Living in Transit: Youth, Nomads and Reality: A Narrative Essay on Becoming and Education

By Sebastián Alejandro González Montero

Living in Transit: being in motion is an actual condition. Movement is real. Moreover, it is essential because it concerns kinetic events. We can insistently perceive that everything changes and moves. All living beings undergo experiences revealing flows, adaptations, and becomings. Quotidian experiences testify to that. Directly or indirectly, we face reality's movements all the time. Atoms move. Planets move. Animals move. Rivers move. Trees move. Technology moves. Economy moves. The State moves. And people move. The ontological assertion that reality is all about beings in motion has an anthropological side that must be considered. We indeed live in times highly defined by movement and change. As we have said, everything moves. It is inevitable to perceive and face movement and change. For that reason, it is essential to ethically assess our human role in changing living scenarios and dynamic beings.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Universidad de La Salle
• Release date: Feb 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9786287510838

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González Montero, Sebastián Alejandro

Living in Transit : Youth, Nomads, and Reality. A Narrative Essay on Becoming and Education / Sebastián Alejandro González Montero. – First edition. - Bogotá : Ediciones Unisalle, 2023. 228 p. ; 23 cm

               Incluye referencias bibliográficas

               ISBN 978-628-7510-82-1 (impreso) /ISBN 978-628-7510-83-8 (ePub)

               ISBN 978-628-7510-84-5 (PDF)

               1. Cambio social – Ensayos, conferencias, etc. 2. Sociología de la educación – Ensayos, conferencias, etc. 3. Ciencias sociales – Ensayos, conferencias, etc. I. Título

               CDD: 303.4 ed.22

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ISBN paperback: 978-628-7510-82-1

ISBN ePub: 978-628-7510-83-8

ISBN pdf: 978-628-7510-84-5

First Edition: Bogotá D. C., February 2023

© Universidad de La Salle

© Sebastián Alejandro González Montero

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This book was reviewed by independent external reviewers. Therefore, the research contained in this book has the endorsement of experts on the subject, who have issued an objective judgment of it, following scientific criteria to assess the academic soundness of the work.

Content

Introduction

Contagion, Differences, and the Challenge of Living

Living in Transit: On Reality Impositions

Navigational Capacities

Living and Reality

The Little Things: On the Subtleness of the Event

Youth and Change

Conclusions: Education and Becoming

Introduction

Writing is about thinking honestly. To think truly: the challenge is learning to use thought freely. But that challenge is also about writing boundaryless. All of us live within the margins of the real. Habits, costumes, moral imperatives, cultural fashion, accepted routines, etc.: we live within striated scenarios. Rules sometimes are regulative and, therefore, constrain behaviors. Other times, rules are constitutive because they create new possibilities for actions. In any case, rules are everywhere. And we adapt to those scenarios as best as we can. Or perhaps we just pretend to do it to survive. Who knows? Maybe we all are acting. In any case, we try to adapt. That does not mean we must accept the cage we were thrown into. At least we do not have to take living under rules in every single place of our lives. Creative thinking. Creative writing. Can those activities create scenarios of freedom? Can those activities concern aspirations that do not necessarily link with conventional expectations or opportunistic reasons?

There is one detail to consider beforehand. And it is about our way of writing.

We have decided to write in short paragraphs that we would like to name ‘Aphorisms.’ But we have to say something humble about it. We engage with the main idea of writing by short-size passages without pretensions of being as clever and creative as those who wrote in aphorisms —Nietzsche, La Rochefoucauld, Pascal, Bacon, Jonson, Calderón, etc. (Hui, 2019, pp. 9-10).

True, we like the idea of writing shortly as if measuring every word was an essential task in reaching clarity. We also like the idea of imaginatively writing within academic environments. There are so many gestures of rejection, competitiveness, and judgmental attitudes in academics that any effort to try other forms represents fresh air (Braidotti, 2002, p. 9). But there is more at stake. The secret of writing is mainly about seeking compositional fluidity and variation in tone, cadence, and grammar (Hui, 2019, pp. 26-27). That means we write concisely because it represents a new line of inquiry in two senses: on the one hand, it allows us to follow conceptual abstractions at the level of central assertions coming from the state-of-art debates. By writing shortly, the essential aim is to get acuity and privileged qualified ideas.

Additionally, we can accept openness and free movements filled with silences and doubts by writing shortly. It is like accepting there exist things that we do not fully know: silence time is necessary to understand those things and incorporate them into reliable and precise comprehension. Indeed, we believe it is possible to get more than an assemblage of textual units in favor of a networked organization of ideas. We can play, then, with the idea that short steps allow us to construct more than fragmentary assertions and, instead, constitute carefully developed and accurate understandings (Hui, 2019, pp. 12-16). Certainly, succinct paragraphs let us build a concrete argument based on notional interconnected passages composed of different observation levels and differentiated disciplinary topics.

