Politics and Pedagogy in the “Post-Truth” Era: Insurgent Philosophy and Praxis 9781350059900, 9781350059931, 9781350059917

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Don’t Bring the Truth to a Gunfi ght
1. Studying in the Party
2. In and Out of the Gap
3. Th e Sinthom ostudier
4. Stupid Urbanism
5. (Un)communicative Aesthetic Education
6. Magical Bookkeepers
Conclusion: A Pro-Test Protest
Appendix: History, Space, and Ideology
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Politics and Pedagogy in the “Post-Truth” Era

Also available from Bloomsbury Critical Pedagogy for Social Justice, John Smyth Developing Student Criticality in Higher Education, Brenda Johnston

Politics and Pedagogy in the “Post-Truth” Era Insurgent Philosophy and Praxis Derek R. Ford

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Paperback edition published 2020 Copyright © Derek R. Ford, 2019 Derek R. Ford has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. vi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Joshua Fanning Cover image © Sarah Pfohl All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-5990-0 PB: 978-1-3501-6486-4 ePDF: 978-1-3500-5991-7 eBook: 978-1-3500-5992-4 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Don’t Bring the Truth to a Gunfight 1. Studying in the Party 2. In and Out of the Gap 3. The Sinthomostudier 4. Stupid Urbanism 5. (Un)communicative Aesthetic Education 6. Magical Bookkeepers Conclusion: A Pro-Test Protest Appendix: History, Space, and Ideology Bibliography Index

vi 1 21 41 57 75 91 107 127 131 147 155

Acknowledgments The ideas in this book spring not only from my engagement with certain texts, but more fundamentally—and first—from my engagement with certain struggles, and certain groups, forces, and people in those struggles. This might seem odd for a work like this that’s deeply theoretical, but it’s true nonetheless. It is the struggle that structures my encounter with philosophical and educational concepts, and that in many ways determines how I develop my own, to the extent that they can even be called “my own” (and I don’t think they can). So thanks to all of you—or, better, us. It was Michael Peters who got me thinking about the “post-truth” era, after I had instinctively written it off as so much mainstream liberal rubbish. With his prompting through an editorial in Educational Philosophy and Theory, I began to wonder what the temporal and political designation might offer the current political struggle. He invited me to contribute a chapter to an edited volume on the topic, Post-Truth, Fake News: Viral Modernity & Higher Education, and that chapter was the springboard for this book. Thanks to Mike for this, for his own scholarship that has opened many doors, for taking me (and other young educational scholars) seriously, and for amplifying our ideas. Another scholar, whom I also call a friend (in all the indeterminacy of that word) that I owe a public thanks to is Tyson Lewis. Tyson coauthored with me what appears as the fifth chapter in this book. He also cleared a path of legitimation for my generation of educational theorists to think (and publish) politically and pedagogically out of bounds. He and Amy Kraehe carefully read Chapter 4 and gave helpful feedback. My students in Radical Philosophy and Education taught me a lot about what studying can really look like. The education studies department at DePauw University provides me the support and flexibility to teach and study a range of disparate but pedagogically related topics, which enables me to do this kind of research. Mark Richardson and Maria Giovanna Brauzzi, my editors at Bloomsbury, have been unusually responsive and helpful throughout the inception, writing, and production of the book. Thanks also to the four anonymous reviewers, who helped sharpen and shape the text in significant ways. Finally, thanks to Sarah Pfohl for her insights, laughter, and gestures, and for making a life with me and with Felix and Otis (and Moose, Roscoe, Dotty, Daisy, and Ava).

Introduction: Don’t Bring the Truth to a Gunfight

Many are in shock that today the truth doesn’t seem to matter in politics. Every time US president Donald Trump tweets that a news article unfavorable to him is “FAKE NEWS!” they are aghast and disoriented. Every time he says something blatantly false, it adds a new bullet point to a list of lies and sets off a new circuit of outrage. The response is clear: we need to call out the lies and tell the truth! Educators have a crucial role to play here, for we are the ones who teach the truth to others, or who facilitate the collective realization of the truth. This analysis and proposal completely miss the mark: politics has never been about a correspondence with an existing truth. Indeed, when I hear people denounce our political scene as “post-truth,” I wonder when exactly they think it was that truth determined politics. The same goes for those who decry today’s “fake news.” Hasn’t the media always been an arena of political struggle? To claim that with Trump’s election we’ve entered a post-truth era of fake news is to claim that the domestic and international wars against First Nations, Black people, and people of color that were and are central to US democracy have been based on truthful politics and media.1 Political struggle rather concerns the formulation of new truths and, more importantly, the materialization of those truths. Our contemporary moment thus offers an important opportunity for the Left to embrace political struggle, to stake out positions, and to fight for those positions. On the one hand, it seems reasonable to propose that we reject the “posttruth” designation altogether. After all, doesn’t the repetition of that language serve to further entrench the liberal narrative of a democracy corrupted? I would answer this question affirmatively. But, on the other hand, I would also caution that we should not—and in fact cannot—exhaustively determine the uses to which this language will be put and the effects that such usage will have. Thus, I’d like to hang on to the “post-truth” for now, but I’d like to propose a particular conceptualization of it, one that I believe holds political and pedagogical promise

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as a frame for engaging in transformative praxis. To be post-truth, so I  wish to suggest, is not to be “anti-truth” or even “without truth.” Instead, we should understand the relationship between the “post-truth” and “the truth” in the same way that Jean-François Lyotard formulated the relationship between the modern and the postmodern. For Lyotard, the postmodern is not a negation, annihilation, or supersession of the modern. There is no dialectic of or between either. The postmodern doesn’t come after the modern, for such a progression would itself be decidedly modern. No, the postmodern “is undoubtedly part of the modern,” Lyotard tells us.2 Even Christianity has its own postmodern inflection (for who can really prove that Christ isn’t a phony?).3 The postmodern inhabits the modern, interrupting it: “The postmodern would be that which in the modern invokes the unpresentable in presentation itself, that which refuses the consolation of correct forms, refuses the consensus of taste permitting a common experience of nostalgia for the impossible, and inquires into new presentations—not to take pleasure in them, but to better produce the feeling that there is something unpresentable.”4 The modern is that which offers a narrative of understanding, cohesion, and unity; the postmodern is that which interrupts it. The modern itself isn’t a narrative. The modern can be read as a narrative, but it can also be understood in relation to institutions, philosophy, science, art, and so on. The postmodern is that for which these can’t account, an excess of thought, feeling, and being. At one point he offers that “postmodernity is also, or first of all, a question of expressions of thought: in art, literature, philosophy, politics.”5 As a surplus of the modern that cannot be tamed, the postmodern is that which certain modes of politics and forms of governance attempt to suppress, regulate, or annihilate. What Lyotard is after is a form of life that doesn’t accede to this repression, but not so that the different and the new can be uncritically celebrated (an important injunction that his critics always overlook). The postmodern project is an investigation into the rules governing reality to open up the possible. The post-truth designation, on this reading, is an occasion to refuse the liberal nostalgia for the democratic and civil public sphere based on truthful exchange at the marketplace of ideas. Like the postmodern shows how the modern covers over difference and the rules and methods by which difference is accommodated or obliterated, the post-truth can agitate the political nature of truth and, more importantly, the pedagogy of truth. The post-truth, in other words, opens up a political project as well as a pedagogical one. The political project involves the power relations that compose truths, and the pedagogical project involves how

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we engage ourselves, each other, and the world in transformative processes as we formulate and realize these truths. These related but irreducible tasks are rarely thought together in academic literature. Radical political theory is littered with educational terms like learning, teaching, and even testing. The logics, trajectories, and politics inherent in these educational processes, however, are neither excavated nor explicated. The pedagogical dynamics of political struggles remain unconscious and unexamined, latent and assumed. One would think that this is where critical educational researchers would step in, but here, too, pedagogy is variously reduced to politics, sidelined by political analysis, or subjected to the service of politics. In the first case, pedagogy is collapsed into political revolution, in the second case it is benched so that analyses of neoliberalism can take center stage, and in the third case it is theorized and deployed with the aim of producing particular kinds of subjects who are capable of being part of a (democratic) order. In each instance, pedagogy itself is left untheorized.

Zombie intellectualism Not only is pedagogy untheorized, but the political domain into which it is subsumed or to the side of which it steps is at best impotent, and at worst destructive.6 One cause of this I label zombie intellectualism, and this ailment often takes the form of blog posts, articles, book chapters, and even entire books that do little else than denounce the present moment, condemn our political reality and subjectivity in near apocalyptic terms, whitewash history, and issue decrees to social movements. The reason I  term this zombie intellectualism is because it feeds off of political struggles but serves only to demobilize and demotivate them. It’s the same old ideology critique whose faith rests on the critical educator awakening the stupid masses to the reality of our oppression. They tell us we are living in end times and at the end of democracy, reinforcing a triumphalist narrative of US democracy and romanticizing a past that’s never existed in this country. Usually these pieces end with nods to existing social movements, although tellingly the pronoun of social movements in this literature is always a “they” and never a “we,” because the authors are disconnected from any existing struggles. When the problem is posed as ignorance and complacency, it means that all theorists need to do is theorize, and that we need not leave the computer or the classroom. Zombie intellectualism is the latest trend in the academic left’s long history of armchair analysis.

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In Magical Marxism, Andy Merrifield notes that marxism has become too stagnant and predictable, too explanatory and stultifying. Workers and students don’t need any convincing that capitalism is a dead-end that has nothing to offer us. Young people can see in the pile of debt we accrue that capitalism has defuturized us. No critical pedagogy is necessary to lift the veil of ignorance, to engage in the process of demystification. At the same time, however, marxists have remained fixated on explanation and critique, spending all of their time documenting, detailing, and analyzing capital’s destructive tendencies. Merrifield takes aim specifically at the radical academics who occupy the pages of the New Left Review. “The journal’s lack of imagination,” he contends, “the disdain it shows towards little germs of new possibilities quietly incubating in the world, its obsession with scouring the political landscape for global oppositional forces, and nothing less, betrays the mandarin cynicism it contents itself with peddling.”7 Even more debilitating are the counterproductive (read: counterrevolutionary) critiques propagated. As Curry Malott has persuasively demonstrated, the field of critical education remains mired in anti-communism and has in essence closed ranks with imperialism and its mouthpieces. Critical educators often echo the demands of US imperialism, deploying its language, categories of analysis, and even judgments. Malott documents the appearance of (always unsubstantiated) anti-communist declarations in the founding and more recent texts of critical pedagogy, concluding that the entire school of thought was established as a dismissal of socialism and the legacy of actually existing resistance to exploitation and oppression.8 The academic left is, he says, busy fighting the specter of Stalin instead of actual manifestations of oppression, busy fighting the mistakes of others in past centuries instead of fighting for a better world. Even marxist literature in education tends to be on the defensive, remaining content with showing—over and over again—that it is really the logic of capital that is the problem. When I  read zombie intellectuals, I’m reminded of Eve Sedgwick’s essay “Paranoid Reading, Reparative Reading, or, You’re so Paranoid you Probably Think this Essay is About You.” She questions the certain faith the critical theorists place in the act of exposure: “Like the deinstitutionalized person on the street who, betrayed and plotted against by everyone else in the city, still urges on you the finger-worn dossier bristling with his precious correspondence, paranoia for all its vaunted suspicion acts as though its work would be accomplished if only it could finally, this time, somehow get its story truly known.”9 If only our students could understand that it is really capitalism that is at fault, then the revolution

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will come! If only our political analysis were finally correct and known, the system would surely collapse! If only we told teachers that they have to be dangerous, then we can have a real public sphere! In addition to an assumed ignorance of others, the critical academic exists in and insists on “a paranoid temporality . . . in which yesterday can’t be allowed to have differed from today and tomorrow must be even more so.”10 Oppression and exploitation, they tell us, are everywhere, have been everywhere, will always be everywhere. The strategy, apparently, is to keep listing everything that’s wrong with neoliberalism or capitalism until change springs forth and organically unfolds. The critical educator’s role is of an enlightened and isolated researcher who reveals the truth but who can’t stray too far from the mainstream, as we can’t risk too much. So we end our articles or chapters with vague calls for resistance, a few sentences to rouse the masses into action. Affirming the importance of education, we insist that public education and pedagogy are imperative in the fight for a just world. And then, radio silence (until the next blog post). Here I wholeheartedly endorse Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s call in the opening chapter of Assembly: “So, let’s be done with public intellectuals!”11 It’s not enough to write accessible blog posts; we have to “engage cooperatively in processes of co-research, valorizing and contributing to the theoretical knowledges and political decision-making that emerge from the movements.”12 We have to move with and be guided by the movements.

