a contrary entity before the not-reason like if we could represent the arbitrary role of what is rational or not rational. Foucault still affirms that the importance of the members of the Frankfurt school was to study this kind of rationality that is a specific feature of the modern culture.

However, the Foucault’s proposal is not setting in debate the Frankfurtian studies or yet studying the rationality as a totally process that make part of the society and culture. He had suggested other form of investigation that will discuss the expression of the rationality and the power in many fields, pointing out their specific experiences of rationality like madness, illness, death, crime, sexuality etc.

Foucault intends to use the forms of resistance against the different forms of power in order to clarify the relations of power, find their positions, discovery its point of application and the methods that have used, and said: “Rather than analyzing power from the point of view of its internal rationality, it consists of analyzing power relations through the antagonism of strategies. For example, to find out what our society means by sanity, perhaps we should investigate what is happening in the field of insanity. And what we mean by legality in the field of illegality.” [8]

Hence, Foucault’s decision to study this forms of power relations came from the evaluation of the modern process to transform human beings in subjects. He refers to Modern State and its institutions as sophisticated structure to submit the subject under specific models of the power relations. The disciplinary role of institutions had put in practice the process to regular the subject’s body and one example was the use of exams in schools and the schooling process that had produced at the behalf of State a process to transform the human beings in obedient students.

Deleuze [9] has introduced through the concept the societies of control the other mode to exercise the power relations on contemporary ages. Different of the disciplinary societies, the institutions in the societies of control had become more flexibles the relationship among subjects, and the traditional schools with their strongly rules has been opened to the new relations and become more subtle the exercised of the power involving teachers and students, coordinator and teachers, principals and all professionals of school. Deleuze affirms the control of societies works with other kind of machines like the computers, for instance, that keeping the subjects submitted to the virtually environment where they will share their profiles and where they will decide what thinking, doing, buying, selling etc.

The difference is that human beings do not need more institutions to keep them in vigilance because they are transforming themselves in a frenetic answer before the demands of capitalist society, and it involves at same time a strongly adapting and an inexhaustible searching for change. Lipovetsky [10] has affirmed that is at the same society where is predominant the consumption, the same way of life, the economic globalization and the mass media; it is still where subjects demand for breaking the traditions and institutions, as well as where is rising a process of differentiation guided by a logical process of precipitation and innovation in which everything became obsolete before its consolidation. This form of sociability has been the base of the new individualism on a post-modern condition, demand a constant innovation and differentiation before the options.

The contribution above gave us argument to present the last loss during the modernity that is the loss of individuality when the project of a modern individual transforms itself in individualism, i.e. a kind of sociability that move subjects away from a project of future in attempt to live incessantly the present daily life.

4. A Philosophy of Education in the Plan of Immanence

The first task of the philosophy of education on contemporary ages is a critical thinking task because it must to evaluate the conditions of individualism that has submitted the subjects to the new demands of the cotemporaneous capitalism. In order to face it, this text aims to displace the education of the capitalist logical process on post-modern conditions, and in terms of Jeans Fransçois Lyotard [11], it needs to face an education that is legitimated through the performativity. Then, the philosophical task must face the objetivizing, needs to displace the performativity education and discuss educational problems in other plan of immanence, like on Deleuse and Guatarri’ senses and their critical appropriation of philosophy.

Gilles Deleuze and Guatarri [12] had named plan of immanence the ground where the knowledge will sprout from the historic time, emphasizing what Silvio Gallo’s highlighted in his text, i.e. that it could have multiple plans of immanence on Deleuze and Guatarri’s sense [13].

I should take in account that Deleuze and Gutarri did not think about philosophy of education, and I would not be the first to say that these authors do not take the Educational field as a domain of philosophical questions in the same way that they did, for instance, in the fields of literature or cinema. In this sense, it could be affirmed that a research on literature or cinema has more theoretical situations to appropriate their thinking than on education or philosophy of education.

However, there are some situations in which we can use Deleuze and Guatarri’s philosophy and one of them has been indicated by Gallo’s reading. Using the concept of “displacements”, He does not propose Deleuze and Guatarri’s truths about problems of education but how his thoughts could be fruitful in education.

Therefore, it is better suited to present the relationship between education and philosophy, as “events”, and Gallo will make me express it better, such as Cestari gave attention in other text [14]: “the philosophical act is necessarily alone, but it is a loneliness that will provide meetings of ideas, philosophical schools, philosophers, i.e., ‘events’ to share the means to construct concepts. In other words, the concepts have only been constructed during a loneliness of interiority; it cannot construct anything in empty. A construction depends on the events, events are robberies, and robbing are creativities. Hence, robbing is the construction of a new concept”.