§1

Living in Transit is about uncertainty and change. It is a philosophical endeavor anchored in the old enterprises to face the human issue of being lost and the ungraspable reality’s complexity. Spinoza, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Gilles Deleuze, and Alain Badiou are representatives of the traditional philosophical task of thinking about uncertainty and change. Living in Transit is a book unfolding in a similar background to those who have thought about our human precariousness, reality uncontrollability, and becoming (Badiou, 2012; Rosa, 2020).

Living in Transit is also about traditional existential considerations. Let us explain. We are lost, indeed. We have been lost. And we have known that since the times of human efforts to manage natural forces. Work on Myth (Blumenberg, 2003) and Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer & Adorno, 2002) are standard references to the idea that being lost is still a human dilemma. It is unnecessary to consider the old Gods’ cultural role to be aware of that. The pandemic, economic turmoil, political and social struggles, war, etc.: sometimes, some things can remind us that reality works beyond human desires and control. We can fight against that fact. We can try to pretend otherwise. But we are lost in the end.

§2

In Latin America, we have conceptually responded to the being-lost existential condition by two traditional concepts: revolution and reform. That fact will be one of the most critical issues at play here. But it is not going to rule out other important considerations. Revolution and reform are concepts expressing traditional debates about responding to realities in change. But, recently, some transitions to contemporary expectations have played a role in our comprehension of facing transformation and ensuring human possibilities to deal with that. Nomadic ethics have been deployed to manage empirical descriptions of the universe in terms of uncertainty and chaos. We will go into those ethics, focusing on their impact on Latin American conceptual debates about the past and the future.

Revolution and reform are probably concepts undergoing theoretical innovations with enormous implications in recent cultural frameworks. We will wrestle with those implications showing the notions of revolution and reform have been translated into ideas about the role of data-based making processes-decisions and technocratic skills related to technical reasonings about dealing with social issues, political questions, economic phenomena, etc. Briefly: it seems that changing realities is either about new commencements or improving institutions by political agreements and reasonable deliberation but modeling realities and producing scientifically and technologically grounded solutions to concrete problems.

§3

Can it be asserted that living is all about uncertainly becoming different and, simultaneously, reaching guiding ideas is possible? Perhaps, it is possible. But in the middle of uncertainties, any attempt to find guidelines has to pay the price: highly shared values have to be found in reality instead of returning to the transcendental. Opinions are out there. Everyone can have a picture of the real. And living in the middle of opinionated views seems to offer no more than confusion and motifs to fight and live separately, polarized (Klein, 2020).

That former statement creates a context for saying something relatively simple to state and tremendously hard to develop. It is possible to say that character is the product of interactions between individual subjectivity and the importance of the environment (Maffesoli, 2004, pp. 151-155). So, we write close to the idea that accepting living is all about becoming differently within a fragmented world and facing the uncontrollable world.

Following the well-known sociological orientation, it can be said contemporary subjectivity concerns awareness of our precariousness related to human limits and an acceptance of the present as the unique real scenario in which we struggle to find freedom, build possibilities, and create differences. Fate and destiny are coordinates from an old-fashioned life where people believe living should have meaning in the future —a reachable future by making efforts and working hard. Modern inheritances are at the bottom of those expectancies.

Recent times seem to be marked by a distinctive framework. It appears that living is more about present options to find enjoyable scenarios for doing things as differently as possible than working on getting freedom at the end of human days. Young people are displaying such stubbornness regarding activities supposedly dedicated to giving a distant future that they seem to be negating everything: education sense, job purposes, family motifs, making money attempts, etc. (Maffesoli, 2004, pp. 155-159). What is important? Immediate gratification. What is worthy? What gives pleasure? What is worthy of time and energy? Something that can make the present more tolerable and rid of whatever is related to anxiety and weariness. To put it banally: if the future is not absolute and cannot be any because of war, economic turmoil, social disaster, pandemic diseases, etc., what is the point of being preoccupied with it? Juvenile awareness is taking place these days through the mere occasional cultural setup represented by the present. No more. No less.

§4

From Kracauer to Foucault, a fascination with the past and problems with the present can be outlined. That fascination has led us to this book (Jay, 1976).

§5

How does it avoid pessimism when accepting a life without transcendental meaning and destiny? We try here an answer that has two parts. One is saying that we can face the challenge of living by exploring realities. The second answer is that we can examine facts using our navigational skills —i. e., the human powers of going into multiplicities and making sense in the middle of that exploration (Simmel, 1991, p. 15).

§6

We initiated this research under the presumption that the twentieth century is born as a time shaped by a general eclipse of utopias (Traverso, 2017, p. 5).

