Educational Philosophy and New French Thought

David R. Cole, Joff P.N. Bradley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351624596
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Contemporary French philosophy perhaps reached a high point during the 1970s with the likes of Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Since that time, thinkers such as Francois Laruelle, Bernard Stiegler, Quentin Meillassoux and Catherine Malabou have continued on in this strong tradition, while deepening and rethinking many of the parameters that have made contemporary French philosophy so powerful and useful for understanding the contemporary condition. For example, new French thought has reengaged with the relationships between thought, science and universal commercial interests, and has investigated purposefully the possibilities of post-capitalist theorising.

This book, while not exhaustive, takes the most pertinent aspects of new French thought, and applies them to the philosophy of education. In contemporary philosophies of education, the repetitions of evidence-based and neoliberal theories abound. This book serves as an antidote to the levelling off, and exhaustion in thought, that a capitalist takeover implies, while keeping sight of the crucial relationships between science, the arts and metaphysical speculation. Furthermore, this book represents a thoroughgoing thinking through of philosophy of education's relationships with neuroscience, new scientific paradigms, feminist materialisms, anti-correlationism, technology and the socius, and as such constitutes a new philosophy of education.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Educational Philosophy and Theory.

Educational non-philosophy

DAVID R. COLE

Centre for Educational Research, University of Western Sydney

Abstract

The final lines of Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy? call for a non-philosophy to balance and act as a counterweight to the task of philosophy that had been described by them in terms of concept creation. In a footnote, Deleuze and Guattari mention François Laruelle’s project of non-philosophy, but dispute its efficacy in terms of the designated relationship between non-philosophy and science, as had been realised by Laruelle at the time. However, the mature non-philosophy of Laruelle could indicate a resolution to the problematic relationship between science and educational philosophy that we have inherited due to the poststructural theories of Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze. Non-philosophy suggests a framework for thought that includes science in a non-positivist style and provides the means to view education as a performative practice. This article explores the non-philosophy of Laruelle in education as a means to view education under the conditions of strict immanence and in line with an anti-phenomenological metaphysics of non-representation. Laruelle is perhaps one of the most important critics of Deleuze in France, and as such, his insights into the Deleuzian oeuvre reveal a way forward for education as a practice that analyses science, philosophy and politics through non-philosophy.

Introduction

A useful place to start with respect to this exploration and creation of ‘educational non-philosophy’ is with the dictionary of non-philosophy, and in terms of a definition (of sorts) of non-philosophy:

Non-philosophy is initially a theory by or according to the One, therefore a unified theory of science and philosophy. It is over time a theoretical, practical and critical discourse, distinct from philosophy without being a meta-philosophy. It is specified according to the regional material inserted into the structure of the philosophical Decision (non-aesthetics, non-ethics, etc.). (Laruelle, 2009a, p. 45)

In the case of this article, the ‘regional material’ that will be inserted into the structure of the ‘philosophical Decision’ is educational. Yet one can immediately sense how Laruelle’s non-philosophy introduces an alien conceptual language into the frame, that from the outset derails an ordinary language explanation of the notion of non-philosophy, or at the very least makes reference to its tenets almost impossible without introducing further non-philosophical terms and ideas. In this brief definition, one can appreciate how non-philosophy aligns itself with science, yet how is this alignment achieved? Apparently through, ‘the One’: but what is the One in this context, furthermore, what is the philosophical Decision? And why is the philosophical Decision so important, given that we are working with non-philosophy? Perhaps these questions can be partially answered with reference to the type of Neoplatonism that non-philosophy looks to shadow and ultimately replace or supersede (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Neoplatonism vs. non-philosophy (Srneick, 2010)