The political-subjective-economy of the post-truth Those of us who believe that educational theory has something important to offer to contemporary movements have several tasks. The most imperative to my mind is the need to think more deeply, carefully, and hopefully about both our political and pedagogical commitments. We have to engage in revolutionary critique and analysis, but from within global struggles and the ongoing legacy of existing alternative social formations. We can’t assume that this critique itself does anything. In fact, the more I  move in these struggles, the less I’m convinced that we need more critique. We throw up barricades not in response to the written word but because the material conditions of our existence compel us. To be sure, the spontaneity of action and responsive resistance needs to be synthesized with analysis and critique, but we need more: we need organization, force, and imagination. Taking a positive position on the post-truth era can help us clarify, actualize, and mobilize these different valences of political struggle,

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helping us to break out of the political-economic configuration that keeps us stuck in the present, which, through a synthesis of Jodi Dean and Lyotard, I term democratic communicative capitalism. Although Lyotard’s philosophy undoubtedly emerges partially in response to the Nazi project to annihilate difference, he is just as worried about democracy, and his critique of democracy is really no less damning than his critique of fascism. Writing after the overthrow and dissolution of the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc in Eastern Europe, Lyotard labels liberal democracy and imperialism as “the system.” Liberal, imperialist democracy emerges triumphant not because it is the most enlightened system, but because it is the most effective one, the system that adheres best to the performativity criterion. As he writes in one of his fables, “The Intimacy of Terror”: It does not permit peace, it guarantees security, by means of competition. It does not promise progress, it guarantees development, by the same means. It has no others. It arouses disparities, it solicits divergences, multiculturalism is agreeable to it but under the condition of an agreement concerning the rules of disagreement. This is what is called consensus. The intrinsic constitution of the system is not subject to radical upheaval, only to revision.13

Democracy is based on principles of dialogue, deliberation, transparency, and communication. It is an open system that not only accommodates, but actively solicits differences and disagreements. To be sure, there are limits. Not any sort of difference will be acceptable, especially one that refuses or cannot acknowledge the system and its rules. But differences in general are to be encouraged and variously reconciled, accommodated, tolerated, or tamed. The system’s rules are even open to debate, dialogue, and transformation. There is something deeper that democracy cannot tolerate, however, something that betrays all of its principles. Lyotard calls this “the secret life.” The secret life is opposed to the public, democratic life, the life that is visible and open. The secret life is an internal region, an inhuman region, one that exceeds knowledge, discourse, and representation. The secret life is the realm of the incommunicable and the opaque, a place you go—alone and with others—to “encounter what you are unaware of.”14 Democracy can’t condone any secrets, and wages a war on this region. “Heavy pressures are put on silence, to give birth to expression.”15 Democracy works to produce us as subjects that babble endlessly, express themselves constantly, who feel that if we are not exposed then we do not exist. In this way, democracy works hand in glove with capitalism, for only once things are expressed can they be exchanged.

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If Lyotard shows us the political conditions of our post-truth era, then it’s Jodi Dean who illuminates the economic conditions through her work on communicative capitalism. This is the term she borrows from Paul Passavant to name our contemporary networked society in which democracy and capitalism have become tightly wedded through the proliferation of networked technologies and the profound developments in information and communication apparatuses. Networked technologies embody and actualize the ideals, processes, and logics central to democracy:  access, participation, inclusion, diversity, critique, and input. As these technologies develop and intensify (in speed, capacity, and so on), so does democracy. For example, when there are threats to exacerbate unequal access to the internet (like the repeal of net neutrality in the United States), then these are framed as threats to democracy. Capitalist telecommunication corporations become the answers to the lack of—or deficiency in—democratic praxis. The latest gadgets and social media platforms make democracy more efficient and comprehensive because they facilitate discussion, conversation, and debate. We can debate endlessly with others known and unknown, and we can form alliances with people we would never have come into contact with otherwise. Anyone with access to a computer or smartphone can hop onto a free WiFi network and start a blog, vlog, Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, or Snapchat account and intervene in any number of debates instantaneously, and endlessly. The surest way to have a complaint about anything—a private corporation or individual, or a public entity or official—addressed is to post it on social media. One might think that an increase in equity and diversity would result from the rapid spread of these technologies that facilitate participation and deliberation, but the opposite is the case. Communicative capitalism “coincides with extreme corporatization, financialization, and privatization across the globe.”16 Extra participation spells extra consumption and production for the global elite at the expense of the global poor. There is the physical wealth produced through the production of these technologies and gadgets—things like data servers, databases and computers, smartphones and cables, satellites and routers, and all of the raw materials that go into producing and maintaining these things. There is also the expropriation of information, data, and social relations produced through our use of these devices. Every click, “heart,” or “like” is data bundled and sold to corporations (and used for state surveillance). This expropriation is the rent we pay just to live and communicate in contemporary capitalism. Just as important is the ideological work communicative capitalism does of erasing—or, better, smoothing over—the antagonism that is fundamental to political organization and struggle. The constant circulation of ideas, memes,

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blog posts, and so on contributes “to the billions of nuggets of information and affect trying to catch and hold attention, to push or saw opinion, taste, and trends in one direction rather than another.”17 The “search for the truth” is crucial to this operation. There is always something more to find out, another angle to consider, another source to pursue, another link to follow. And as we are on our search for the truth about one thing, another tragedy starts circulating, another hashtag starts trending, and we are off again. There is always more to learn, something else to discover, and nothing can ever seem to cohere. The need to constantly express that Lyotard articulates thus has a flipside: the need to constantly seek out others’ expressions. It’s not enough for us to tell our secrets, we need to know everyone else’s secrets too. We need to comment on them, rank them, share them. This is the ethos of social media. And here we have the link between Lyotard and Dean: Democracy produces the subject compelled to express, and communicative capitalism provides the circuits to capture and enthrall that expression and the implacable pursuit of the truth, which, while we may insist is knowable, is eternally deferred. This is how the post-truth relates to the truth: the post-truth is the truth not “at its end, but in a nascent state, and this state is recurrent.”18 In her first book on the topic, Dean theorizes that the public and the secret together prop up communicative capitalism. She doesn’t care about what the secret is, just the form that it takes as the necessary outside to the public. The secret can never actually be revealed, and so it is “the form through which the fantasy of the public takes account of its failures in advance. No inclusion, whether of groups or information, people or issues, will provide enough legitimacy to justify what is claimed in the nature of the public.”19 Stated differently, the fact that the secret will always be there to be discovered provides democracy with a perpetual out or excuse. Whereas Lyotard argues that democracy can’t tolerate the secret, Dean argues that democracy needs the secret, needs its permanent other. What really matters, however, is how we relate to the secret: Do we compel it into expression or do we find respite and resistance in it? The crisis of symbolic efficiency accelerates the tempo of democratic communicative capitalism. Put simply, symbolic efficiency is that which fills in the gaps between signification and substance, allowing for the mobility and transmission of information and meaning. This crisis “designates the fundamental uncertainty accompanying the impossibility of totalization:  that is, of fully anchoring or pinning down meaning.”20 Democracy isn’t a master signifier that can tie up these loose ends, but rather gives political form to the drive of communicative capitalism, providing the ideological force that

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makes our contradictory actions and knowledges cohere. In this scene, to demand democracy is to demand more capitalism, and vice versa. What’s more, even anti-capitalist critiques and resistances are flattened and dulled in this configuration. To insist on the pursuit of the truth is a trap that keeps us stuck in the reflexive circuits of democratic communicative capitalism. If Dean provides us with a way to understand the contemporary intermingling of capitalism and liberalized democracy that emerges from the development of communication networks, Lyotard gives us a critique of democracy that demonstrates how this intermingling evolves out of the very ethos of democracy.

Politics and pedagogy The right wing knows all of this. They don’t make appeals to the truth. They make appeals to beliefs and convictions. If those beliefs and desires contradict some set of evidence, then that evidence is fake. That is what Donald Trump means when he tweets “FAKE NEWS!” It isn’t an assertion of what the truth really is (as if the news had some innate relationship to truth and constituted “the real”). It isn’t an objection based on an understanding of language as a neutral and objective container of ideas, nor is it based on an understanding of language as a weapon of persuasion. Rather, the “FAKE NEWS” tweet is intended as an anticipatory interpellation. It’s an assertion of belief of what should be, a performative utterance meant to organize and intensify one side—his side—of the political. To reply that the news isn’t fake, that the fake news designation only applies to news that he doesn’t like, news that makes his side look bad, misses the point completely. Sure, the right wing preaches about the importance of “freedom of speech,” but they clearly only mean their speech. They’ll attack left-wing academics for their tweets and try to get them fired while they protest against a campus banning a neo-Nazi speaker. Recently, Trump got backlash for sharing anti-Islamic propaganda videos from a neo-Nazi group in Britain. Their veracity was first called into question and then disproven. When confronted with this, Trump’s press secretary totally disregarded the attack: “Whether it’s a real video, the threat is real,” she said.21 This is why the right wing is winning:  they know they have enemies and they have allies, and together they want to defeat those enemies. To defeat those enemies, they mobilize, organize, intervene, and act collectively. They imagine the future they want. They talk to each other, they create their own ideological bubbles from which to act, resist, take swings. They capture the state and wield

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it toward their ends. They don’t care about what the other side thinks. They believe in themselves and their movement. They don’t think their people need to be enlightened by public intellectuals. In sum, the right wing has broken out of the drive of democratic communicative capitalism through their embrace of politics. It’s time we do the same. This isn’t an embrace of relativism. I’m not saying that what is true for some is false for others, or that we should never make appeals to the truth. But we can’t position politics outside of the truth or pretend that our politics is derived from the truth. The truth is always framed and contextualized, and so we need to ask what certain truths are doing in certain moments, what their material effects will be. Consider the Syrian Arab Army’s liberation of Aleppo in December 2016. The US government went on a media offensive against Syria and its allies by hurling accusations of human rights abuses and barbarism. The reports coming out of Aleppo at the time were all filtered ideologically through either the government or the militant (read: radical Islamist) groups.22 Even the “objective” source for the mainstream media, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, who was UN Human Rights commissioner, was a Jordanian prince, which is significant as Jordan is the main base for CIA operations in Syria. As one activist organization reported during the liberation battle, “Those who are trying to definitively suss out all the competing claims from the battlefield, from computers thousands of miles away and without their own sources on the ground, are deluding themselves.”23 One couldn’t know definitively what was and wasn’t happening and so could rely only on politics. Even if one was absolutely certain of some truth, that truth would have served to reinforce one ideological position or another. None of this is to say that appeals to the truth aren’t important, for they surely are. It is important to call out the lies propagated by the right wing to promote oppression and exploitation. My point is that this is a failed political strategy because it rests on the idea that there is a truth that can bridge all divisions and erase all antagonisms, something we can all agree on, something that transcends our structural positions in society. I’m also not arguing that “might makes right.” If I  was, then I  would be affirming that what is should be. My position rather is that might makes; that it is ultimately force that makes our world, not abstract ideals or transcendent truths. In his study of public space and social justice, Don Mitchell shows how “the public” is never decided a priori but is always the result of concerted action on behalf of the excluded. Certain groups, that is, only become part of the public to the extent to which they force a new configuration of the public. One of the ways Mitchell demonstrates this is by examining the history of speech regulations in

