The shadows the pandemic invisibility projects: what alternatives to the future?

Abstract

For months the world population has faced the COVID-19 pandemic, a unique situation and perhaps the most challenging which we bring to mind. For most individuals, that crisis joins to further emergencies and intensifies injustices, violence, discrimination, and suffering, once they are considered invisible and survive in spaces lacking in hygiene, health, education, and safety and replete of so many other manifestations of renunciation and impossibility. Considering that the social structure is liable for getting us where we are, we need to stand against the unawareness of a reality that displays itself as normative and immutable, apprehending it in critical and transforming perspectives. That way, this text proposes the problematization: which alternatives can we foresee in the post-pandemic world, since the inequalities and injustices increase? Current time prognoses are delineated based on the dialogue among Adorno and Horkheimer (2006) and Santos (2007), using as analyses categories: instrumental rationality, abyssal thinking, post-abyssal thinking and emancipatory education. The rationality has become the cannon of the enlightened society, underlying the social structures and relations in a universal, totalitarian, and homogeneous perception, that despises and invisibilizes the differences. We advocate an education to contestation, to restlessness and to resistance, that unveils and problematizes the abyssal lines, thus thinking and acting beyond them, envisaging alternatives, new practices and supportive and sustainable perspectives, since any ideal of progress and development will be illusory as long as the invisibility “of the other side of the line” keeps on. The forethought of the reality, in the light of its historical and social structures, is an effective possibility of new ways to the comprehension of the obstacles and emancipatory potentialities.

Keywords: COVID-19. Instrumental Rationality. Abyssal thinking. Emancipatory Education.