The structure that represents non-philosophy in the diagram above (Figure 1), by Srneick’s (2010), has been heavily influenced by Brassier (2007), shows how non-philosophy depends on a fundamental dualism between ‘Man’ and ‘the One’.¹ This dualism is opened up and serviced through the practice of non-philosophy that is in fact a dualysis (see, Laruelle, 2009b) that deals with the duality of ‘Man’ and the ‘One’ as a procedure. The philosophical Decision leads from the real and immanent cause or the determination-in-the-last-instance to philosophy itself. Non-philosophy clones this process in a reversible pathway from philosophy to ‘the force-of-thought’. In contrast to the ‘paths to knowledge’ that one finds in Plotinus, the practice of non-philosophy opens up a transcendental identity by exceeding philosophy and engendering ‘the force of thought’ (Srneick, 2010). In other words, non-philosophy is not philosophy by another name that seeks to represent connections between knowledge, thought, reality and the self. Rather, non-philosophy determines rupture points and thinks through the problems that philosophy leaves behind in the dualism between Being and thought. Laruelle takes an important step away from the 1970s French philosophers such as Foucault, Derrida or Deleuze in that he does not reconcile the Heideggarian project of discovering the lost Being (of the Greeks) via the investigation of Western metaphysics, either by working through the examination of power, subjectivity and discourse (Foucault), the deconstruction of logos (Derrida), or by the construction of a plane of immanence (Deleuze) and its application in, for example, the understanding of schizophrenia and capitalism. Rather, non-philosophy attends to a state prior to and adjacent to philosophy, that is closer to and in line with science (or science-thought) and achieved through cloning and effectuation. This is where knowledge lies for Laruelle; it is parallel to the Real, but in a wholly different dimension that is excavated primarily through the act of non-philosophy that tends towards ‘Man’ and ‘the One’. The work of educational non-philosophy therefore may be located in this realm according to the schema from Laruelle; i.e. in thinking through to a point where one reaches the Real or ‘radical immanence’, and that which is, in the case of this article, wholly ‘non-educational’. Non-philosophy axiomatically deploys immanence as being endlessly conceptualisable by the subject of non-philosophy. This is what Laruelle means by radical immanence. The task of the subject of non-philosophy is to apply its methods to the decisional resistance to radical immanence which is found in philosophy. This thinking could activate a new ‘education-thought’ that is beyond scientism in education, and closely aligned to how we learn. However, before we come to this point, it is worth exploring non-philosophy and educational non-philosophy from the perspective of a ‘philosophy of difference’ and in understanding Laruelle’s immanence and the Real further.

A Philosophy of (non)-Difference?

In his 1986 piece, Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-philosophy, Laruelle (2010) begun leaving behind the philosophies of difference that had dominated the 1960s and 1970s in France. Laruelle examines difference from a number of perspectives in this enquiry that lead back to the ways in which continental philosophy has dealt with the key term of ‘difference’. For example, Hegel read difference in and through the Aufhebung, which is a form of dialectical self-overcoming determined and unfolded by ‘spirit’, and which leads to the negation of nature and the rise of civil society and ultimately, ‘the state’ (Hegel, 1977). In contrast, Heidegger posited an pre-ontological difference or Being that he called ‘Dasein’ (Heidegger, 1996), and which is locatable in Greek philosophy, in, for example, the oeuvre of Aristole, and which has been progressively diminished and evacuated through the practice of Western metaphysics. Nietzsche, in many ways parallel to Heidegger, looked to the Greeks and noticed their ‘over-life’ and wondered what had happened in terms of the contemporary situation, and where that over-life had disappeared to (Nietzsche, 1956). However, instead of looking for an explanation in pre-ontological Greek thought itself, Nietzsche explained ‘the difference’ that he perceived in terms of the will to power and the differentials between power relations, instinct and the drives. According to Nietzsche, the Greeks could celebrate life to a far greater extent than contemporary man by being closer to their drives, whereas modern man is shackled by Christian morality, living in and as part of the herd, and through the creation of a new reality that has given rise to the progressive lies of a ubiquitous slave morality (Nietzsche, 1956). In contrast, Derrida constructed a concept of difference that he termed, ‘différance’ and that he employed to deconstruct the power relations through time that have been left to us in and by Western civilisation (Derrida, 1982). Derrida wanted to understand the Western ‘logos’, or how reason has become manifest through words and in texts as an invisible force. Therefore, Derrida analysed between texts, looking for the generalisations and ways in which the logos of the West has become a predominant and discriminatory power construct. Deleuze operated in a similar manner to Derrida, but rather than deconstructing the prejudices and clichés of logos, Deleuze examined the difference that has been quashed or denied through the transmission of philosophical thought (Deleuze, 1994). Echoing, but distinct from Derrida, Deleuze invented a new concept of difference, that he termed as the ‘differenciator’ and that he used to investigate the ‘difference of difference’. However, in opposition to Derrida, Deleuze did not homogenise Western society, or look for singular ways that Western power has worked through logos or in words. Rather, Deleuze sets his ‘differenciator’ to function through studying other philosophers by novel means, by systematically examining capitalism and schizophrenia, and through studies on literature, cinema and art.