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the United States. One common thread throughout Supreme Court rulings on protests and “free speech” is the idea that “a democratic polity requires dissenting ideas; these ideas, however, have to stand or fall on their own merits as they enter into competition with other ideas; the better ideas win, but only by being tested against less worthy ideas.”24 This is where we get to the “marketplace of ideas,” which only works if we accept the market for what it actually is. Bourgeois ideologues (on the Supreme Court and everywhere) want us to think of the marketplace of ideas like they want us to think about any marketplace: a space in which different groups hang commodities with price tags and descriptions for buyers to peruse at their leisure until they decide on the one or ones they’d like to purchase. Setting aside the characterization of ideas as commodities, this is liberal ideology at its purest in that it completely ignores power, ownership, subjectivity, and history. First there is the question of who has admittance to the marketplace to buy and sell, as marketplaces are always exclusionary. Even in so-called free societies there are a host of racialized, gendered, and classed rules (e.g., dress codes, age limits) and the construction of some as “window shoppers” and others as “loiterers.” Second, even if everyone was allowed to participate in the marketplace, some clearly have more capital than others and therefore can purchase preferential locations with bigger lots, recruit and fund designers, advertisers, hawks, and so on, to sell their products. They can buy out their competitors, create legislative barriers to entry, establish monopolies. Third, in order for some to have capital, others have to be deprived of it. There is an even more fundamental problem with the marketplace of ideas, which is the question of determining what constitutes the competitive order in the first place. Such a rational order is highly exclusive and works to protect and legitimate repressive orders.25 The excluded are by definition irrational, disorderly, and without access to the marketplace. And so, as a result of struggle, Mitchell says, “the seeming irrationality of violence . . . becomes a rational means for redressing the irrationality of injustice, for withdrawing consent from an order that does not deserve to be legitimated.”26 The marketplace is not a site of idyllic exchange but of coercion, power, and struggle, and the capitalist marketplace was founded on slavery, genocide, and the expropriation of many by law and individual and state acts of terror. If this order is to be transformed then there must be a forceful disorder. The direction of that disorder will determine the character of the political thrust but, regardless of its character, without force there is no transformation. As Marx put it, “force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with the new.”27

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Politics and Pedagogy in the “Post-Truth” Era

The issue of transformation, force, and disorder brings us to pedagogy, a term that groups together modes and relations of intentional engagement with others, ourselves, and the world. Pedagogy is a term that’s used much more often than it’s defined. It mostly designates the transmission of information from one point to another. A more open use of the term is found in fields like critical pedagogy. Here pedagogy signals the communication, dissemination, or production of knowledge, analysis, and theoretical frameworks. The first defines pedagogy too narrowly and narrows pedagogy to learning, but the second defines it too broadly and, in doing so, reduces pedagogy to politics and critique. What we need to do is open the definition of pedagogy up, to think more precisely about particular pedagogical forms, and to theorize their relation to politics. In his first-hand account of the Bolshevik Revolution, Ten Days that Shook the World, John Reed relays the taut connection between education and political struggle. After the 1917 February Revolution that overthrew the hated Czar, power consolidated in two ends:  at the duma and the soviets. The untenable situation couldn’t last, and it was made all the more untenable by the drawnout bloodiness and despair of World War I, which in turn was exacerbated by economic crisis. A month before the October Revolution that would usher in the world’s first successful socialist revolution, Reed traveled to the war front to visit the 12th Army regiment at Riga, where an intense battle with invading Germans raged. “We came down to the front,” he recalls, “where gaunt and bootless men sickened in the mud of desperate trenches; and when they saw us they started up, with their pinched faces and the flesh showing blue through their torn clothing, demanding eagerly, ‘Did you bring anything to read?’ ”28 They didn’t ask for food, water, or medicine, but for reading materials! The army had their own soviets, organs of training for self-government and sites of theoretical debate and resistance organizing, and so the soldiers were not asking for just any materials, but for pamphlets and magazines addressing the burning issues facing the struggle. In an essay on the early years of the revolution, Richard Becker attributes the survival of the soviet state to “the revolutionary enthusiasm unleashed by the revolution itself.”29 He likens it to a thermonuclear explosion, in that “there is no way to conceive of the tremendous amount of energy released when there is fusion. There is no way of calculating this factor in history, of what people are really able to do, of what is really possible, of the potential that lies within the oppressed classes.”30 Becker gives us a theoretical form to understand why the soldiers privileged their educational demand over even the demand for the basic necessities to sustain life.

Introduction

13

While this powerfully encapsulates the educational thrust of the energy released during revolutions, there is also an inherent tension—or even antagonism—between pedagogy and politics that needs to be acknowledged, respected, and negotiated; as the struggle for power, politics combines direction and ideological content, while pedagogy is the actualization of forms and logics of education, rather than content. Politics is binary (one is for something and against other things) while pedagogy is planar. The two are part of a constellation in which different and even antagonistic elements exist in inextricable tensity, and so the task for a political pedagogy is not for one to conquer the other but instead to navigate these agonisms.31 The gaps and contradictions between different elements are not deficiencies to be resolved but necessary resources for theory and praxis in that they mark out the coordinates of struggle. In fact, traversing constellations is in itself a pedagogical process, as new modes of life are generated from within the emergent and discordant spaces between concepts and practices. This book theorizes this heterogeneous configuration as an educational resource for the collective navigation of contemporary political, social, and economic struggles. As such, the differences between openness and prescription, potentiality and execution, micropolitics and insurrection, theory and practice, form and content, certainty and ambiguity, strength and weakness, are illuminated but nowhere resolved. While I critique critical education’s insistence on critique, I don’t call for an abandonment of it but rather for a different manner of critique that begins with different content and theoretical dispositions, and that quickly opens onto other educational registers and reasonings, particularly the affective and the ontological. In this, I’m mostly interested in generation rather than condemnation (but there is some of that too). Through writing the book I’ve found that while politics and pedagogy are distinct, they also are each overdetermined by the other and, consequently, this book occurs on particular ideological and educational horizons. Educationally, I’m after modes of engagement that disorient, disorder, and disrupt, and ideologically I’m writing from within projects searching for and enacting alternatives to the present order, alternatives that are simultaneously new, old, and unknown.32

Constitution To be “post” is necessarily to be unstable. Categories, subject positions, assumptions, and so on, are thrown up in the air, no longer fixed; one can’t

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Politics and Pedagogy in the “Post-Truth” Era

confidently determine the coordinates of the moment. In a sense, then, pedagogy is always “post” in the strictly Lyotardian sense of the term. Pedagogical engagements are, in other words, invariably destabilizing, uncertain, and indeterminate. This is why it’s necessary for political struggles to take pedagogy seriously. It is also, consequently, why pedagogy is such a difficult process to activate, and why pedagogy is so often reduced to techniques of instruction or methods of transmission. Because pedagogy is such a muddled but necessary concept, I begin this book with an examination of different pedagogical logics and their relationship to modes of production. The first chapter serves as a bridge of sorts from my previous book, Communist Study, to the present one. In that book, which was written just after I  defended my dissertation, I  developed a partisan theory of studying, which was posed against the logic of learning. In short, learning, as the process of acquiring preexisting knowledges, habits, skills, ideological dispositions, and so on, is the pedagogical motor of the capitalist mode of production. Demanding actualization and measurement, which in turn rest on predetermined benchmarks and values, learning keeps us locked in the present. Against this, studying is a pedagogy that produces—and then resides in—a break in the present by unleashing potentiality. When studying, that is, all doors remain open, and the foreordained order is suspended; the subject is radically (even painfully) open, deindividuated and commoned, positively charged but without particular direction. Openness and indeterminacy are important moments of transition, but they aren’t destinations. I remember one time at a march a disagreement emerged over which road to take. The leaders (who of course weren’t elected or vetted through any process) decided to stop, take an intersection, and hold a meeting! This lack is the first appearance of the contradiction between pedagogy and politics. I  show that studying is the pedagogical aperture for political struggle and, using Dean’s recent work on the communist party, argue that studying has to be organized or else potentiality will turn to impotence. What I call the “party sphere” generates the affective and explanatory conditions necessary for organizing for and enacting a new power, and I show this through the stories of several young communists. Dean holds that the crowd doesn’t have a politics, but I think the situation is a bit more complicated. Crowds are apolitical in the abstract, but they are always structured by politics before and as they form, and the communist party struggles to determine these conditions. To enter into the crowd entails a leap into the gap of the unknown. And yet the gap exists in relation to something. There is never only pure unknown; the gap exists

Introduction

15

between things. At base, then, the party aggregates crowds to advance actual manifestations of study and struggle. Having established the decisive nature of political organization, in the next three chapters I articulate educational paradigms for studying. A short art video furnishes the backdrop for Chapter 2, giving thrust to an exploration of form and content, a reconsideration of potentiality, and the introduction of temporality and aesthetics. The video under consideration, A Cure for Being Ordinary, by Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby, induces altered temporal states through its form and the “Law of the Clock” through its content. The video’s protagonist, Tim Eckman, recounts his dysfunctional relationship to time, and how he found freedom in the “breaks” between times, and ultimately in the rafters above his former cubicle. Paolo Virno’s reflections on memory and déjà vu let me show how capital drives a temporal wedge between potentiality and act, inhibiting our ability to feel the infinity of potentiality and to grasp the importance of saturating history ideologically. To address this latter inhibition, and to explain how Eckman remains isolated and individuated, I bring in a marxist philosophy of language, which reconstitutes Eckman’s defection into a collective struggle. Duke and Battersby seem to indicate this necessity, as they give the endless circulation of the city—and not Eckman—the last word. I propose a particular pedagogical praxis for enacting such a collective defection, which I  term sinthomostudying, in the third chapter. This praxis is posed against the current structure of capitalism—which I  demarcate as a triumvirate of capital, learning, and debt—and is produced by studying Lee Edelman’s hopeless, antisocial wager. I  go first to his polemic, No Future, which figures the Child as the organizing principle of a reproductive futurism that binds us to identity, meaning, repetition, and a future that can only be the same as the present, and which figures queerness as that which opposes the future and embraces the death drive. Sinthomostudying moves us away from the false promissory note of the future—and the debt that binds us to it—as it exposes the gap between the symbolic and the real as constitutive of being. Sinthomostudying exerts a pedagogical force that harnesses the death drive and unravels the solidity of the subject and its identities that try (impossibly) to suture the gap. Having approached the nexus between pedagogy and politics, I pivot to examine the death drive’s differing manifestations under distinctive configurations of capitalism to guard against sinthomostudying being swept back into the circuits of democratic communicative capitalism. The pedagogical articulation in Chapter  4 emerges from within urban struggles, which I  contend are defined not by their location but by their

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Politics and Pedagogy in the “Post-Truth” Era

aspirations, effects, and amplitude. Specifically, I propose an urbanist pedagogy, a specific pedagogical archetype oriented toward the creation of the urban and constitutive of urbanization and urban revolt. To do this, I call on Henri Lefebvre and Lyotard, who together allow me to advance a conception of the urban not as an object or thing, but as an incommunicable process that entails two distinct and interrelated educational elements: explosive confrontation and stupor. The urban is defined by the endless confrontations that come to a head through encounters with differences as they negotiate the “right to the city” and the resulting shifting centrality, an excessive event that tends toward use value. Lefebvre, however, denies the urban its secret, and in so doing gives the urban over to capital and its agents of quantification. Thus, I  propose that the right to the city must be accompanied by a “right to the domus,” the domus being a stupid resistance to useful thinking and acting. To make these attributes more concrete, I read this urbanist pedagogy through a set of protest movements in West Germany in the 1980s. In the book’s final chapters I  return to the pedagogical form and pulse of the party. In Chapter  5, originally cowritten with Tyson Lewis, I  show how, because democracy and capitalism rest on an aesthetic of the beautiful, the communist party has to be organized around the aesthetic of the sublime. Realigning radical politics through the sublime, I  turn again to Lyotard, but this time to his pedagogical musings on teaching philosophy, which is, at base, not about understanding but about disrupting understanding to get beyond comprehension and at the unpresentable. Teaching philosophy is precisely not about communication, and it interrupts communicative circuits by annihilating itself in its very articulation. In this way, philosophy is a practice of sinthomostudiers as they approach the collective singular zero(s) of being. Although Lyotard’s pedagogical practice and its sublime aesthetic unconscious point us out of democratic communicative capitalism, the question of direction once again returns us to politics, and thus to the communist party. The chapter ends by reading an (un)communicative communist aesthetic pedagogy through a study group in the Jim Crow south. In this group, a collective reading of the party newspaper effects an excessive surplus that provokes a sense of ineffable sublimity and partisan opacity. Returning to the problem of zombie intellectualism, in the last chapter I move to theorize a magical marxist pedagogy, but one that finds its raw materials in the actually existing socialist struggle and the social formations it has produced. This gives us a political problem to be solved pedagogically, and I  show this first by turning to the three volumes of Marx’s Capital, strategically reading the

