Rorty’s Redescription and the Pedagogical Context: enunciation possibilities

Abstract:

The text analyzes relations of Rorty’s redescription - neo-pragmatic, analytical philosophical perspective - and approaches on education, with specific objectives: to reflect on epistemology, particularly the abandonment of the notion of knowledge as representation; to meditate on redescription as a metapractice inherent to the contexts of basic and college education, inspiring more libertarian, ethical, creative and political pedagogical routines; to present the redescription named Negociações Cronocapilares, of 2019, produced in the Mid-West, an artistic installation that should circulate among state schools. The redescription, methodology of the essay, proposes a teaching challenge, by questioning, from the foundations of knowing, even educational practices.

Keywords:
Redescription; Epistemology; Didactics; Artistic Intervention

Resumo:

O texto analisa relações da redescrição de Rorty - perspectiva filosófica analítica, neopragmática - e abordagens sobre educação, tendo como objetivos específicos: refletir sobre epistemologia, em especial o abandono da noção de conhecimento como representação; meditar sobre a redescrição como metaprática inerente aos contextos da educação básica e superior, inspirando rotinas pedagógicas mais libertárias, éticas, criativas e políticas; apresentar a redescrição intitulada Negociações Cronocapilares, de 2019, produzida no Centro Oeste, instalação artística que deverá circular por escolas estaduais. A redescrição, metodologia do ensaio, propõe um desafio docente, ao questionar, desde os fundamentos do conhecer, até mesmo práticas educativas.

Palavras-chave:
Redescrição; Epistemologia; Didática; Instalação Artística

Introduction

This essay analyses the relations of Richard Rorty’s (1994) redescription - neo-pragmatic, analytical philosophical perspective - and approaches on education. We recognize the quite pretentious nature of the effort for such few pages, since the object of pedagogical science itself already holds a multifaceted scenario. What can be said if we relate it to a philosophical system? Not by chance, Libâneo (2012) advocates the solidarity among different areas of knowledge - pedagogy, psychology, sociology, etc. - for a more concise reflection on education. This said, the general objective consists on analyzing, using the essay format, the following context: the possible nexuses between Rorty’s contributions and educational matters. For this purpose, we had to make choices inherent to the specific objectives, in order to engender a path which will first try to analyze epistemology questions among other philosophical aspects; about that, we will highlight the analytical perspective of Rorty’s thoughts which, except for better understanding, does not coincide with the realism that strongly marked the classic pragmatism. The Rortyan writing sought to free itself from the traps of knowledge founded on representation - eroded, rarefied mirror, seated on the alleged grounds of logocentric scientificity, according to the author (Rorty, 1994). Then we will reflect on education as an academic background marked by the individualization/socialization dyad in Rortyan terms: redescription as meta-practice, a narrative made possible particularly by metaphor, among other linguistic expedients which point out to new possibilities of experiences with knowledge.

The school context - elementary and university education - can be guided by redescriptive assumptions in order to inspire more libertarian, ethical, creative and especially political pedagogical routines as they turn to the social dimension. The third specific goal consists in presenting an artistic production that exemplifies redescription in unconventional ways, an intervention called Negociações Cronocapilares, of 2019, that we produced in a public university of the Mid-West region. The installation shall circulate through various state schools, interactively, so that students can manipulate its pieces. Therefore, the text will take a conic path: broader approaches of philosophy (with emphasis on epistemology) that taper into didactics, under the ethical and social bias, and flow into a singular exercise of art education; a path organized by the concept of redescription.

There is an effort, in various sectors of the academic production regarding education, to break up with the impersonal asepsis of liturgies that collect data, especially those that hold universal certificates of scientificity. We see expressions of this venture in the shortcuts open by narrative research (Josso, 2004; Nóvoa, 1992, Ferrarotti, 1988), in autoethnography (Santos, Biancalana, 2017; Versiani, 2005), among other examples of methodological places of speech, in which we notice the libertarian aspiration, the thirst for a more authorial writing. In this sense, redescription, which methodologically characterizes our work, figures as a possibility of narrative research.

