Reflections of Nonviolence Pedagogy With Laozi and Deleuze in an Era of Pandemic

• In Event: Peaceful Solutions to Challenges of Pandemic: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives From the East to the West

Abstract

Two authors in this symposium presentation explore the challenges of non-violence as an educational subject. Conceptually framed by nonduality, this cross-cultural conversation between Laozian and Deleuzian viewpoints articulates reforming non-violence into non-violencing within the educational discourse. We connect this theoretical concept to the current global crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic. Non-violencing is a shift that opens up space to theorize non-violence as open-ended, uncertain and dynamic. The first presenter utilizes Laozi’s Taoism to examine yin–yang cosmology to illustrate the continuum of violence/non-violence. Proceeding from the notion of non-action (wuwei), he argues that non-violence is not the opposite of violence, but it is a form of active action by not doing. Non-violencing is becoming in the same way that water is spontaneous and unpredictable. This is a process-oriented understanding of non-violence rather than outcome-oriented judgment of what violence or non-violence is. Sociopolitical and cultural approaches to non-violencing leave a space for pondering such contextual knowledge by avoiding this duality of “violence/non-violence.” The second presenter draws from Deleuze to connect non-violence to the concepts of haecceity, minoritarianism and multiplicities. Events assemble through “concrete individuations that have a status of their own and direct the metamorphosis of things and subjects” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 261). This is never deterministic, though. In regards to non-violencing, the concept is one element “in the assemblage of which they are a part, independent of the form of their concept and the subjectivity of their person” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 291). Non-violence is an indeterminate activity in an ongoing change in relations. It is an attempt to affect how “this” relates to “that” so that harm, immediate or future, is less possible and the event is known as non-violent. It helps to think in small terms, to take a “minor” approach, as Deleuze and Guattari (1986) have written. A signature component of a “minor” approach is that it is opposed to the transcendent, the universal, and the general; it is a way of philosophizing in the “cramped space” (p. 17) of life.
Together, both authors postulate that non-violence is not a thing. Instead, both authors consider it in its gerund form to be a particular kind of activity performed to prevent violence in whatever relational patterns it may take. This open-ended space created by non-violence facilitates imagining a fresh approach to human interactions. In promoting this cross-cultural conversation, the William Joiner Institute Teacher Initiative Project (TIP) is highlighted as an exemplary program emphasizing the uncertainty, incompleteness and paradox of the violence/non-violence duality and non-violencing pedagogy (http://joinerteacherinitiativeprogram.weebly.com). This cross-cultural, philosophical study will provide educators with salient epistemological and pedagogical frameworks with which to advance the field of non-violence education. We do not seek to unmoor non-violence from questions of morality, ethics, and justice. Instead, we attempt to open a new avenue for non-violence education by posing non-violencing as a concept. This introduces elements of indeterminacy and unexpectedness into the effort towards non-violence, which creates new grounds for examining our intention and learning about non-violent movements in the past.

Authors

• Seungho Moon, Loyola University Chicago

• Charles Tocci, Loyola University Chicago