Introduction

17

texts for explicit and implicit references to communism, and demonstrating that Marx figures communism in different and even antagonistic ways. After this, I turn to the future—or what comes after capital—and I do this by asserting an astonishingly overlooked fact:  we have already been post-capitalist. Our history and present have to be the real stuff of magical pedagogy, and the hope is that this chapter can serve as a corrective that invigorates and provokes. This section of the chapter is what comes closest to a critical expose in this book, but the point is to prove that an alternative has already existed, a sort of reckoning with our past so we can (critically) inhabit our victorious histories. In the final section of the chapter, I turn to the party’s program, which I posit as a collective organizing testament that moves from critique to imagination, making the present not only seem detestable, but also feel foreign, instituting the affective disjointedness of collective, partisan sinthomostudying that breeds political struggle. Closing out with a concrete example of such an organizing apparatus affirms again the present links to which we can attach ourselves. The appendix to the book is one take on the domestic political landscape, although it’s a take that prioritizes the international situation. The coordinates in which we operate are ceaselessly shifting, and now so more than in recent history. For the entirety of my life, the US political establishment has remained relatively stable, and US hegemony undeniably dominant. This is changing now. The decline of US hegemony has the liberal wing of the bourgeoisie running scared, and this motivates their “resistance” to the current president. But personalities do not politics make, and liberals can’t lead resistance movements. We need independent political analysis, and the appendix can be viewed as an effort at identifying the concrete fractures and gaps in the world we can force open. There are several themes that run throughout the book, like aesthetics, temporality, opacity, futurity, incommunicability, collectivity, and force. Some themes are present chronologically while others make appearances, retreat, and reemerge later. Because political and ideological struggles can only be worked out through practice, that is, through the actually existing struggle of the working, oppressed, and dispossessed classes, I make no pretenses at formulating or presenting directives, dictates, or ultimatums. Although I  am a political organizer who seeks to merge politics and academia in many ways, an academic essentially wrote this book. The test of this book, as I argue in the conclusion, isn’t to be found in the present. I intend it as an offering to help us reimagine and reenact our ways of being together in ways that are just, sustainable, responsive, and expansive.

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Notes 1 For a few counterpoints, see Maximilian Forte, Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO’s War on Libya and Africa (Montreal: Baraka Books, 2012); Damien Sojoyner, First Strike: Educational Enclosures in Black Los Angeles (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016); Sandy Grande, Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015). 2 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence 1982–1985, trans. D. Barry, B. Maher, J. Pefanis, V. Spate, and M. Thomas (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988/1992), 12. 3 Ibid., Chapter 2. Here Lyotard clarifies his infamous report on knowledge and postmodernity, writing that he both oversimplified and overemphasized the category of the narrative. 4 Ibid., 15, emphasis added. 5 Ibid., 79. 6 While there are plenty of exceptions to this in the field of education writ large, there are very few in critical education. 7 Andy Merrifield, Magical Marxism: Subversive Politics and the Imagination (London: Pluto Press, 2011), 146. 8 Curry Stephenson Malott, History and Education: Engaging the Global Class War (New York: Peter Lang, 2016), 63. 9 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 138. 10 Ibid., 147. 11 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Assembly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 13. 12 Ibid. Although it’s worth noting that their analysis of social movements shows that they are disconnected themselves. This is especially obvious when they write that Black Lives Matter is “skeptical” of leadership, and that DeRay Mckesson is “relatively anonymous,” 11. 13 Jean-François Lyotard, Postmodern Fables, trans. G. V. D. Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 199. 14 Ibid., 117. See also Chapters 4 and 5 in my Communist Study: Education for the Commons (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016). 15 Ibid., 120. 16 Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 23. 17 Ibid., 24. 18 Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained, 13. 19 Jodi Dean, Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 43.

Introduction

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20 Jodi Dean, Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2010), 6. 21 Christina Wilkie (2017). “White House: It Doesn’t Matter if Anti-Muslim Videos Are Real Because the Threat Is Real,” CNBC, November 29. Available online: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/29/white-house-it-doesntmatter-if-anti-muslim-videos-are-real-the-threat-is-real.html (accessed November 30, 2017). 22 Social media timelines flooded with appeals to “the world” from radical Islamists linked with al-Nusra (called “rebels” by the mainstream media) like Bilal Abdul Kareem. As I scrolled through these, I thought to myself: “I’m sure if social media was around during the Civil War we would see these videos from slave-owners in the south detailing the savagery of the Union troops.” For Bilal Abdul Kareem’s track record as a propagandist for al-Nusra, see Ben Norton (2017). “Bilal Abdul Kareem, Prominent U.S. ‘Journalist’ in Syria, Serves as Mouthpiece for Violent Extremists,” Alternet, December 29. Available online: https://www.alternet.org/world/bilal-abdul-kareem-usjournalist-syria-aleppo-propaganda-extremist-rebels (accessed November 28, 2017). 23 Liberation Staff (2016). “Aleppo: The Frenzied Media Response and the Stakes for Syria.” Liberation News, December 20. Available online: https://www. liberationnews.org/aleppo-the-frenzied-media-response-and-the-stakes-for-syria/ (accessed November 30, 2017). 24 Don Mitchell, The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space (New York: Guilford Press, 2003), 47. 25 For more on this general point, see, for example, Nirmala Erevelles, Disability and Difference in Global Contexts: Enabling a Transformative Body Politic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Joy James and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, eds., The Black Feminist Reader (Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 2000). 26 Mitchell, The Right to the City, 53. 27 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (vol. 1), trans. S. Moore and E. Aveling (New York: International Publishers, 1867/1967), 703. 28 John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World (New York: Penguin Books, 1919/1977), 40. 29 Richard Becker, “The Early Years of the Russian Revolution,” in Storming the Gates: How the Russian Revolution Changed the World, ed. J. Cutter (San Francisco: Liberation Media, 2017), 39. 30 Ibid., 40. 31 For more on pedagogy as constellation, see my Communist Study, and Tyson E. Lewis, “Mapping the Constellation of Educational Marxism(s),” Educational Philosophy and Theory 44, no. s1 (2012): 98–114. 32 For more about this ideological horizon, see the introduction to my Communist Study, as well as the preface to my Education and the Production of Space: Political Pedagogy, Geography, and Urban Revolution (New York: Routledge, 2017).

1

Studying in the Party

When engaging in political dialogue and action, it is not uncommon to hear educational terms thrown around. We talk about testing our ideas in practice and about learning from our history. We form study groups. We question and revise our methods of facilitating meetings and of interacting with others. Politics is deeply educational. At the same time, the educational components of political movement building are rarely investigated in any rigorous manner. One of the most important contributions that educational philosophy can offer radical politics is this investigation. We can help develop the tools, concepts, frameworks, and languages with which to better understand contemporary political educational processes, and construct and enact alternative and oppositional processes. A  driving theme of this book is the exploration and articulation of such alternatives, and the purpose of this chapter is to politically theorize and push forward a specific educational praxis:  studying. Research on studying emerges within the abundance of educational literature on neoliberalism, and it makes the important contribution of noting that, as a social, economic, and biopolitical regime, capitalism is legitimated and reproduced through the logic of learning. Studying is proposed as an alternative educational logic that can push past the educational limits inherent in the capitalist mode of production. Yet studying hasn’t been able to address its inherent political limitations. In particular, studying has remained merely an alternative, and hasn’t been theorized as an oppositional pedagogical logic. For this to happen, studying has to be political while remaining educational, a paradox that points to the question of organization. I begin this chapter by drawing out the connection between learning and capitalism, showing why learning is so pivotal for the reproduction and maintenance of capitalism’s hegemonic grip and, therefore, why it is an important target for developing counter-hegemonies. Seen in this light, education does not follow from or arise in response to, but plays a key role in producing the

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Politics and Pedagogy in the “Post-Truth” Era

political–economic order. I next move to an elaboration of studying, which is not positioned against learning writ large, but rather as a type of ellipses within learning, as an act that opens education up to the possibility that things might be radically otherwise. To draw out what I  call the present political limits of study, I turn to Dean’s recent work on crowds, in which she argues that the crowd event produces a discharge of equality that introduces a gap in the present order. Studying, I posit, is the educational logic of the crowd. While the inauguration of the gap of possibility that the study of the crowd generates is necessary for politics, it is not sufficient. To back this up, I refer to two examples of radical study:  hacking and Occupy Wall Street. Taken together, these examples reveal that, because studying lacks direction and infrastructure, it can be reabsorbed within the dynamics of capital accumulation or cut short through state repression. Dean offers a corrective that the Left must take seriously: the party. For Dean, the party is not a master, director, or prophet, but rather a type of affective infrastructure that maintains the gap of possibility and that, as I suggest, organizes and defends study, even in the direst and most hopeless of circumstances. Yet the party doesn’t emerge out of abstract crowds, but out of  concrete ones gathered for particular purposes, which brings the question of explanation and learning back into the fold.

The educational limits to capitalism If capitalism is predicated upon the dispersion of learning throughout society, then the logic of learning represents a crucial educational limit to the reproduction of capitalist social, economic, and biopolitical relationships, or what I  will collectively refer to as “production relations.” Employing a Foucauldian analysis, Maarten Simons and Jan Masschelein have argued that the formation of a “learning apparatus” has been central to the rise of neoliberal governmentality. Governmentality refers to the tethering together of the state, the economy, and processes of subjectification. A transformation in sovereign rule, governmentality is a shifting and diffuse but identifiable network of power through state and non-state actors that weds together government and selfgovernment, politics and subjectivity—and learning is the fulcrum. Simons and Masschelein make four points to demonstrate the centrality of the learning apparatus in contemporary society. They first argue that learning has become the main engine of the economy, which is variously conceived of as the knowledge, information, or creative economy. Not only is education

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subjected to economics (which is what most critiques of neoliberalism focus on), but education itself is a “supplier” of the knowledge economy. Workers have knowledge, but they can always gain more knowledge. This leads to the second supporting claim, which is the emergence of “lifelong learning.” Because of the constantly changing nature of the economy and society, we have to continually subject ourselves to learning in order to fit the needs of global capital and to continually (try to) attain happiness, satisfaction, and health. The school, on this model, teaches people how to learn so that they can enter adulthood, which is where one never stops learning. Moreover, adulthood—true, autonomous being—is defined by one taking responsibility for one’s own learning, and this is the third aspect of the learning apparatus. “Learners,” in this perspective, “should become the ‘managers’ of their own learning, for example, by developing their own learning strategy, monitoring the process, and evaluating the results.”1 The fourth point is that today the results of learning have to be employable. This is what the notion of “competencies” means today:  they are the “outcome of learning and the input for the labor market and society.”2 The state withdraws from the management of society and any responsibilities toward the collective because there is no more collective; there is only an agglomeration of individual entrepreneurial selves who are free to learn and relearn, and who are solely responsible for their own lot in life. One can only blame one’s poor educational choices for their circumstances, and one can only undertake a new learning project to improve them. The key lesson to take from Simons and Masschelein is that we can’t “learn” to be free, because learning is the very mechanism through which we reinforce our subjection to governmentality. Of course, it isn’t our subjection to an amorphous, omnipotent, and nebulous set of contingencies that can never be pinned down or resisted, as they claim, but rather our subjection to contemporary production relations. The learning society catalyzes a discursive shift, which in turn constrains the definition of education, and hence what it can and can’t be. This is Gert Biesta’s argument. The “language of learning” now dominates not only education but society as a whole. In an early book, he identifies three main problems with the language of learning: (1) that it formulates education as an economic exchange between the consumer (student) and provider (teacher); (2) that in this model the teacher is there to meet the needs of the student; and (3) that education is viewed as a commodity, or a thing, that can be transferred, transmitted, and so on.3 As a result of these three problems, questions about the direction and purpose of education are reduced to whatever the flexible, global market desires and needs, eclipsing the possibility for dialogue or professional judgement.