In this cold morning of July 2019, though feeling a little distressed, we seek to open a trail marked by the effort not to surrender to the comfortable pulpits of modern epistemology, with its crystal cathedrals, where the objects of education - our Sphinx of Giza - would shine polished by categories of analysis, quali-quantitative treatments of unshakable conciseness. In our ears, right at this moment, a lugubrious, cavernous and metalinguistic voice whispers: What you are doing is a chronicle, it has no academic value! So go and write poetry!

Although we may succumb once more to the ordinances of the scientific-philosophical speech, mirror of nature, as stated Rorty (1994), quite frankly we no longer nurture interest in rescuing enshrined systems that serve as a foundation for knowledge, such as the ballast in gold that national economies should have for their currencies. We actually abdicate finding these chests. We know that upon us lies the danger of the exclusionary mechanisms of speech, as listed by Foucault (1999, pages 9-11): interdiction, separation and delegitimation as true... which, let us admit, in practice could mean refusal from research development agencies, disapproval from committees that analyze projects, rejection from referees in journals, prominence to those who profess an epistemic belief little accustomed to negotiations. From now on, the writing may reveal enunciative particularities, decrepitude, grumbling, conceptual limping, once easily obscured by the impersonal mantle of scientific rationality Qualis A - L4, with its obsessively self-commendable, apodictic and Olympic propositions.

In these records, the technical-productivist discursivity, as presented in the current paths of neopositivist modernity, assumes the enunciation, and the researcher, though oriented to educational themes, is responsible for replaying the already-told or illuminating the not-told, always appealing to the authorial pleiad that, in choir, authorizes, legitimizes and perpetuates possible advances of the research. Convinced consciences has the impression of having discovered how one learns, having found the music box of the eviscerated doll; in other words, the fundamentals of knowing, which can dress as law, religion, philosophy, economics, natural sciences, among so many discursive institutions that, besides other things, point out to processes of representation (Rorty, 1994).

For Rorty, as totems of what would the guardians of the little boxes be like - knowledge theories - we would have Locke (mental processes), Descartes (subjective primacy of spirit) in the seventeenth century and Kant, in the eighteenth century (with his court of pure reason); here we have an association of Lockean and Cartesian assumptions, in a neo-Copernican search for clear, distinct, imperatively categorical truths. Not by chance, we would have a canonization (i.e. the ambiguity: standard and holiness) of the Kantian epistemology, especially by what it summarizes regarding the efforts of modernity to legitimize the bases of reasonable speech, which leads us to the debate between empiricism and idealism, appearance and essence, among other emblematic questions in the history of philosophy.

We join all those of Nietzschean inspiration which, in some way, have tried to break up with the reign of epistemology, seeking a fallible, possible, perhaps heretical/erotic enunciation, abdicating any suzerainty of truth. What we are trying to do here becomes a necessary practice of despondency, because we no longer have the goal of searching “[...]the area of culture where one touched the bottom, where one could find the vocabulary and the convictions which permitted one to explain and justify one’s activity as intellectual, and thus to discover the significance of one’s life” (Rorty, 1994, p. 20, italics added by the author). The bottom has collapsed. All we have left is the contingency of telling what we go through, with no other pretensions than grabbing to a discursive fabric which is orphan of what, according to the neo-pragmatist, in the twentieth century, would still be guaranteed by Russel and Husserl: the scientificity of philosophy, the founding core of knowledge. Rorty pointed out three names that undertook a challenge somewhat quixotic, not exactly iconoclastic, for they have ultimately proposed, each one in his own way, new systems to contextualize thought, marked particularly by the deposition of the Cartesio-Kantian epistemology as foundational. They are Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Dewey. Thus we find ourselves forced to imagine how to go on producing writing about educational themes without the transcendent blessings of the Mandarin of Königsberg (borrowing from Nietzsche). In that old well we have learned that every object would only exist if located in time and space - a priori intuitions, logical forms structured by the mind. Would it be possible to imagine a sausage can outside all that, not counting on the furniture of understanding anymore? In this brief example, we have the perception that a Titan as Kant impacted the western culture in such a way that it becomes almost schizophrenic to think of knowledge production and, why not, subjectivity, without a foundation, a grade beam footing well-buried in the floor of our epistemic awareness.

