PLATFORM: Paulo Freire as an Antidote to the Hegemony of Abstraction

Paulo Freire is by far the most important educator of the 20th century. With over half a million citations, he is the only thinker from the Global South among the 50 most influential in recent history. His best-known book: Pedagogy of the Oppressed, is the third most cited in all social sciences.

One can imagine that Freire's monumental work has influenced the field of knowledge of architecture and urbanism; after all, so many of us work as both designers and educators. But that's not exactly the case. A detailed search for Paulo Freire in architecture journals reveals that our field does not respond to his work in the same magnitude as the humanities and social sciences in general

Even more surprising is the paucity of scholarship that undertakes spatial analyses of Freire’s work. There are few and very recent works that study Freire's pedagogical theories through the variable of space, something that I emphasized in a longer version of this essay written in Portuguese. I venture to propose that Paulo Freire’s work does not enjoy popularity among architects and urban planners because his main contribution to the world of ideas involves relativizing the hegemony of abstraction: his valorization of concreteness of relations hurts the myth of the modern architect manipulating abstract spaces.

“Paulo Freire’s work does not enjoy popularity among architects and urban planners because his main contribution to the world of ideas involves relativizing the hegemony of abstraction...and hurting the myth of the modern architect manipulating abstract spaces.”

Abstraction is so ingrained in our history that it predates our species. The ancestor Homo Erectus probably deserves credit for separating the idea of fire from the accidental burning of bushes, triggering the supremacy of hominids, both in terms of weapons of war and in terms of brain expansion due to the breakdown of protein and energy molecules before ingestion. Jean Piaget has taught us that abstraction develops in early childhood learning processes. Human babies develop the ability to separate mental concepts from phenomena experienced while still in their parents’ arms, even before they learn to walk.

Abstraction also means reduction, however: selecting a few ideas from the messy experience of the world to operate more efficiently. Michael Pollan reminds us that this type of simplification (planting only one species, breeding only with equals, manipulating only a few variables) does not exist in nature, which always operates with diversity and complexity. History teaches us that abstraction – and more specifically spatial abstraction – is one of the main roots of social inequality, racism, natural resource depletion, and climate change. The process of modernization triggered by the events of 1492 featured increasingly higher degrees of spatial abstraction.

Figure 2. Freire’s literacy method. Illustration by André Koehne.

In the early years of the century, Wilhelm Worringer defined abstraction as the opposite of empathy. For Worringer, either you use the “higher” processes of abstraction or you develop empathy. Echoing the writings of René Descartes from three centuries earlier, Worringer emphasized that emotions and care do not belong to the domains of knowledge, justifying their exclusion and the hegemony of abstraction. In response to what I call an overdose of abstraction, the twentieth century gave us two powerful critics and some possible antidotes: Henry Lefebvre and Paulo Freire. Lefebvre was exactly 20 years older than Freire, but both created their most brilliant theses in the 1960s and 1970s. Lefebvre questioned our over-reliance on abstract space, discussing the hidden layers of lived space and representational space. Paulo Freire, in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, explains how the success of his literacy process was based on replacing urban words with concrete everyday examples that Brazilian peasants did not know. Relational knowledge, concrete examples, lived spaces, and empathy constitute powerful ways to advance our relationship with each other and with other earthly beings.

First published in 1968, Freire's ideas were developed after two decades of practice in K12 education, first teaching Portuguese in high school, then as secretary of education developing programs to address the horrifying 72% adult illiteracy rate of Pernambuco, Brazil, in the 1950s. Freire's response to the illiteracy emergency was to create a series of reading exercises that used words chosen from the workers' routine, such as hoe, cow, sugar cane, rice and beans. Refining the method in successive attempts throughout the state of Pernambuco, Freire achieved notable success in teaching 300 sugarcane workers to read in the 45 days available between the end of harvest and the beginning of replanting.

Freire's genius lies in using the concreteness of the context around the student as a basis for building abstractions of sounds/syllables. Freire anchored abstraction in everyday life, and in doing so, empowered subjects based on their own reality.

“The closer to the student’s reality, the better the concept performs in the literacy process. Proximity and concreteness thus ameliorate the hegemony of abstraction: small fragments of everyday reality are inserted in the process so that the students develop familiarity with sounds, letters, and ideas.”

Figure 3. Mural at Universidad del Bio, Chile.

At this point it is worth highlighting the spatial dimension of Frerian theory. The closer (spatially) to the student's reality, the better the concept/term performs in the literacy process. Proximity and concreteness thus ameliorate the hegemony of abstraction: small fragments of everyday reality are inserted in the process so that the students develop familiarity with sounds, letters, and ideas. In Freire's pedagogy, proposing problems is more important than solving problems and happens through a process of encoding and decoding reality. Freire discusses the encoding/decoding process in terms of the development and analysis of what he calls "generative themes." In essence, these are life themes that are generated from "significant dimensions of an individual's contextual reality." It is important to note that Freire does not rule out abstraction, just as he would not rule out the advantages of clean drinking water, sanitation, public transport, etc. All these achievements of modernity are the result of abstract processes of conception and design. The key is to encourage the empowerment of those least benefited from modernization.

Returning to our discussion of architecture as a discipline of abstract and disembodied design, applying the “pedagogy of the oppressed” to the challenges of the built environment implies that people design their own programs of necessity and make decisions about what, where and how to build. This participatory process, when implemented, pushes the architect out of the central position we think we have. As Giancarlo de Carlo wrote, “participation destroys the mysterious privileges of specialization, reveals professional secrecy, lays bare incompetence, multiplies responsibilities and converts them from private to social.” Alternative processes in which the architect steps aside to play the role of consultant or cultivator have been systematically marginalized until very recently.

I have no doubt that relational processes (empathy, concreteness, perspectivism, participation) are urgently necessary for architecture to activate transformative and empowering power that has been dormant after centuries of abstraction hegemony. Paulo Freire's thought meets all the requirements to occupy a central role in this paradigm shift: it emerges from the Global South, celebrates everyday life and Indigenous spatial contexts, and aims at subverting the privileges associated with spatial abstraction.

Citation

Fernando Luiz Lara, “Paulo Freire as an Antidote to the Hegemony of Abstraction,” PLATFORM, May 6, 2024.