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In a more recent book, he turns away from explicit talk of the commodity and the market, and locates two related but more general problems with learning: (1) that learning designates a process and doesn’t entail any particular content; and (2)  that learning individualizes education, eradicating the need for an educational relationship. Instead of an educational relationship, there arises educational accountability, which seeks to eradicate the risk inherent in education.4 Through a deconstructive line of thought, Biesta argues that what makes education difficult, risky, and impossible is what makes it educational. If education could be guaranteed, it would be transmission, and it wouldn’t involve human subjectivity. Education must remain unpredictable and open. In terms of an educational response, Lewis has proposed the richest counter-logic to learning. Bringing Giorgio Agamben into the conversation, he identifies the notion of potentiality at the center of neoliberal capitalism as that which drives neoliberalism’s logic of learning. Potentiality can be broken down into two types: generic and effective. Generic potentiality is the common meaning potentiality takes on, in which potentiality is the passage from potentiality to actuality, from the state of “I can” to the act of doing or being. Neoliberal capitalism and its logic of learning are “anchored in an ontology of generic potentiality as a ‘not yet’ that ‘must be’ made manifest in measurably determinate, socially useful, and economically manageable skill sets.”5 Learning is defined by the achievement of a predetermined end, which is why learning is always measureable and testable. Benchmarks are then established to chart one’s progress along the way to a learning outcome, objective, or goal. The irony of generic potentiality is that through the passage to actuality, potentiality is destroyed: one is no longer in potential, one no longer can but is. Thus, we arrive at the other form of potentiality:  effective potentiality, or potentiality freed from the actualization imperative. Effective potentiality is, therefore, the potential to be and not to be, to do and not to do. Whereas generic potentiality is a potentiality in relationship to a particular thing or act, effective potentiality—as the potentiality to not be—is “a potentiality that has as its object potentiality itself.”6 Potential is not actualized but preserved and held within itself. Potential stays impotential. Agamben sees these two types of potentiality as separate and, in doing so, Lewis contends, he “takes for granted the existence of in-capabilities and propensities as the necessary background for the appearance of capabilities. He assumes that one can.”7 Lewis, in turn, asserts a sort of dialectical relationship between them, which is why he writes of im-potentiality. To be im-potential is to be able to be and to be able to not be simultaneously, to experience potential freed

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from any predetermined category or identity. The learning society eliminates im-potential because it is “obsessed with the measure of what someone can do in order to fulfill a particular role within the economy,” and this obsession with “assessment and verification of actualization is . . . a form of evil that destroys the students’ freedom to not be.”8 True freedom, that is, is not the freedom to be this or that, but the freedom to be or to not be this or that, and thus the freedom to be or to not be something else altogether. Neoliberalism forecloses this freedom; it can’t tolerate it because it disrupts the demand for performativity and efficiency. Thus, Lewis looks to the freedom of im-potentiality to develop an alternative educational logic to learning: the logic(s) of studying. Whereas learning is always concerned with and determined by ends (learning goals, outcomes, etc.), studying is about means:  it is definitional of studying that when one engages in the act one does not have an end in mind. When one sets out to study there may be an end in sight (a dissertation or a book, or a piece of information or a theoretical development), but as one begins to study the end retreats. As Lewis puts it, “The studier prefers not to engage in selfactualization . . . constantly moving forward toward some kind of indeterminate goal while simultaneously withdrawing from the very idea of goals in the first place.”9 When we wander in the archives, or when we follow link after link after link on the internet until we end up watching obscure YouTube videos, the ends of our project are distanced or, more accurately, they are suspended. In the learning society, such wandering is interpreted as procrastination. We tend of think of what is actually studying as getting distracted and sidetracked. The state of impotential has to be overcome as quickly as possible, and anything that interferes with this process is a hindrance. This interpretation follows directly from the obsession with actualizing potential and from the demand that learning contribute directly and immediately to the functioning of capitalism and self-actualization. Studying can’t be properly said to “produce” works, for while studying surely contributes to a product, its contributions can’t be delineated in any coherent way. Even with hindsight, studying resists strict signification. Studying instead leaves “traces,” and Lewis identifies three of these traces that shed light on the logic of study. First, when studying, one “prefers not to.” “When deep in study and someone asks, ‘so what have you found out?’ or ‘so what is your stance on x?’ the studier prefers not to say, thus withholding conclusions.”10 It is not that the studier will not say, in which case they would possess determinate knowledge that they refuse to share, and it is not that the studier cannot say, in which case they would lack any potential answer. Instead, the studier both can and cannot

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say. Second, studying takes place within the “no longer, not yet.” When studying, one is no longer ignorant but is not yet a master. Studying pushes toward and withdraws from the command of knowledge. Third, studying is organized around the “as not.” While learning about an object or idea, we engage that object or idea as it is, but while studying an object or idea we engage it as not. Lewis gives the example of studying a car engine by taking it apart. This act is indistinguishable from a mechanic taking apart a car engine for a certain goal and purpose. What distinguishes the two engagements with the engine is the fact that the studier of the engine engages the engine as not an engine. This frees the object up for unforeseen and unforeseeable uses; activities are divorced from predetermined purposes, and signs from predetermined significations. Studying, it’s important to note, is not necessarily the opposite of learning. “Studying,” Lewis writes, “suspends ends yet does not retreat into pure potentiality. It is the ambiguous state of recessive sway that holds within itself this and that without choosing either.”11 Studying opens up what has been learned to the possibility of being otherwise, opening up ellipses within the learning society that can be stretched to render it inoperative.

Studying in crowds Learning orders students according to existing identities and capabilities, grading them according to their ability to actualize sets of skills, knowledges, habits, and so on. Learners are graded and ranked, their ability to conform to predetermined commands is evaluated, and these evaluations subjectify the learner to corresponding economic, social, and political roles. Not everyone’s potential is invested in, of course. Many are victims of quite violent disinvestment. One set of learners “can” and another set “cannot.” The first set are tasked with becoming self-entrepreneurs, constantly learning and relearning to meet the constantly shifting global market society, and the latter set are subject variously to abandonment, repression, and death. Studying interrupts the demand to actualize potential by introducing a hyphen in between potential and impotential, so that the slogan of the studier becomes “I can . . . I cannot.” Studying is antagonistic to the learning regime and the neoliberal production relations it reproduces because it is incommensurable with the latter’s obsession with ends and measurability. While studying, one prefers not to be this or that category, this or that kind of worker, and capital accumulation and social progress are thrown into crisis.

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One of the most important things that Lewis’s theory of study does is to reveal that education is not a subset of or subservient to politics and economics. His work helps us understand that forms of educational life do not follow from, but lie at the heart of, politics. Yet, while studying is antagonistic to capitalism and its learning society, the manner in which this educational logic becomes a political force is underdeveloped at best. To account for and counteract this, I  turn to the recent work of political and cultural theorist Jodi Dean, and in particular her book Crowds and Party. While Dean doesn’t address education, learning, or studying, her insights nonetheless have important implications for the matter at hand, for not only beginning to reveal the limitations of studying as it has so far been theorized but, more importantly, for making studying into a political force. Toward the end of her 2012 book, The Communist Horizon, Dean notes that “our political problem differs in a fundamental way from that of communists at the beginning of the twentieth century—we have to organize individuals; they had to organize masses.”12 Her new book begins here, with a theoretical and historical examination of this contemporary subject of politics: the individual. The individual subject-form leaves revolutionary politics fragmented and isolated, moving from local reform to local reform without articulating any grand vision. The prominence of individuality results from an assault on collectivity. One of the strange ways in which we embrace this assault is when we turn to “do-it-yourself ” politics, which, Dean writes, “is so unceasing that ‘taking care of oneself ’ appears as politically significant instead of a symptom of collective failure—we let the social safety net unravel—and economic contraction—in a viciously competitive job market we have no choice but to work on ourselves, constantly, just to keep up.”13 The Left, too, has turned to the individual, believing that “the task of changing the world [is] preceded by that of understanding oneself.”14 Politics have to match up with my personal desires if I am to participate, if I am to feel welcome: “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.”15 Having incorporated the logic of learning into its politics, the Left activist today sees themselves as an individualized consumer out to satisfy their needs and desires. I have a real need to help animals, so let me shop around for just the right organization that will let me give the amount of time I want and do the kind of work that I want. This is the educational ethos of what Slavoj Žižek calls liberal communists, those global technology business owners for whom “there is no single exploited working class . . . There are only concrete problems to be solved: starvation in Africa, the plight of Muslim women, religious fundamentalist violence.”16 Having turned away from the state and collective efforts to solve fundamental social problems,

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liberal communists view problems in isolation and approach them as individuals or, at best, as a group of individuals. As one could predict, Žižek views this as an ideological problem, writing that “charity” becomes “the humanitarian mask hiding the face of exploitation,”17 but it is just as much a pedagogical problem. The liberal communist is the lifelong learning activist. Yet the Left has a history of a different, antagonistic, collective subjectivity, and this is what she sets out to reclaim. She begins by reading Althusser’s famous thesis on interpellation backward, standing it right-side up. In Althusser’s formulation, ideology interpellates individuals as subjects. He gives the example of a police officer shouting, “Hey, you there!” When one turns around in response to the hail, one is subjectified. Although, as Althusser repeatedly clarifies, one is always-already a subject. Even before one enters the world they are enmeshed within the familial, medical, legal, and other ideological apparatuses. Dean, on the contrary, contends that instead of interpellating the individual as a subject, ideology interpellates the subject as an individual. Rephrasing one of Althusser’s arguments, she writes, “What do children learn in school? They learn that they are individuals.”18 Viewing interpellation as an act of individuation poses the individual subject-form as a problem, as the result “of the enclosure of the common in never-ceasing efforts to repress, deny, and foreclose collective political subjectivity . . . Rather than natural or given, the individual form encloses into a singular bounded body collective bodies, ideas, affects, desires, and drives.”19 When we are individuated, we are separated from collectivity, isolated, trapped in our fictional egos. Individuation, however, never works smoothly or totally, and the gaps created by its non-completion or consistent failure are where the subject is located. The gap is also the occasion of politics: “Political subjectivization involves forcing this non-identity, making it felt as an effect of the subject.”20 Dean refers to this as a split in the people, which includes not just the split between those who have and those who don’t, or between the included and excluded, but a split within the people’s consciousness, the ways in which we aren’t fully presentable, transparent, or accountable to ourselves. Individualization, that is, always fails, and the crowd seizes on and amplifies this failure, forcing the people into the realm of what Lewis calls im-potentiality, that place of limbo between subjectification and desubjectification. Group dynamics and crowd theory are important here, in particular Gustave Le Bon and Freud. Le Bon, a conservative racist who had nothing but contempt for the revolutionary crowds in the industrial centers of the nineteenth century, identifies four key characteristics of the crowd: “Contagion, suggestion, affective

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intensification, and de-individualization.”21 Freud, for his part, appropriated crowd theory and Le Bon’s work to argue that the crowd is “a source of new feelings, thoughts, and ideas” as well as “the novel consistency of a provisional being.”22 To put it through two of Lewis’s traces of study, we could say that in the crowd we experience ourselves as no longer ourselves but not quite an other self, and that we experience ourselves as not ourselves. The no longer, not yet, and as not of the crowd can bring into being what Elias Canetti called the crowd’s egalitarian discharge. The density of beings in place ordains this libidinal excess, which liberates subjectivity from the individual subject form. The equality of the crowd’s egalitarian discharge is thus not the equality of disparate individuals, but an equality flowing from the dissolution of the boundaries of the interpellated individual. The libidinal feeling of the egalitarian release enacts the affective dynamics of the crowd. Specifically, the desire of the crowd is to increase, expand, and endure, and it will do these things so long as it has an unattained goal. “Direction,” as Dean writes, “intensifies equality by providing a common goal. If the crowd is to continue to exist, the goal must remain unattained. Expressed in Lacanian terms:  desire is a desire to desire.”23 This direction, of course, need not be explicit. In actuality, the direction of the crowd is usually quite uncertain. Quite often the direction of the crowd is formulated negatively, as an expression of anger and a desire to move away from some system, event, structure, and so on. The crowd emerges from within the gap of subjectivity, engaging us in a process of joyful disindividuation that takes the form of an intense belonging. This discharge, in turn, pushes us to want more, and it enables us to experience the force of collectivity, accomplishing what we could not accomplish as single or even as aggregated individuals. The crowd experience of collectivity and equality is enamoring. Resisting and breaking free from the enclosure of subjectivity and feeling the jouissance of desire can feel like liberation. Some radical activists—Dean specifically calls out “autonomists, insurrectionists, anarchists, and libertarian communists”24— organize to achieve precisely this “beautiful moment,” and their political program revolves around sustaining it. This is not just a dangerous mistake, but a complete dead end, for the crowd is not political. Rather, the crowd offers an opening for politics by installing a gap in the order of things. Here, it might be helpful to bring in another one of Althusser’s ideas:  the materialism of the encounter. Althusser begins his brilliant treatise simply: “It is raining,” he writes. “Let this book therefore be, before all else, a book about ordinary rain.”25 In the ordinary rain, Althusser sees Epicurus’s atoms flying

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parallel until there is what Epicurus called a clinamen, or swerve. With this swerve, atoms encounter other atoms, and the possibility of the new is produced. Yet it is only the possibility of the new, for the encounter, as Althusser insists, has to take hold, has to endure and persist. Generation takes place when the encounter is sustained, but there is nothing to guarantee whether or not an encounter will take place, whether or not it will hold, and in what direction it will go if it indeed does take hold. The encounter can thus take place, take hold, and take off. The sustained encounter and its results are always a bit of a surprise, which “is what strikes everyone so forcefully during the great commencements, turns or suspensions of history . . . when the dice are, as it were, thrown back on the table unexpectedly.”26 In the crowd people encounter one another, and as the boundaries between them dissolve, as subjectivity resists and escapes enclosure, the chance opens for new political arrangements and production relations. Yet, as Dean exhorts, this politics—this beautiful moment of encounter—isn’t really politics, for “politics combines the opening with direction, with the insertion of the crowd disruption into a sequence or process that pushes one way rather than another.”27 The beautiful moment is when the encounter takes place, but what will ensure that the encounter will take hold and that it will take off in the right—or better, left—direction? Without paying attention to the matter of organization and affirmative direction, the crowd and its educational logic can be reabsorbed into the circuits of capitalist valorization or, worse, can work to strengthen the rule of capital. This brings us to the political limits of studying.