In Dewey (1959), despite its recurring opposition to Cartesianism and transcendentalism, we also find a nature of input into the structure of the reflexive thinking, as the classic pragmatist had conceived. Scientific intelligence, according to Dewey, should sort inference (nucleated by symbol). In this gnoseological record there is a repulse of the philosophical tradition that despised experience, precisely because it had sacralized apodictic altars, with privileged representations about things, in order to fix them, universalizing their identities. Acting Deweyanly implies launching ourselves into the problems of the lived experience in a contingent way, given that human experience occurs in a physical-cultural environment, mediated by language; the last underlies the logic that engenders the reflexive thinking. Here is the relationship between symbol and reflexive thinking. We do not see in this a founding ballast of knowledge, as it figures, for example, in the legacy of Descartes (1979), but the belief in the paths of experience, herein understood as something that passes by us and is also transformed by our action (mediated by language), object of pragmatist philosophy, unlike the idealist or empiricist postulates. We notice, however, the new context to substantiate thought, as stated by Rorty. There is still a search for legitimacy, especially by the attempt to retain “a certain conception of philosophy after the notions needed to flesh out that conception (the eighteenth-century notions of knowledge and mind) had been discarded” (Rorty, 1994, p. 21). However, we must ponder that Dewey, with his gnoseology, has undertaken the exercise of questioning, examining and even rejecting all scientific and artistic enunciation, or of any nature that does not express the movement of experience itself. According to Rorty, Dewey, along with Wittgenstein and Heidegger, would have advocated the abandonment of the notion of knowledge as a representation of the world, enhanced by cognitive processes, in the light of a dazzling theory of representation.

With respect to Wittgenstein, the rejection of traditional epistemic postulates advances in the sense that, for this author, what we have in everyday life are language games; the relationship between a statement that seeks assertiveness and what it effectively means would relate to its connection to the whole discourse and no longer between a subjectivity and the objects that surround it. In order to know what we are looking for, we must seek the nexuses of what we see with the symbolic system, a broader, correlational and non-material context. Also regarding the binomial mind/body, when we scream a dirty word after stepping on a nail, what we have would not be an ontological experience with pain, but the use of a system related to how we talk about pain. According to Rorty (1994), Wittgenstein (2009) proposes a kind of epistemological behaviorism, as he rejects idealistic gnoseological inputs, arguing that what there is to be understood reveals itself in the perception of how we behave, interact, elaborate the rules and movements of the communicative game. It is a holistic perspective that aligns to the Rortyan conceptions regarding the examination of the foundations of knowledge, especially by the emphasis given to the analysis of the language.

For Heidegger (2003; 2015), the paths of epistemology, broadly speaking, would have foundations in an objectivity that consolidates itself with the presence of the object in front of the observer (how can we deny the vision of a cockroach licking our steak dinner?). The primarity of this relationship, including sensory, would substantiate the belief that other connections with things would occur in the same condition of certainty or reasonability. The epistemological eagerness would be similar to that we experience when we believe in the reality of the insolent cockroach, and it would guide other stages, as geometry proving the theorem, among various almost-visual routines in depuration, in order to build representation assemblies that would become compulsively self-commendable. According to Rorty (1994), Heidegger would have also perceived that the epistemic inclination was a product of the dialectic march started with Plato, heuristic that can expand armies of metaphors which could grant us access to the reality furniture. When the eminent philosopher proposes a phenomenology that interrogates the entity, examining “the fundamental structures of being that belong to the presence as an understanding of being” (Heidegger, 2015, p. 78), to a large extent, he buried the rails of metaphysics, formulating a hermeneutic that is oriented to the existentiality of existence, which implies the abandonment of the Kantian schematisms, the Cartesian cogito and the Aristotelian ontology.

Reflecting on the theoretical perspectives enunciated so far, we reaffirm with Rorty the lack of meaning in the secular search for guarantees for the foundations of knowledge. We see the abandonment of these old horizons as of utmost importance for the educational context, for various reasons, among which we highlight: the dismantling of power relations maintained by instituted knowledges, the breaking of chains that prevent the creation and free movement of thought, the student/teacher appropriation of narratives of their own existence.