Laruelle (2010) does not dismiss this important work into and about difference in the continental tradition, but critiques it, and reinvents difference in terms of the philosophical Decision and consequent mixtures. For Laruelle, the fundamental problem that the philosophies of difference demonstrate is that they are still doing philosophy. Rather than flattening hierarchies and creating a space for the truly novel to emerge in thought, Laruelle (2010) perceived the ‘philosophies of difference’ as exemplified above as extenuating the discipline of philosophy and as turning difference into something which it is not; i.e. a part of philosophical systems and approaches that subsume difference from their own philosophical perspectives. This is why one should dispense with the philosophical notion of difference in the continental tradition according to Laruelle and integrate the ‘philosophies of difference’ into an expanded but more focused notion, that he terms as the philosophical Decision (with a capital D) and that comes closer to dualysis (see Figure 1) and understands difference in terms of mixtures. It is with this move that Laruelle can start to sketch his non-philosophy in relation to a transcendental position that can think ‘the Real’. Laruelle’s non-philosophy owes much to the heritage of the ‘philosophies of difference’, and one could add lies in their trajectory, yet Laruelle attempts to go beyond them, to discover a logic of its own that revolves around the formation of a philosophical Decision as a means to circumvent the possibly stultifying and suffocating effects of philosophy on anything novel or new. However, at this point, one could argue that Laruelle (2010) is proposing a form of ‘thought-empiricism’ or even a type of transcendental empiricism à la Deleuze (1994).

In many ways, Laruelle’s position of the philosophical Decision is parallel to Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism in Difference & Repetition, with of course the proviso that one accepts the procedure of dualysis. Deleuze’s monism integrates the One and Man into the ‘crowned anarchy’ or chaos of the natural world through singularities and doesn’t artificially separate Man from nature. Laruelle is not proposing to take philosophy back to the Enlightenment and re-establish a grounds for the domination of nature through logic, reason and industry, or a slippage into the romanticism of an othered nature with all (her) imperial majesty (see, Harrison, 2006). Rather, Laruelle’s move to undercut the philosophies of difference through the philosophical Decision is a means to come closer to the thinking through of the Real. The problem of Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism according to Laruelle is that Deleuze is still ‘doing philosophy’, and therefore produces an idealisation of empirical multiplicities via philosophical thought, and the reappearance of multiplicities throughout Deleuze’s oeuvre, for example, as ‘desiring-machines’ or ‘rhizomes’ demonstrates this form of idealisation. In contrast, Laruelle’s non-philosophy proposes to unify science with philosophy through dualysis, and not as just another ‘philosophy of difference’. If one accepts the dualysis in Laruelle’s non-philosophy, and that the unification of philosophy and science is possible, there could be a significant way forward for educational research and philosophy that is currently divided between quantitative and qualitative methods (see, Johnson, Onwuegbuzie, & Turner, 2007). Quantitative methods imply a positivist, empirical approach to data, whereas qualitative methods have used ‘the philosophies of difference’ to interrogate the data fields that are uncovered through research (see, Wolcott, 1994). Non-philosophy offers the tantalising possibility for educational philosophy and research of a unified conceptual and theoretical field that could integrate quantitative and qualitative methods, not merely as mixed-methods, but as theory, concept, methodology and science. However, before we can move to explicate such a possibility, we need to understand how non-philosophy figures the Real and immanence.