The political limits to studying Studying is, like the crowd event, a beautiful moment of encounter, the opening up of the possible, the breeding ground of the new. While studying, one is disindivuated, swaying between subjectification and desubjectification, between being this and being that. The studier resists classification, preferring not to actualize any predicate. And like the crowd event, I contend, studying isn’t politics, it is only the occasion for politics, a necessary but insufficient educational logic for the struggle against capitalist production relations and for the common. Without something more, studying can retreat from impotentiality into impotence and, on the other hand, it can be actualized into something reactionary. To illustrate these possibilities, I will turn to two examples.

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The first example is of studying as hacking, when one takes some thing or process, enters into it, and disrupts it. Hacking is an intervention that directs something toward other ends and uses, detaching it from its attachments to other objects and processes, potentially opening it up to the unforeseen and unforeseeable. In this way, hacking is a transgression and the hacker is an outlaw, one who literally lives by transgressing the lawful order that dictates propriety (who can do what with what). Lewis and Friedrich bring up the Anonymous collective, which has “repurposed websites and servers to expose particular contradictions and injustices in the capitalist system.”28 Not only their actions, but Anonymous’ very mode of organization is subversive in that anyone can join. Membership in the collective is not predicated upon any particular identity or a commitment to a specific end. Anonymous are “pirates who steal back private code for common use, and in this sense open up the world of code to unanticipated mutations.”29 One of Anonymous’ first major actions was a swarm attack on the Church of Scientology for their efforts to censor online criticism of the church. In addition to sending all-black faxes to their fax machines (to use up ink), Anonymous members coordinated a Google bomb attack by linking “scientology” to a host of other words, like “dangerous” and “cult,” to influence (redirect) any Google searches for scientology. Through distributed denial-of-service attacks, in which multiple computers attack the infrastructure of root nameservers, Anonymous hackers have shut down a host of websites, from the Department of Justice (in response to the DoJ’s takedown of a file-sharing network) to the International Association of Chiefs of Police (as part of a national day of action against police brutality). While hacking is indeed a reappropriation of code and a repurposing of the networked infrastructure of contemporary capitalism, there is nothing inherently revolutionary about hacking. For as many Anonymous actions that have supported revolutionary political movements, there have been others that have hindered such movements. Consider Anonymous’ intervention in the “Arab Spring” uprisings as a case in point. Anonymous sought to support the uprisings by attacking government websites and publicizing the private information of government officials who were opposing or repressing the protests. Yet, in addition to attacking the governments of Egypt and Tunisia, which were indeed repressing popular revolts, Anonymous also attacked the government of Syria, which was battling a range of forces, including those associated with al-Qaeda and its splinter group, Daesh, or the Islamic State in Syria. The situation in Syria was much different than that in Egypt or Tunisia, as the government retained

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popular support and immediately engaged in a series of serious reforms, including the drafting of an entirely new constitution.30 Indeed, it could be said that in Syria the government was the progressive force. The same happened with Libya. In this case, too, Anonymous effectively joined the US State Department in their war against the sovereign African country. Or consider a spin-off of Anonymous, Ghost Squad, which shut down the official website of the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the next week attacked the website of Black Lives Matter (before tweeting, “All lives matter!”). Regardless of one’s position on these issues, conflicts, nation-states, and so on, it is clear from these few examples that hacking doesn’t have a politics and that, as an act of studying, it is not inherently against capitalist production relations, imperialism, or white supremacy. Or, rather, the politics don’t adhere to the act of hacking but to the relations that are being hacked. The second example illustrates the potential apolitical impotence of studying, and it brings us more directly into conversation with Dean. In the last chapter of Lewis’s On Study, he turns to the early stages of the Occupy Wall Street movement to articulate the “im-potential political dimension to studying.”31 Lewis celebrates the beginning stage of Occupy Wall Street as a form of collective, public studying, especially in its absence of concrete demands. While the mainstream press and politicians were anxious to hear what the protesters were demanding so they could issue a response accordingly, the occupation “spent most of its time preferring not to commit to any one demand over and above any other.”32 Rather than actualize political polemics and demands, articulating them into proposals that could then be evaluated, occupiers produced a rupture within the received order of political struggle. The occupation actively resisted the drive to achieve results and instead conducted an ongoing study of politics, suspending the pursuit of measureable outcomes; engaging in protest as not protest. As a result, efforts to grade the movement falter, for there were no preestablished criteria with which to evaluate it. Occupy celebrated horizontalism, leaderlessness, inclusivity, and the absence of hierarchical structures. Neither an undifferentiated mass nor an agglomeration of individuals, the occupiers formed a state of exception where dichotomies and divisions were left idle, the homeless the middle class, and a host of other intermediary grounds (including students) met in an atopic space and time to study the sublime art of discussing across differences and living across class divisions. What emerged was precisely the question (and not the answer) of inclusion and exclusion facing not only OWS but the contemporary learning society as such.33

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This state of exception was exemplified in the slogan, “We are the 99%!” The “99%” was a kind of nonidentity, “a totally generic yet absolutely irreducible singularity,”34 as Lewis puts it. “We are the 99%!” took a quantity and transformed it into an indefinable quality, a way of grouping people without resorting to predicates and already-established identities. Just precisely who the 99 percent were (or are), was never fully delineated, couldn’t quite be accounted for. The question was left open for collective study. A significant problem with this ongoing collective study, however, is that there was nothing to defend it or to sustain it. Capital and its state weren’t studying, but were rather gearing up to unleash a wave of repression that would eventually undo the occupation. And repression opened the door to reabsorption, as many occupiers entered the non-profit industrial complex, or even started their own business ventures to profit from their activism. Occupying and hacking represent study as embryonic political praxis, the enactment of educational logics that are potentially antagonistic to capitalist production relations and capital’s logic of learning. Whereas capitalism demands that everything—even that which opposes it—be actualized so that it can be subsumed within its circuits of productivity, occupying and hacking interrupt this seemingly ceaseless process, opening up the world and subjectivity to the possibility of being otherwise than. Studying is therefore, I  proffer, the educational activity of the crowd, a way to pedagogically bring forth the beautiful moment. This is a crucial element of struggle but, as Dean reminds us, it isn’t properly a politics; it is merely an opening for politics. Writing again explicitly about political movements, Dean notes that “the beautiful in-between of infinite potentiality can’t last forever. People get tired. Some want a little predictability, reliable food sources, shelter, and medical care. Others realize they are doing all the work . . . The crowd isn’t an alternative political arrangement; it’s the opening to a process of re-arrangement.”35 The question, then, is how to seize upon this opening and carry it forward into a real revolutionary movement. How, in other words, to make the encounter take hold, how to make it take off in a desirable direction? These are questions that, while they should always be open to study, have to be answered, at least provisionally and contingently. Or else the market and its advertising agencies will come knocking with an endless list of glossy, high-definition answers. Or, alternatively, the state will come knocking down doors, guns drawn and handcuffs aplenty. The encounter won’t take hold and the possibility of the new will be foreclosed as the crowd is dispersed through redirection, exhaustion, or repression.

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Studying in the communist sphere We already have an answer—or, perhaps, the beginnings of an answer—to these questions:  the organizational form of the party. The crowd craves affirmative direction and it wants to persist, to spread, to keep the gap within the order of things open. This is precisely what the party does. Hence, Dean proposes that the primary role of the party is not that of the prophet, director, or master. Instead of (only) providing answers and directions, the party is, more than anything else, a type of affective infrastructure that maintains the gap of desire and, I would add, that sustains the practice of study. To make this claim, Dean turns to the history of communist parties not where they were or are strongest—like in the Soviet Union or the People’s Republic of China—but where they were weakest:  the United States and Britain. In particular, she turns to Vivian Gornick’s beautiful book about the experience of former members of the Communist Party of the United States, The Romance of American Communism. The book paints a portrait of the CPUSA as an apparatus that generated feelings of imagination and possibility, as an institutional configuration that, in the direst of circumstances, “held open a gap in the given through which people could see themselves in collective struggle changing the world.”36 From the larger tasks (organizing workers and the unemployed, protests, campaigns, and jail support), to the seemingly smaller tasks (canvassing neighborhoods, organizing, facilitating and attending local meetings, selling newspapers, making and distributing leaflets, raising funds), all party work was not just filled with a sense of purpose, immediacy, and enthusiasm, but served to generate these feelings. As Dean formulates it, “It wasn’t the vision that sustained the activity. The activity was the practical optimism that sustained the vision.”37 Stated differently, it wasn’t that the party’s vision was out there, something external that had to be attained. Instead, the vision was internal, traversing the subject and the collective. As Paul Levinson, who was raised in a New  York City housing project dominated by communists in the early twentieth century, frames it: It was alive. Intense, absorbing, filled with a kind of comradeship I never against expect to know. In those basement clubrooms in The Coops, talking late into the night, every night for years, we literally felt we were making history. Do you know what I  mean when I  say that? We felt that what we thought and spoke and decided upon in those basement rooms in the Bronx was going to have an important effect on the entire world out there.38

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The gap that the party held open made it possible for members to study, to live within a world no longer bourgeois but not yet communist, to transform routine activities (talking, writing) into something profound and earthshaking. The world was not just thought of in these terms, it was experienced in them. Along these lines, the Communist Party is a kind of container, one that’s both external and internal. It’s kind of like Peter Sloterdijk’s sphereology. While for Heidegger the question of the human was about being, for Sloterdijk the question of the human is about being-in: “For humans, being in spheres constitutes the basic relationship—admittedly, one that is infringed upon from the start by the non-interior world, and must perpetually assert itself against the provocation of the outside, restore itself and increase.”39 We are never just there, but are always contained in things, things that are both literal and figural (classrooms are spheres as are teacher-student relationships). “In this sense,” he continues, “spheres are by definition also morpho-immunological constructs. Only in immune structures that form interiors can humans continue their generational processes and advance their individuations.”40 The party is an oppositional interior in bourgeois society that is generated by the cadre that it protects, that works on the workers who produce it. It’s a shared interior that isn’t hitched to any particular place or time. Fighting against the domination of capital and the state requires a strong oppositional interior, one that protects and enhances its inhabitants, and one in which we study. We need a collective immune system because the struggle is hard and victories are few and far between. In Judy Kaplan and Linn Shapiro’s Red Diapers, a collection of autobiographies of children who grew up in communist Left families, there is a story that shows the impact that the force of the party interior exerted on a young comrade. Sirkka Tuomi Holm, a daughter and granddaughter of communist Finish immigrants, was a member of the Young Pioneers, the Communist Party USA’s children’s organization (which fed into the Young Communist League) in the late 1920–early 1930s. One day in class, when a teacher asked if any student didn’t believe in God, Holm’s hand shot up. Her teacher and fellow students were horrified, her closest friend deserted her, she was alienated. Holm was embarrassed and lonely, and so two months later, when another teacher asked the same question, Holm didn’t raise her hand. But this time, another Pioneer, Leo, was in the class. He held his hand high. At the next meeting of the Young Pioneers, Leo outed Holm for not raising her hand. Holm tried lying, saying that she had raised her hand but the teacher hadn’t seen her. “What did this episode do to me?” she asks. “I vowed that I would never be a coward again and that I would stand up and fight from then on.”41