Was Rorty a pragmatist? Redescription as an aesthetic exercise

We have reasons to state that the neo-pragmatist strikingly strays from the assumptions of the philosophy of Peirce (2005), the founder of pragmatism, Dewey’s teacher, in the discipline of logic. The Peircean writing, when describing the most complex and concise semiotic system already seen, had clear pretensions concerning the pursuit of truth - an argument symbolic legisign⁴. The three goods - aesthetic (expressiveness), ethical (truthfulness) and logical (truth) (Peirce, 2005, C.P., 2.539⁵) - sew a phenomenological epistemic architecture greatly different from the European conceptions; for this reason we do not see an aprioristic subject that imposes molds to things in order to understand them. In this sense, we join the chorus of those who question Rorty’s affiliation to the original pragmatism, since the author’s management of philosophical questions moves to language (understood in the Rortyan conception as captained by linguistic signs) what for the founders was of crucial importance and guided them: the experience. All things considered, we can point out in Rorty what was happening in Europe in the mid-twentieth century, with the pragmatic turn of language, having Bakhtin (1997) and Habermas (1986a; 1986b) as helmsmen (each one in its own way).

In addition to this aspect which we consider of extreme relevance, we have another one at the same level: the fact that classical pragmatism constitutes a realistic philosophical system, while the Rortyan perspective about the lived experience reveals itself as anti-realistic. According to Pogrebinschi (2006), assuming the analytical perspective, Rorty destined to language the place occupied by experience in the original pragmatism, a characteristic that the moves him away from this philosophy. It is important to keep in mind that it differs from the traditional realism, especially concerning truth (for example in Scholasticism), in which there was the pretension of having a concept in itself, aprioristic and unchangeable, what that does not imply stating that pragmatism was anti-realistic, as Rorty proposed (Pogrebinschi, 2006). Here we emphasize a significant difference between what the founders believed to be communication, with highlight to Peirce and his logical/semiotic system, and language to Rorty. The first, along with James and Dewey, understood the communicative phenomenon as the realistic process in which things acquire meaning, aiming the aproximation of a temporary, fallible, testable and prospective truth, i.e., targeting future evolutive consequences. In this heuristic there would be a march that always counted on the investigative community, perpetuating the movement of inquiring about the world and the lived experience. In James, we add to all this the adaptation towards the creation of new realities. In Dewey and his conception of reasoned thought⁶, we have a reflective unit when we transit from a pre-reflective situation to the verification of the hypothesis. Thus, common to the authors who founded pragmatism, we reaffirm that there is a philosophy of experience, which therefore bets on it, mediated by language, with which we access realities. We see that, according to Pogrebinschi (2006), in Rorty communication is no more a means for us to walk inside the inquiry, as postulated by Peirce, James and Dewey, but a purpose. The linguistic turn attributes to language an ultimate purpose (forgive us the pleonasm).

Assuming a more narrative writing, Rorty aims what may come before words, deaf contexts in which the philosophical problems would have been formulated. Toledo Jr. (2007) states that Rorty’s analytics reveals the effort to abandon an understanding of the philosophical activity as a scientific routine, an inheritance of modernity, to treat that exercise as one cultural genre among many others. The neo-pragmatic himself attributed the respect modern philosophy had in the secularization of culture to the success of natural sciences (Rorty, 1994). However he points out that other figures, like poets and novelists, assumed positions that used to belong to preachers and philosophers. The more their former statutes of authority and rigor emphasized these characteristics, the more absurd they became regarding their intentions in the contemporary world. The Rortyan writing therefore assumes a figurative and even literary character, abandoning universalist precepts, electing metaphors to cut out pseudo-problems of traditional philosophy, such as truth, good, beauty and knowledge. Rorty joins the chroniclers, workers of writing, pointing spears against religion, science and other institutions, seeking possible connections between them, as a cultural articulator, mediating debates about representations, social values, abandoning the old essentialist searches, in order to become a practitioner of cultural policy (Toledo Jr., 2007). With respect to epistemology, the most overwhelming strike concerns, except for a mistake, the abandonment of the notion of knowledge as representation. For the author, we would be free of basic binomials such as subject-object, appearance-reality, among others. If we proceed like this, seeking exercises of language (here we use the word “linguageiro” in Portuguese, referring to language as a social practice, aligning it to a minor, less pretentious philosophy, as wanted not only by Rorty, but also by an entire post-modern tradition with which he is curiously aligned), in semiological, ironist games, we can move towards a non-representational perspective, as far as possible. Abandoning the Kantian transcendental canons, we would find some exits, for example, in a historicism with Hegelian inspiration (Toledo Jr, 2007). Let us seek exits then... in free conversation, breaking intersubjective simulacra, once, from now on, the way we speak is more important than keeping axioms. Let us reap together a hermeneutics, a poetics which connects us, by an “immeasurable vocabulary” (Rorty, 1994, p. 354), to new horizons that build and rebuild us. Instead of seeking the systematic statement, with pretensions of eternity, let us aim new records, with perishable questions, populated with edifying uncertainties, satires, aphorisms without other pretensions but the expression of the genuine exercise of speech; then we can rewrite our routines in the world of education.

