Immanent Ethics and Transgressive Phantasmagoria as Models for Socially Just Pedagogies

• In Event: Posthuman and Care Ethics for Re-Imagining Higher Education Pedagogies

Abstract

Purpose
In this theoretical paper I will argue for an ethics of immanence based on an exploration of uncanny convergences and the diffraction of binary oppositions. Such an ethics, I contend, would avoid the many pitfalls of ethical models that are focused on idealised configurations of substance and being. Dualistic and dichotomous distinctions that rely on an either/or model are not only false, but often result, as Elizabeth Grosz (2017:131) writes, “in terms on one side of the divide being used as a regulative ideal for the others (as, infamously, man has served for woman, child, animal and even God)”. Too often, these binarizations are perpetuated unquestioned in social and pedagogical systems.


Theoretical framework
Feminist new materialist thinkers such as Grosz and Rosi Braidotti, building on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, insist on an immanent ethics of joy that confounds mutually exclusive/exhaustive binarizations (such as mind/body, reason/passion, material/ideal, black/white and male/female). Such an ethics, they insist, is uncanny. “Reconfigured outside of and beyond theories of good, moral laws or ethical obligations,” it refuses the normative and familiar, resisting being conflated with standards and “universal principles of thought and action” (Grosz 2017:132). Immanent thinkers and pedagogues work with a diffractive either/or outlook that considers cognitive and pre-cognitive, material and immaterial processes.

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry:
This paper will argue for the relevance of Deleuzoguattarian and feminist new materialist philosophies to the task of reconceptualizing socially-just pedagogy. The pedagogical value of speculative science and sonic fiction (sf) as a way of exploring and understanding an immanent ethics of becoming will also be considered.

Data sources
Deleuze and Guattari (1988:248) emphasize the pedagogical value of sf as a literature of “experimental becomings.” In the examples of feminist, queer and afrofuturist sf I will consider, multiple variables of difference or of devalued otherness become situated “as positive sites for the redefinition of subjectivity, placing “minority subjects of subjugated knowledges, such as feminist, black, postcolonial, queer and [various] others in privileged positions as readers” (Braidotti 1997:68).

Results and/or substantiated conclusions
The “transgressive phantasmagoria” of Deleuzoguattarian and feminist new materialist praxes and, indeed of sf, succeed in reconfiguring “the image of thought through a series of rigorous interventions” specifically, via representations of immanent processes of becoming and affect (1997: 68). An ethics of immanence reconceptualises subjectivity as dynamic and relational; as a “meshwork” or complex material “entanglement of paths, processes and lines of habituation” between humans and non-human things in constant movement (Ingold 2011: 69-70).

Significance
I will argue that Deleuzoguattarian as well as feminist new materialist perspectives are of great value to pedagogical systems orientated toward social-justice. This paper will demonstrate that a pedagogy attuned to such an ethical system is one that teaches difference and a conception of lived orientations without resorting to hierarchies and binarisms, fostering subjectivities that do not require the marginalization of others with respect to majoritarian norms.

Author

• Delphi Carstens