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When Holm was 10  years old, she got the chance to prove her bravery. Beside her mother on a picket line in Ohio in 1931, the cops rushed in and began beating the striking workers and their supporters. A  big cop charged at her mother, and Holm intervened: “I took a step forward, stood in front of my mother, stretched myself as high as a short ten-year-old could, and glared defiantly at the oncoming cop. My stomach churned. I started shaking all over. My teeth chattered.” The cop slowed a bit in response until he “stopped, arm still raised, and we locked eyes. We stared at each other momentarily, and I was surprised to see a look of shame and then one of pity on his face. He lowered his arm, turned away, and started furiously charging at another woman, a friend of my mother’s.”42 This was the “test” that she faced after the incident in school. Her young comrade, Leo, outed her to her comrades for letting the bourgeois teacher puncture the party sphere. The party inside of her strengthened, and she strengthened her commitment to the party. In that moment, faced with the brazen authority of capital and its state, the collectivity of the Young Pioneers asserted itself in the body of 10-year-old Holm. The immune system of the party sphere restored her fighting spirit. But the affective generation of the party sphere is intertwined with epistemology, and the feeling generated and sustained through the party can’t be severed from the content of the party’s analysis. It wasn’t only that the party had optimism and a vision, but also that it was able to explain. Analysis and explication are what Sarah Gordan, who joined the Young Communist League at 14 years of age, attributes the life-sustaining effect of the Communist Party to. In fact, she has a hard time conceiving how someone could live in poverty without the party’s explanatory framework. “Imagine being that poor,” she says, “with nothing to explain your poverty to you, nothing to give it some meaning, to help you get through the days and years because you could believe that it wouldn’t always be this way.”43 The party’s literature, meetings, and functions served to provide a structural understanding so that Gordan was able to understand that her poverty wasn’t her fault, that capitalism was to blame, and that capitalism was bound to be overthrown; and so, too, her state of poverty. The party perspective, then, was twofold. On the one hand, there was class consciousness, a learning of the tendencies and laws of capital accumulation and the dynamics of imperialism, racism, and national oppression. On the other hand, however, there was an affective intensity that things can be otherwise and that this otherwise is already present, already germinating. “The perspective,” Dean says, “is like a law, the law enabling communist desire, setting it apart from the capitalist world by holding up and uniting the experiences of the oppressed.”

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This law isn’t external, however: “It’s a law communist give themselves in order to hold themselves together when everything conspires to pull them apart—police repression, fear and paranoia, individual desire and need.”44 To be disciplined to the party is to be loyal to one’s desire for collectivity, for desubjectification, and to the taking hold of the encounter. The only trace of study that seems to be absent in the party is that of preferring not. After all, the perspective of the party is proletarian, and its members emphatically embrace and occupy this identity category. I want to propose that the party occupies a contradictory position in relation to preferring not. On the one hand, preferring not is a fundamental feature of the crowd from which it emerges. This is most evident in the crowd’s desire to desire, the requirement that the crowd’s wish be forever unfulfilled. The crowd wants to endure, and this endurance depends, in part, upon its unmet desire. Here, studying provides the party with a preparatory pedagogy, for the act of preferring not is, in lieu or in addition to the crowd event, what helps the student imagine the world beyond capitalism. Yet on the other hand, the party serves to orient the crowd, giving it direction, ensuring that it doesn’t get reabsorbed into the circuits of capital or redirected toward reactionary ends. Perhaps the party is forced to disavow its affective origins in order to sustain them, carry them forward. Although here we are still on an abstract theoretical terrain. The party forms not out of abstract crowds, but concrete crowds gathered under particular circumstances for specific purposes. The party’s origins are in crowds with certain political potentialities—not in crowds gathered for entertainment purposes. To enter into the crowd entails a leap into the gap of the unknown. And yet the gap exists in relation to something. There is never only pure unknown; the gap exists between things. And so here is where I want to disagree with Dean, or to augment her theory. Crowds are only apolitical in the abstract, and are in reality already structured by politics before and as they form. This, in turn, means that there are struggles over studying within the crowd. In Russia during the months leading up to the Bolshevik Revolution, for example, “each political faction had its newspaper—sometimes several. Hundreds of thousands of pamphlets were distributed by thousands of organizations, and poured into the armies, the villages, the factories, the streets. From Smolny Institute alone, the first six months, went out every day tons, carloads, train-loads of literature, saturating the land.”45 Learning and studying, content and pedagogy, are heterogeneously blocked together. The Bolshevik Party preexisted the revolutionary crowds of 1917. Although its origins could be found in those crowds as well, the party had been accumulating crowds for over a

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decade, and in each intervention had pushed the crowd forward and grown even more. The party aggregates crowds to struggle over the actual manifestations of study.

Notes 1 Maarten Simons and Jan Masschelein, “The Governmentalization of Learning and the Assemblage of a Learning Apparatus,” Educational Theory 58, no. 4 (2008): 400. 2 Ibid., 401. 3 Gert Biesta, Beyond Learning: Democratic Education for a Human Future (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2006). 4 Gert Biesta, The Beautiful Risk of Education (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2014). 5 Tyson E. Lewis, On Study: Giorgio Agamben and Educational Potentiality (New York and London: Routledge, 2013), 6. 6 Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. M. Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993/2007), 36. 7 Lewis, On Study, 45. 8 Tyson E. Lewis, “Rethinking the Learning Society: Giorgio Agamben on Studying, Stupidity, and Impotence,” Studies in Philosophy and Education 30, no. 6 (2011): 588–589. 9 Tyson E. Lewis, “The Fundamental Ontology of Study,” Educational Theory 64, no. 2 (2014): 164. 10 Ibid. 11 Lewis, On Study, 147. 12 Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon (New York: Verso, 2012), 196. 13 Jodi Dean, Crowds and Party (New York: Verso, 2016), 31. 14 Ibid., 53. 15 Ibid., 71. 16 Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (New York: Picador, 2008), 18. 17 Ibid., 22. 18 Dean, Crowds and Party, 85. 19 Ibid., 80. 20 Ibid., 89. 21 Ibid., 95. 22 Ibid., 100. 23 Ibid., 122–123. 24 Ibid., 125. 25 Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978–87, ed. F. Matheron and O. Corpet, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (New York: Verso, 2006), 167.

Studying in the Party 26 Ibid., 196. 27 Dean, Crowds and Party, 125. 28 Tyson E. Lewis and Daniel Friedrich, “Educational States of Suspension,” Educational Philosophy and Theory 48, no. 3 (2016): 244. 29 Ibid. 30 See Dan Glazebrook, Divide and Ruin: The West’s Imperial Strategy in an Age of Crisis (San Francisco: Liberation Media, 2013). 31 Lewis, On Study, 150. 32 Ibid., 152. 33 Ibid., 159. 34 Ibid., 157. 35 Dean, Crowds and Party, 142. 36 Ibid., 220. 37 Ibid., 228. 38 Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 56. 39 Peter Sloterdijk, Spheres I: Bubbles: Microsphereology, trans. W. Hoban (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 1998/2011), 45–46. 40 Ibid., 46. 41 Sirkka Tuomi Holm, “Daughter and Granddaughter of the Finnish Left,” in Red Diapers: Growing up in the Communist Left,” ed. J. Kaplan and L. Shapiro (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 38. 42 Ibid., 34. 43 Gornick, The Romance of American Communism, 32. 44 Dean, Crowds and Party, 243. 45 John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World (New York: Penguin Books, 1919/1977), 39.

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In and Out of the Gap

The characterization of time is tricky business, and it’s inherently political. There are things at stake in temporal designations, which in turn means that who gets to characterize time and in what way is always a matter of struggle, and this struggle always has ideological content. The complexity of time isn’t merely a matter of abstract theoretical discussion, however, and it doesn’t always concern large classifications, like centuries or ages. Seconds feel different depending on whether we are bored or engaged in a class, flowing or stumbling through a public presentation, with our lover or with our boss, on our way to a vacation or returning from one, on a picket line or on the clock. Time is quantitative and qualitative, and our conceptualization and experience of it and its possibilities bear directly upon revolutionary struggle. In this chapter I want to investigate the pedagogical times of capital and defection as a way to extract temporal openings for political agonism and relief, openings to generate resistance, and I do this with the help of a short piece of video art. The aesthetic realm is integral to efforts to disrupt norms and imagine alternatives, for the aesthetic “teaches us to redistribute the relationship between what can and cannot be seen as well as what can and cannot be heard.”1 As such, aesthetics is not external but radically internal to political pedagogy. Video art is especially suited for the educational task of disrupting and imagining alternative temporal regimes. Emerging in Europe and the United States in the 1950s, multiple artistic fields turned to utilizing video technologies, resulting in an art form with confusing and uncertain artistic origins. Its boundaries are open and shifting. As a result, most histories of video art focus on the evolution of technological and social means of video production and distribution.2 The specific capacities of audiovisual technology determine what can and cannot be or, as Ina Blom writes, video art “deployed artistic frameworks and art-related materials, personnel, and competences as part of its exploration of its own potential.”3 Thus, the medium itself compels explorations of time and duration.

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Video art, then, gives artists the bandwidth to induce altered temporal states. The viewer necessarily needs to engage the art for a certain amount and kind of time. One particularly compelling piece that does this is Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby’s short video, A Cure for Being Ordinary, part two of a triptych titled The New Freedom Founders.4 In it, Tim Eckman (played by Battersby) sits in the stairwell of his former office place. In a helium-infected voice, Eckman gives an autobiographical account to a concerned woman (played by Duke), perhaps a social worker of some kind, of his move from his office cubicle to the rafters above his cubicle where he has, together with his cat, made a new home. He presents a narrative of his move out of work and labor via his historical relationship to time. As a child, Eckman says, “the clock in my room made me think that it was alive. How could I  think anything else?” The clock watched over him, lorded over him, exercised agency over him, watching him always. Sometimes, he says, the clock moved quickly, and this meant he had to hurry. Other times, the clock moved slowly, and he could relax, remaining still until the clock’s tempo changed. The clock meted out its punishments through parental proxies. “If I disobeyed the clock, my parents would become angry with me,” he says. Before the boss, before even the father: the clock. The clock didn’t need anything from the child and his family—unlike the cat, which “needed a lot of things, like love and attention. But not the clock.” The clock was a “superior being” for these reasons, something that demanded nothing but obedience and respect. Eckman’s story moves from his bedroom to his time working on the “front lines” at a Harvee’s Burgers, “customizing customers’ hamburgers.” Here, the clock moved slower than ever. Serving again as the clock’s proxy, his father told him that a job was a requirement. At this father-son moment, Duke’s character smiles, acquiring a moment of understanding this strange figure. Passing over his time in school in a sentence—as if it was a mere interlude between the home and the workforce—Eckman turns to his work as a computer programmer. His dissatisfaction with his job, he recalls, was not because of the work’s obvious triviality, its power structure, or the “happy, cheerful face, I  am forced to perform every day.” Instead, he attributes his move out of the labor force to his “incorrect relationship with time.” Duke’s face moves from posed seriousness to a bewildered smile and ambiguous laughter as he describes his move into the rafters, from where he observed the uniformity of his replacement’s clock— mechanical, the same all day long. From this vantage point, he understands that he previously experienced time in chunks. He worked for a chunk of time, took a break for a chunk of time. Even in the break chunk, time wasn’t really his

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own, he was still alienated from it. Anyone who has ever sat in a break room at work can attest that it’s nothing but a waiting room for your next chunk of work (Figure 2.1). There aren’t only chunks of time, there are also breaks between the chunks, and it is within these breaks where Eckman has found free time, time that is truly his own. He likens it to the cuts between TV programs, which you can’t necessarily see but which are nonetheless there. And Duke and Battersby accentuate these cuts in the video, in ways both visual and auditory. But they do so especially at the video’s end, which transitions rapidly back and forth between a close-up of Eckman’s face and the living nightscape of the city outside. The quick repetition introduces a temporal excess in the video, wherein what we are drawn to are not the images being cut between, but the cut itself. We can feel how Eckman ekes out his existence in these cuts, and his move into the rafters is precisely a move into the cut. Rather than move out of the office and into a house or apartment, or into a tent in the wilderness or an encampment, which would posit an “out there” to the world of the clock, Eckman has found temporal freedom through a slight spatial displacement. He is neither in the office nor out of the office, but occupying a cut within the office, stretching it out into a life. It’s like Walter Benjamin’s telling of a parable about the Messiah that Giorgio Agamben recounts in The Coming Community. Once the Messiah comes, “everything will be as it is now, just a little different.”5 What this means, Agamben explains, is not that the actual material world will be the same but slightly different, but that the perfected world will be like the one as is with but with slightly different peripheries. The parable thus “introduces a possibility there where everything is perfect, an ‘otherwise’ where everything is finished forever, and precisely this is

Figure 2.1 Tim Eckman

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its irreducible aporia.”6 It is of course not that Eckman has reached the Absolute, but that he has inhabited the aporia in the here and now. Two spaces in the same building, mere inches apart, and not only two different lives, but two gaps— the gap between the rafters and the cubicle, and the temporal gaps of Eckman’s existence.