Redescription and school context

We have the impression to launch slogans here, as in a redescriptive manifesto for the lived experience, although there is something corrosive and clownish in this exhortation. Forgive us, reader, we know how it may sound naive to bet all our remaining chips in the negotiation of speakers, in redescriptions, kaleidoscopes of everyday life. It is because we have students to educate. In 2018, they were 48.4 million in basic education (Basil, 2019). And they come full of news!... the dog that was born, the tooth that fell, the blond girl in the bathroom that was seen once more (and really had cotton in her nose). We believe that this might be of more interest to them than the Tropic of Capricorn or Bhaskara’s Formula... either way, it seems to us that this is what we have to deal with... discursive pragmatics... we put the chips on the table; from now on, let relations be as horizontal as possible.

Here we present the attitude of redescription: it implies the renunciation of the previous criteria that used to sustain language, assuming the search for alternative ways to speak, the possibility of new narratives, resulting from the encounter of cultures and people, in a solidary dynamics that extends collective and individual horizons by imagination. Beyond the implications of what we have listed, redescription is constituted as a political attitude, especially for the possibility of engendering discursive institutions that protect the most fragile ones from the villainy of the privileged ones, as devoutly professed the neo-pragmatic (Rorty, 1994).

It is important to emphasize that the author has insisted on the thesis that the school context fulfills a central role in the process by which the individual recreates himself. Regarding schooling, Rorty stated that, besides ensuring the intergenerational transmission of knowledge, it should be conducted from two distinctions: basic education would be responsible for the students socialization, educating citizens who are able to feel the pain of others and to commit not only to their own interests; university education would have the role of promoting individualization, an internal movement in contrast with the socialization that occurred in basic education. Therefore, we would have a scholar with critical visions and perspectives, able to reflect and act upon the socialization processes. In this sense, we can see the importance of the narratives that problematize crystallized values, prejudices, reductions of common sense, helping university students to recreate their self-image resulting from projections of the past. Rorty himself saw in this proposal a utopia and reaffirmed the importance of having it as a possible horizon.

In summary, redescription as proposed by Rorty and its analytic philosophy, is constituted as part of an eminently aesthetic, ethical and political project. Human routines would have a self-corrective nature, permanently challenging disciplinary stereotypes, in a libertarian meta-practice of hermeneutic nature. If we have citizens who were socialized by the experiences of basic education and self-created in the university educational context, then knowledge can abdicate the suzerainty of truth. Let us be careful, however, to avoid that all these propositions end up grouped into one more notorious curricular-pedagogical theory, as it often happens with certain philosophical perspectives focused on education, which would reflect again our vocation to the seclusion of the epistemological awareness. We do not see, however, a complete ban of the subject-object relation, but a new context in which we have entered the world, collectively, carrying judgments, ways of acting, being more creative, facing what afflicts us, giving up the subjection that knowledge has always promoted. Here is an almost utopian challenge: to abdicate the power relations that epistemic currencies have been promoting and mediating for so long.

Relations between metaphor and redescription

Trying to move away from the flaw of being naive or romantic, the neo-pragmatic philosopher stated that, on the basis of his propositions, the figure of the humanist intellectual would be highlighted, especially for provoking in students the need to redescribe themselves, as well as the society that produced them (Silva, 2012, p. 523). Imagination, sensitivity to the suffering of others, solidarity, courage to dethrone the epistemological tradition, among other human aspects, constitute traces of the redescriptive experience. We ratify here the importance of the educational context, which promotes the symbiotic relationship between the processes of socialization and individualization. It is important to emphasize that redescription, in these terms, would have political, ethical and linguistic consequences; we would have, in the narratives and their various modalities (not only teachers testimonials, but also novels, letters, comics, movies, etc., of all educational players), expressions of an aesthetic of being that opens to the uncertain, to the recreation of oneself, of others and of the world.