Change can be related to the idea that revolution is possible. That is about radical changes instead of rotation: ruptures are expected, not returning from old times. Radical changes are mixed with great expectations. ‘The best is coming.’ That is an old slogan, indeed.

Of course, it is highly debatable if it is true that revolutions produce better times or if they come from reforms engaged by those who incorporate emancipations within society’s intersections. The idea of change is usually translated into practical questions. How does a new world come? What do people need to make real change possibilities?

Instead of hope, action: humans can build their fate. Romantic questions arise in that context. What kind of world will we give to the next generations? What can we do to ensure the youngest’s future? It is believed that science, technology, communication at big scales, crossing paths between cultures, etc., are elements of a new living scenario that is usually considered the best moment humans have had to achieve progress. It is not about having hopes —it is essential to repeat. It is about building a new world. The notion of revolution can be contrasted with the principle of responsibility crystallized by the idea of reform. That represents an old debate in Latin America within the old-fashioned Left —an old debate that has relatively transformed in the recent progressivism wing (dos Santos, 2020).

§7

Contemporary times are incredibly nihilistic. The idea of another society has become almost impossible to conceive of, and no one in the world today is offering any advice on the subject or even trying to formulate a new concept. Here we are, condemned to live in the world as it is (Furet, 1999, p. 502). Revolution seems to be dead. What may we say after Salvador Allende’s sacrifice? What after Che Guevara’s death? Who wants to believe in change after Fidel Castro’s burial? After listening to Silvito Liam Rodriguez’s songs, what may we say about the revolution’s future?

Perhaps, all we have is nostalgia.

On the other hand, from reformist endeavors arise reactions. It appears that we have not had the expected changes. At least, we have not had the radical changes we have desired in front of the recent challenges we are facing —i. e., poverty, unemployment, diseases, insecurity, lack of access to vital opportunities, etc. Young people do not want to wait until the State institutions mature enough to be able to consider them as part of the possibilities to make a future. In addition to their impatient desire, young people are worried (Nicolás y Los Fumadores). Young people do not want to die working in a call center and living in their parent’s house forever. It seems they do not wish to work, renouncing living an intense life. Similar observations can be made around studying, getting married, having friends, buying things, etc. Consummation is different from consumption (Maffesoli, 2004, p. 135).

§8

Things are happening more or less randomly. It is difficult to know that humanly. Sometimes, reality goes peacefully. Sometimes, it goes crazily, giving us surprises. Days go after days ensuring conditions to build habits. On other days, we must change and adapt to new circumstances. And it is difficult to recognize the difference. There are days when everything seems perfect to establish routines. Immediately after, we have to consider managing options. Adaptation and flexibility are essential. But it is also our tendency to notice and create patterns. How does it know when it is the time to change and when it is the time to maintain routines? How does it know when it is the time to discipline us and when it is the moment to challenge us?

Flexibility and adaptation are capabilities usually stated as being completely necessary these days. But saying that requires carefully made considerations if we do not want to follow common sense thought. Despite all contemporary common sense intuitions circulating as self-helping tools, difficulties, nuances, questions, and doubts arise precisely when we know we have to change. Stumbling on Happiness (Gilbert, 2006) and Joy. Lessons from a Tuscan Villa (Travis, 2021) are titles that can call for misunderstandings about convictions of order, sense, purpose, etc. Is that hard to accept that we just do not know how to live?

§9

Making models attached to facts has represented human efforts that have not turned out to be as successful as expected. A critical assessment of modernity and development has been diversely making a similar point: the prices of trying to control realities by modeling and intervention is evident around the picture of recent disasters and social dissatisfaction. War is an obvious example. But there are more complications at play. Climate change, diseases, political turmoil, economic crises, etc., are at the corner of current societies (Rosa, 2019). Indeed, modernity’s promises have been broken, and the human desire to deal with realities by creating formulas to describe them and forecast futures have been proved limited. Sophisticated models usually crash into uncertainties and complexity, revealing their conceptual misconceptions and methodological limitations. The more we want to control realities by mathematical formulas, the more directed the experienced lessons of how impossible it is to get good pictures of the real and the means to modify destinies (Rosa, 2020).

In that scenario, we develop the following idea:

It is perfectly acceptable that we are not closed, self-identical, and unidimensional beings but path-seekers able to perceive, describe, conceptualize, adapt, and respond to changing conditions. That does not mean we can do everything. It is quite the opposite: accepting that we are capable machines does not directly lead to the notion that we are masters of the universe. Renouncing to control things, completely understanding facts, and mutually coordinating to reach highly shared values is the condition to develop more practical ethics in the sense of ethics adjusted to the limits of human reason and will. We deal with that issue by writing about navigational skills and nomadic ethics.