The second task of philosophy of education is present tracks to face the predominant mode of sociability on contemporary capitalism. Such as it has pointed out, the capitalist culture socialize an ephemeral process that keep subject trapped in the societies of control. One way to face it is using the understanding of percept and affect as self-expressive movements of the sensible whose mode of existence is an epiphany of way of life. Deleuze and Guatarri [15] want to construct with these concepts a set of perceptions and sensations that go beyond what are feeling it. The experience with art will explain it better. For example, a writer’s description of a landscape will reach perceptions and sensations that will not get by a painter, like he ascribes the heat of the steppe, that is, a set of visual, auditory and taste sensations that will get independence of who has described it. They have a permanence (durations), because these sensations do not belong to anybody.

Deleuze and Guatarri have expressed these terms percept and affect because he wanted to differentiate them of affections and perceptions. We can feel or understanding something but it needs to became independent of us and acquire the durability to stay here and move sensations in others. These experiences are uncommon in nowadays because the relationship with the world and the other is made by the predominant-ephemeral sociability of the capitalist society. Then, a philosophy of education on the plan of immanence must create the possibility to make education working as a line of escape (ligne de fuite) [16] in the great water flow of the predominant perceptions and affections in the capitalist world.

Therefore, producing affects and percepts is on the same way of the Deleuze and Guatarri’s philosophy when they take into account the conception of image, i.e. the historical constituents’ form that blocks the thought and express the ephemeral. However, it still arguments in favor to a new way (“image”) of thinking, as a creation: the act to think is not a natural possibility but it is a creation. [16]

One example of it is the impressionists because they wrest the perceptions. Like a philosopher whose working is to break the head, affects and percepts are these ways of aesthetic experiences that must became the educational experience durable and contribute to face the ephemeral sociability in the capitalist society.

References

[1]   | Michel Foucault. The subject and the power. The critical inquiry, n. 8 (summer 1982) pp. 777-795.
[2]   | Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. The Philosophy of History. With Prefaces by Charles Hegel and the Translator, J. Sibree, M.A. Batoche Books Kitchener, Ontario Canada, 2001. http://www.efm.bris.ac.uk/het/hegel/history.pdf.Accessed 04/07/2017.
[3]   | Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. The Philosophy of History. With Prefaces by Charles Hegel and the Translator, J. Sibree, M.A. Batoche Books Kitchener, Ontario Canada, 2001, p. 29.
[4]   | Immanuel Kant. An answer to the question: What is Enligthenment? Transleted by James Schmidt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996, p. 58.
[5]   | Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of enlightenment: philosophical fragments. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr; translated by Edmund Jephcott. Standford University press, 2002.
[6]   | Theodor W. Adorno. Theory of Pseudo-Culture (1959). Telos – The critical theory of the contemporary - March 20, 1993 vol. 1993 no. 95 15-38.
[7]   | Michel Foucault. The subject and the power. The critical inquiry, n. 8 (summer 1982) pp. 777-795.
[8]   | Michel Foucault. The subject and the power. The critical inquiry, n. 8 (summer 1982) p.780.
[9]   | Gilles Deleuze Postscript on the Societies of Control October, Vol. 59. (Winter, 1992), pp. 3-7.
[10]   | Gilles Lipovetsky. The empire of fashion: dressing modern democracy. Transleted by Catarine Porter forworded by Richard Sennet. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1994, pp. 276.
[11]   | Jean-François Lyotard. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Tanslation from the French by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi Foreword by Fredric Jameson. Theory and History of Literature, Volume 10 Manchester University Press, 1984.
[12]   | Deleuze, G.; Guattari, F. O que é a filosofia? Trad. Bento Prado Jr. e Alberto Alonso Muñoz. Rio de Janeiro: Editora 34, 1992.
[13]   | Gallo, S.. Deleuze & a Educação. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, 2003, p. 30.
[14]   | Cestari, L.A.S. (2016). Educate and Philosophize at Yearbooks of EPENN’S Working Group 17 (WG17). American Journal of Educational Research, 4(15), 1072-1077.
[15]   | Gallo, S.. Deleuze & a Educação. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, 2003, p. 30.
[16]   | Deleuze, G. Vocabulaire de Deleuze. (réalisé par Raphaël Bessis), 2003. Avaialble: http://vadeker.net/humanite/philosophie/vocabulaire_deleuze.pdf Accessed 04/07/2017.