With the deliberate intention to dismiss the foundations of what privileged representations and their century-validated propositions would be, Rorty saw in metaphor an operator of his aesthetic design:

A metaphor is, so to speak, a voice from outside the logical space, instead of an empirical fulfillment of a portion of that space, or a logical-philosophical clarification of the structure of that space. It is the calling for someone’s change of language and life, instead of a proposal on how to systematize both (Rorty, 1999, p. 27).

The enunciation of metaphor is not intended to save one truth, or the expression of an absolute knowledge, as the great philosophical-scientific systems sought. As we can see in the excerpt above, it is a voice coming from outside the logical space, without aspiring to an illumination of it by philosophy. In other words, we abdicate the categories of consciousness that would fulfill that space a priori, in an attempt to formulate true concepts. We abandon the ambition of having immutable rules in speech which, once decoded, would have illuminated the logical place (and why not the ideological place?) where the necessary propositions would be born. An abyssal change, therefore, in the foundations of language.

Metaphor figures as a poetic, aesthetic and even ethical call for a linguistic and existential turn, much less pretentious than the aspirations of the scientific method (of any affiliation) which, according to Rorty, would be an inheritance of the Aristotelian-Platonic thought. The metaphorical expedient greatly contrasts with such subjective stance, presenting redescriptive, language-mobilizing potential. Thus, metaphors promote intellectual progress, especially because they are hostages of aprioristic, epistemic entities, so that they allow us permanent reconciliations between past and present, in what they can rewrite of existence.

Besides the metaphor, we rely on perception and inference to expand our beliefs and finally continue the redescriptive march. Rorty (1999) considers, however, that only metaphor, for its creative nature, is able to promote the amplification of the logical space of possibilities, expanding language itself. The metaphorical occurrence, by the way, not rarely becomes the truth, for it sets a new vocabulary; by throwing ourselves on what is new, if we are not careful, we will have an epistemic appropriation, in the traditional way, of what came to be scientifically validated, formerly belonging to the domains of error. And we are back to the initial stake! Anyway, it is important for us to believe that metaphor creates conditions for us to read the world, ourselves and others, in order to establish new and much less arbitrary relationships in what redescriptive narratives would be. As an exercise and illustration, the following section presents an artistic intervention produced by one of the authors of this essay.

A redescriptive exercise: artistic installation with polyhedrons

In Negociações Cronocapilares, we elaborated a redescriptive structure, for what it enunciates of historicist, uncertain, monolithic in its materiality, metaphorically approaching assertions of the pictorial constructivism with reminiscences of classicism. It is an itinerant artistic installation produced in a public university in the Mid-West region, which has 50 pieces made of 10-mm geometrical plywood (30-cm and 50-cm edge cubes; 120-cm x 50-cm x 20-cm and 100-cm x 40-cm x 10-cm cobblestones), polyhedrons that also operate as holders for xeroxed artwork.

Image 1
Negociações Cronocapilares (visual redescription)

The intervention shall circulate through state schools as of August 2019, in institutions of basic education, so that students can interact with the pieces, also by proposing compositions and new structures.

It is not easy to free ourselves from the neo-Copernican frameworks of subjectivity (already discussed in this work), pregnant of solipsist idiosyncrasies, which, although not believing possible for us to achieve the thing itself, professed the undisturbed dogma of fixing objects in reality a priori for what they presented to our sensitivity and understanding (Kantian system). Just like this, seeking to break these chains, behold the female face of The Birth of Venus - Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510), painted in 1483, and the lines carved in the Composition with Large Red Plane, Yellow, Black, Gray, and Blue - Piet Mondrian (1872 - 1944), painted in 1921. We can transcendentally retain these xeroxed contents and even the polyhedrons, for what they enunciate about an epistemology of art... but, rowing in unknown directions, we prefer to hike in the trails opened by the signs which are materialized there, orphans of their oracles, leading us to I don’t know where... a gloomy and delirious Venus, swallowed by time furniture, vague, tragic spectrum, seeking lines of force, leaving us...In the brutality of geometric solids, behold an expansion of what Rorty called the logical space of possibilities, enlarging the sleepers of language. The intervention is not an empirical fulfillment of it, also because for us the empirics, according to the philosopher’s criticism, seems to concern the Lockean scientificist stance of betting that we develop mental processes able to arbitrarily align ideas-body (a reflection of what the senses collect) with propositions, in necessary syntaxes (logical formulas). In other words, the empiric acting forged in modernity was also sustained by representation - a mirror of reality.