Immanence: The Real

Central to the claims of non-philosophy is its positioning as a means to reach ‘the Real’ through immanence. In contrast to, for example, the immanent materialism of Deleuze and Guattari (1988) in 1000 Plateaus, wherein the Real is constructed through temporal ‘plateaus’ that define ‘planes of immanence’ that show how historical, political and intellectual influences and intensities have intermingled and produced affects; the job of non-philosophy is to catapult us to the Real immediately, or as directly as possible without convolution. Radical immanence is in the hands of Laruelle a powerful method of active scepticism with respect to any philosophising about the real (see, Laruelle, 2013) or what constitutes ‘the Real’. The project of non-philosophy therefore turns on its ability to ‘see-through’ other philosophical modes of thought that contain a material thesis about the real, even if it is an assumed or unstated position. In sum, these philosophies can blind us to what is real by constructing a Real out of their idealisms about material reality that they wish to carry forward in situational analysis according to Laruelle. High amongst the list of positions that Laruelle shoots down are the left-leaning materialisms that one may derive from 1970s French thought, and these include the work of Deleuze, Foucault and Derrida as has been mentioned above. In an early political piece that dates from 1981, Laruelle has stated that:

When, in its better moments, materialism abandoned its empiricist concept of matter, on the whole it never proved able to go beyond the hyle, the identity of thought and the real, of ideality and matter -the level of relative materiality or of materiality ‘as such’ [comme telle] rather than of matter ‘itself’ [telle quelle] or absolute matter. (Laruelle, 1981, p. 78)

This crucial distinction that Laruelle is making between materiality ‘as such’ and matter ‘itself’ leads us to the conception of the Real that Laruelle wants to be introduced into the analysis of reality. The Real is fundamentally linked to immanence through non-philosophy (Schmid, 2012, p. 128) according to Laruelle. Immanence is used by Laruelle to think materiality beyond the ‘as such’ positions that he derides in materialism. If one refers back to (Figure 1), and Srneick’s (2010) representation of non-philosophy, the Real is presented by radical immanence as a means to push through to ‘the One’. The duality and consequent dualysis that Laruelle’s non-philosophy reintroduces into thought between ‘the One’ and ‘Man’ according to this interpretation was scrupulously theorised against in 1970s French thought by Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze, in an attempt to circumvent dualism and the separation of various irrevocable realms, such as ‘man’ and ‘nature’ or ‘mind’ and ‘body’. Laruelle (2013) suggests that we require these separate realms to think and that the ‘dualysis’ of reality is an inevitable result of the structuration of science; i.e. objectivity. The Real for Laruelle is therefore an all-encompassing concept, which is tied to immanence and not to transcendence, which is reached through the force-of-thought to ‘Man’ in Figure 1. Accordingly, ‘the Real’ according to Laruelle is conceptually at odds with the usage that one finds in Lacan (see, for example, Žižek, 1991), or as a part of the psychoanalytic triad of concepts that make up the self: i.e. ‘the Real’, ‘Language’ and ‘the Ego’. This is because Laruelle (2013) escapes the symbolic order and anti-philosophy of Lacan by thinking through immanence ‘to the last degree’. Lacan’s psychoanalysis does not do the work of non-philosophy because ‘the Real’ is still trapped according to Laruelle in the structures of formal thought and not subject to the radical immanence that could possibly unify philosophy with science. These ideas about the Real and immanence in non-philosoph...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Educational Philosophy and ‘New French Thought’
• 1 Educational non-philosophy
• 2 Stiegler Contra Robinson: On the hyper-solicitation of youth
• 3 Educational Plasticity: Catherine Malabou and ‘the feeling of a new responsibility’
• 4 Michel Serres’ Le Parasite and Martin Buber’s I and Thou: Noise in Informal Education Affecting Dialogue Between Communities in Conflict in the Middle East
• 5 Reading Kristeva through the Lens of Edusemiotics: Implications for education
• 6 Thinking Meillassoux’s Factiality: A pedagogical movement against ossification of bodymind
• 7 Plasticity: A new materialist approach to policy and methodology
• 8 Bernard Stiegler’s Philosophy of Technology: Invention, decision, and education in times of digitization
• Index