§10

Wars and revolutions —as though events had hurried up to fulfill Lenin’s early prediction— have thus far determined the physiognomy of the twentieth century (Arendt, 1963, p. 11). Regarding the twenty-first century, that idea has to be questioned. It seems that uncertainty has determined our comprehension and values. Wars have not disappeared. But they are not the unique representation of living at the edge of risk.

Traditionally, it was assumed that our highest purposes were guided by the cause of freedom versus tyranny (Arendt, 1963, pp. 11-12). We are not sure that motif has ceased to be relevant. Tyranny can take different spatial and historical forms, and these days authoritarianism appears to be one of them (Altemeyer, 2006).

In any case, recent human challenges are not uniquely associated with charismatic politicians and fascistic manners of making politics. An ontological consideration can be added to that awareness: reality is coldly indifferent. That means that reality works by its rhythm, structure, and rules. So, the center of the gravest of all present debates is not just how we will manage to live together but how we will drive to live in the middle of situations changing by their cadence and tempo and without necessarily including human desires, motifs, expectations, etc.

Let us make a point exactly here: thinking about uncertainties is thinking about the notion of an ‘event.’ Revolution and reform notions can be contrasted to the idea of the event in the following sense: both are related to the question of the beginning of things. It is traditionally said that revolutionary origins concern violence and crime. Biblical tales usually testify to that connection (Arendt, 1963, pp. 20-35). Other times, it is said that reformist beginnings concern human procedures. Habermas’ books can be understood in that way (1996).

In comparison with those issues, thinking about the notion of the event is thinking about realities in becoming that cannot be comprehended in terms of transcendental beginnings or human will to initiate rational communities. The event concept signals another problematic scenario of thinking because it signals that reality undergoes processes at differentiated levels and about diverse elements and actors without having accurate and concrete starting or ending points. If becoming is the concept of an infinite and incalculable time, running without causes at the beginning of it or endings at the other extreme —i. e., time is not an arrow—the event is the concept of the things happening because of the time differently passing (McMahon, 2020, pp. 44-54).

Another way to put it is by saying that considerations about the notion of an event set a concrete scenario to think about the different things happening and their meaning in actual thoughts and feelings. We will consider that in detail. Meanwhile, it can be stated that some questions are at play. Things happen. Some of them are simple facts. Some of them are important things. It is the difference between the day of your birth and the number of your weight on that day. Perhaps that number can be an event if it affects processes in your body. Or it can be an indifferent fact as it is the exact moment of the bus passing through the station. It is an indifferent moment since it is repeated and repeated and repeated. But it can become meaningful.

What number of things can happen if you do not get to the bus station on time? You can lose the opportunity of doing something important. You can lose the chance to meet someone essential to you. You can lose definitive news, possibly changing your options. Who knows? That is an example of a critical feature: events are articulated happenings with facts within connected situations becoming different at different velocities within diverse territories. There are important events. And there are simple facts. Events are sometimes able to reach their meaning because they represent changes. Sometimes events are indifferent in that they lead to identity and sameness. Again, who knows? All that we can do is ask questions. How can we understand the extent of the things happening? How can we evaluate the meanings of the things that have happened? Are opportunities open by the presence of situations becoming realities? What can we learn from the surrounding problems? Did that event in the past represent something today I have to consider carefully? What is the significance of that possible opportunity? ‘Uncertainty’ is the current name for awareness of no-knowing and ‘Anxiety’ is the name of the correspondent feeling of living at the edge of no-knowing. What follows is the thought that we want to face directly: events are open series, and they can have differentiated effects and meanings that we do not necessarily foresee and confront adequately. Uncertainty is hard to manage because it expresses our ignorance regarding those effects, and it is difficult to handle because it crystallizes affairs whose importance is unclear.

§11

We aren’t asking for the Moon (Cowles, 2022). Between young people and adults, there are changes at play. In Latin America, it is usual to consider debates about transformations and transitions converging complex worlds where social practices reveal diverse modes of existence, resistances to traditions, social struggles, etc. (Wyn & White, 2015, pp. 28-41). We will get into that in detail, of course. Meanwhile, let us engage in a final introductory comment about the ethos of this research. It will theoretically explain and justify our efforts in pursuing concepts, empirical works, cultural debates, etc., in our writing context. But it will also present our ethical motifs and political concerns in doing what we did.

§12

Me vs. My Parents. It seems everything is radically different these days. Buying a house, having babies, investing money, working in-person all day, every day in the same place, taking loans, studying for four, five, six years or so, etc.: apparently, young people do not want to grow up. Or the situation is that they do not want to do it in the current adult ways. Even more, perhaps young people desire to grow up but have not had the required scenario to do it by themselves. Of course, young people’s lives represent a highly nuanced world —as it happens in human lives, in general. So, it is difficult to reach definitive conclusions. But something is evident these days: young people seem unable to afford their lives —even the lives their parents want (Cowles, 2022).

Questions must be