As in Negociações Cronocapilares, we will always draw in a redescriptive way the possibility of narrating everyday life, the lived experience, what affects us and is transformed by us, in an arrangement of wounds and punctures, where laughter may sound like true and not truths. And then we will ruminate the writing that broke the mirror, hermeneutic expression that may connect us to “the totality of our experience of the world” (Gadamer, 1975, p. 11, apud Rorty, 1994, p. 352). In this sense, when we contemplate the foundations of knowledge, examining the context in which the concepts of the so-called human sciences are born, especially the educational ones, we may seek an understanding of what is at stake when we relate them to the lived experience. We do not expect anything but specular shards.

Final impressions

The Rortyan redescriptive project, according to what we have outlined, points out to different contexts of subjective production, captained by the effort to break up with the foundationalism we inherited from the past. In this struggle lies the greatest challenge of philosophy presented: to dethrone the secular legitimizing canons of scientific production. Rorty would not be the first one to formulate such a proposition. He himself highlighted Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Dewey for the enterprise, as we have tried to demonstrate. We cite others too, like Bergson, Nietzsche, the authors of the Difference, like Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze and Guatarri.

We narrate here a certain discouragement, as we assume the Rortyan perspective; a feeling of mourning hits us, especially in epistemological terms. That certainty of doing science with universal pretensions - erecting altars, liturgies that ensured the acquisition of the candlesticks of truth - has imploded, reduced to ruins. From now on, the subject of knowledge reveals itself as collective, sociological, fragmented, fallible, uncertain, linguistic. We prefer this to following the modern gnoseological march, legitimating knowledges and articulated powers since the times of Athens and the Lyceum, marked by fixity and formal aspirations of eternity. It is urgent that we assume our finiteness, seeking to redescribe what passes by us, what we transform. We have educational, aesthetic, ethical and political commitments. The students interest for school routines needs to be rescued; in this particular aspect lies our appreciation for Rorty’s contributions. We have tried to demonstrate here the powerful possibilities of redescription inherent to the context of schooling: first as a theoretical framework to problematize the epistemic foundations of scientific knowledge, in order to analyze then how the redescriptive conception could inspire more creative, less arbitrary pedagogical routines, that may promote solidarity, empathy and altruism among students, enabling self-narratives, in short, libertarian and democratic exercises grounded in a pragmatic linguistic, a poetic, new ontology of learning and school life.

The installation Negociações Cronocapilares, in this sense, would be a redescriptive exercise pregnant of odd enunciations, three-dimensional visual narratives, inspired in space-temporal, multi-sign subversions. We do not point out here to a saving formula of our school experience; at most, we reflect on the need to seek new paths, with the usual risk: of arriving nowhere, perhaps because there is actually nowhere to go... at least we can narrate this non-space, pure language.

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Notes

• 1
  Peirce (2005), in his semiotics theory, designated the argument symbolic legisign as a sign which object is a general logical entity established by laws originated in the experience, point of arrival of a long chain of representations that engender general classes of necessary propositions, in addition to positioning a being in a series (Silveira, 2007). Truth is presented as a teleological sign of classic pragmatism, objective of the whole semiosis towards the habit, expressed in the final syllogism.
• 2
  To cite Peirce (2005), in respect to the Peircean semioticist community, we kept the notation CP 2.539 – Collected Papers, Book 2, Chapter 539.
• 3
  Faced with a problem, a pre-reflexive situation, we are given suggestions; then, the intellectual operations of delimitation of the real problem; we choose then the hypothesis – winning suggestion; reasoning is articulated by the investigative mind, so as to consolidate the hypothesis; we finally proceeded to the test, in order to assess the assertiveness of the reflective unit (Dewey, 1959).

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  22 June 2020
• Date of issue
  2020

History

• Received
  07 Aug 2019
• Accepted
  26 Mar 2020