The pedagogy of déjà vu Two slightly different spaces, two totally different temporalities. One is dominated by the clock, the other sits outside, or above, the clock. The former is the time of labor, the latter the time of freedom. But what is this feeling of freedom? How might we understand this break that Eckman seeks, that drives his movements? And how should we understand the relationship between these two times? I want to explore the idea that freedom is a particular kind of temporal potentiality that both encompasses a pedagogical force and rests on a certain educational axis. It’s interesting to note that there is no mention of education in the video. Eckman brushed passed his time in school. It doesn’t weigh heavily enough in his autobiography to warrant anything more than a fragment. There’s no mention of school time, nor time in detention, nor of a teacher who took away his freedom or gave a lecture or engaged him in a dialogical inquiry about how his unfreedom could be overcome. Indeed, in his story the clock was the ultimate pedagogue, and its pedagogical force ultimately pushed him out of the capitalist world of work permanently. Returning to our discussion of potentiality in the previous chapter, we might distinguish these two temporal pedagogies along the lines of generic and effective potential. Under generic potential, there is no reason for one not to transition from “I can” to “I am.” It is rather the case it if one can, then one must. Otherwise, potential is wasted. It isn’t hard to see this prevailing logic at work in our world today. The student who doesn’t fulfill the task assigned to them by a teacher, or the worker who doesn’t fulfill the task assigned to them by the boss, or the unemployed worker who doesn’t do as the social worker requests, is only comprehended through the negative frames of lack and squander, of not fulfilling their potential. Why wouldn’t one want to fulfill their potential? Only a madman would rather live in the rafters than in the cubicle. Many subjects today are even understood as completely lacking potential itself, which justifies state and society’s divestment from them (the closing of schools in poor communities, the gutting of welfare and social provisions, etc.). Whereas in

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generic potential the realm of what is dominates, quickly transitioning into the realm of must be, effective potential opens up the realm of what can be. Divorced from the command to actualize potential, we are able to drift endlessly between conception and action. In the former we are free to be, and in the latter, we are free to be and to not be simultaneously. Time here is suspended. Putting philosophy in conversation with memory and history, Paolo Virno presents a different conception of potential, one that has more temporal promise than Agamben’s. Virno doesn’t draw on the distinction between generic and effective potential—a distinction that hinges upon a prior distinction between potential and act—and instead, through an analysis of the phenomenon of déjà vu, presents potential and act as inseparable partners in time. Déjà vu isn’t when something that has actually happened occurs again. It is also not when something similar to what is happening in the present has also happened in the past. Instead of a concrete repetition, déjà vu is an imagined recurrence. It’s an uncanny moment because we feel like it happened, but we know that it didn’t, or at least we are pretty sure (it couldn’t have, could it?). Déjà vu isn’t a problem with memory, but it is a problem of memory. Specifically, it’s a problem of how we think our memory operates and what we think the domain of memory should be:  the past. “Rather than limit itself to preserving traces of times past,” Virno writes, “memory also applies itself to actuality, to the evanescent ‘now.’ The instantaneous present takes the form of memory, and is re-evoked even as it is taking place . . . Inasmuch as it is an object of memory, the ‘now’ is camouflaged as the already-been, and is thus duplicated in an imaginary ‘back then,’ a fictitious ‘other-than.’ ”7 Held in its grip, we aren’t able to finally delineate the now and the illusory back then. Déjà vu is dominantly interpreted as misattribution and false recognition, as an error, something to be overcome or brushed aside if we want to keep our sanity. Déjà vu as false recognition corresponds to an understanding that history exhausts itself, that history remains in the past and, to the extent that it carries over into the now and the future, it is as a sort of basis or limit. The act happens and that’s it. It’s over. Potentiality is no more, and all we have is a past actualized actuality, its occurrence and its record of existence. Virno argues, however, that we need to understand déjà vu differently, and in this way helps us rethink not only the relationship between history and time, but also between memory, perception, potential, and accomplished fact. First, extrapolating on a passing and undeveloped remark in Henri Bergson’s essay on false recognition, Virno argues that perception and memory have methodological differences:  “Perception fixes the present as real, complete,

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resolved in unambiguous given facts; whereas memory limits it within the terms of mere potential, retaining something of its virtual character.”8 Our bodies divide experience into two: first, our senses stabilize the experience into an ordered set of characteristics (who did what, what happened, how the happening felt on what date); second, our memory destabilizes the experience into the realm of potential. Deja vu is when both methodologies are blocked together, when the act and the virtual twist together or, more strictly speaking, when the specific act and its potential, and the specific potential and its act twist together. Potential is never the exhaustion of the act, it is never a passage from “I can” to “I am” or “I did,” wherein one no longer can and instead is. As he formulates it, “far from being liquidated or debased, potential reaches its very acme precisely when it persists as potential alongside the corresponding act. The difference in its nature precludes any assimilation, instead implying its independence:  the possible is not cancelled out by the real, as if it were a temporary interlude, but rather represents another way of being, substantial in itself.”9 Déjà vu contains a surplus of each moment, act, and experience that lives on in our excessive memory in the present. Memory has less to do with the past, then, and more to do with potential. One metaphor for and enactment of this division takes place when we are writing, reading, or speaking, and come across a word or phrase encased in inverted commas, or “scare quotes.” In such a case, a recognized word is doubled, “is used but also mentioned; perceived in its actuality, and together with this remembered as something virtual.”10 The actual word is communicated as is its surplus potential, and neither the actualization or the potential of the word are eliminated. Déjà vu radically disrupts the mechanical ticking of the clock, regardless of its speed. The kind of serious break it forces, the character of the suspension it engenders, has to do with the temporal order of potential and act. These two terms form the parameters of becoming as they refer to what can be and what is or has been. Thus, they seem to refer to an earlier and a later, where “potential is what which is not yet actual (but can become so) whereas the actual is that which is no longer potential (but once was). This pair expresses the articulation of earlier and later, the preceding and the subsequent, the past and present.”11 The relation is internal to itself, and doesn’t refer to the clock, which opens up the question as to whether potential and act are the result or motor of time . . . or both? Virno’s wager is the last, that they determine and are determined by time, that they are about both the ordering and the whole of time. Acts occur in time. Actualizations always happen at, during, or over certain definite moments. More specifically, they take place in present time. Potential, on the

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other hand, doesn’t remain in time, although it is thoroughly temporal. Whereas actualization marks temporal progression, potential, as a steadfast not-now, envelopes the totality of time. The totality of time is therefore not a procession of accomplished acts but a derangement of what could have been and what could yet be. Memory retains both the actual and potential, the moment in time and time in toto. While the clock marches forward, making the world its subject, déjà vu reveals its bluff. Agamben’s understanding of potentiality links potential and actualization, but Virno’s understanding both links and institutes a solid gap between the two. Virno characteristically turns to the faculty of language to make his case here: A faculty cannot be broken down into fractions:  the capacity-to-think is not subdivided into portions, and there is no percentage of the capacity-to-speak. The single act of thinking or speech, however indistinct, always has to do with the entire corresponding potential. When I ask a passer-by for information, I am mobilising the faculty for language as a whole, not some narrow portion of it. Potential is indeterminate, generic, formless, and thus radically different from a potential act, because it is a whole without parts.12

The act doesn’t bring potentiality into a moment in time, which would exhaustively realize potential. Potential as the perpetual could be and is not can never be realized, and therefore isn’t divisible. Rather, potential permanently predates and exceeds the act, whether that act took place years ago, is taking place, or will take place in the future, precisely because it is the temporal backdrop or stage of chronology. As a result, history is always double:  there is the history of the act and the history of potential, the former having taken place in time and the latter enveloping time and enduring throughout; the infinite possibility of the alternate could-have-beens. The past dominates the plane of time for both of these reasons, as accumulated acts and unrealizable potential. Because potential haunts any act, the historical moment is unsaturated. The historical act takes place within the gap between potential and act. Virno argues that the moment can only be saturated from outside, that the moment is filled in through the construction of the past and the future. Because historical acts are saturated externally, they depend on the agents and forces determining historical moments, not during their actualization but in their infinite potentiality. The act is a fact that takes place, and what makes the act historical is the context in which it is imbued. Thus, what makes an act historical is its relationship to a potentiality that is infinite, for there is no limit to the contexts in which we can place facts. History

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is birthed precisely through this infinite heterogeneity, which is only possible because the act is not the exhaustion of potential.

The labor of time Temporal antagonism is the stake and medium of struggle, an aporetic discord in which Eckman has taken up residence. Up in his rafters, Eckman wants to be enveloped by the potentiality of the temporal past; watching as the clock marks actualizations in the workplace, he is freed from the clock’s constraints yet still within earshot of its tick-tock, tick-tock. It’s a subjective relation that divides the subject between contradictory and asymmetrical times, and in which direction the relation develops is a pedagogical question. Duke and Battersby locate Eckman’s temporal difference in his relationship to labor or his place in relation to capital. As Marx tells us in the opening pages of volume 1 of Capital, the value of a commodity is determined by the socially necessary labor time required for its production. “Capital,” as Marx put it in one iteration, “is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labourpower he has purchased of him.”13 Whereas the use value of a commodity is singular and qualitative, the exchange value is general and quantitative, making commodities exchangeable. In such intercourse, however, the augmentation of value is impossible. One can swindle another, buy dear and sell dearer, and increase their own lot, but this won’t expand social value. By going to the “hidden abode of production,” Marx locates labor power as a special commodity that possesses the ability to expand value, to create a surplus. The two times, necessary labor time (the time it takes for the worker to produce their wage) and surplus labor time (the time that the worker produces surplus value for the boss) happen concurrently. The problematic of capital, then, revolves around the distribution of that time—does it go to wages or to profits (and taxes, rent, etc.)? This is why we feel a bit freer when we get a wage increase. It’s not that we have gotten one over on our boss; the feeling doesn’t lie in negation. It’s rather that we are working more for ourselves, the feeling lies in affirmation. It’s a struggle over time or, more pointedly, between times. Capital’s ultimate law of exchange can’t do anything to solve this problematic, for it’s perfectly within my rights as a worker to demand the full value that my labor power produces, just as it’s within my

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boss’ rights as the purchaser of that labor power to consume it as they wish. The two times—socially necessary labor time and surplus labor time—are, in practice, indistinguishable. We can’t tease them out as we work, and we can’t solve them legally. Virno says that this juncture introduces a temporal paradox, which we can figure out thoroughly by examining the potential and act of labor, or labor and labor power. In other words, we can address the problem through placing the struggle within a particular context. In the capitalist mode of production, potential isn’t always concurrent to the act, owing to the intervention of the money relation. “The capacity-to-produce is bought and sold before the productive process has begun.”14 The worker sells not their labor, but their potential to labor, to the capitalist; this potential becomes a commodity, so at work we are literally alienated not just from the product of our labor, but more fundamentally, from our potential to labor. Capital drives a temporal wedge between potentiality and act, rendering them asynchronous. The wage mediates this division, as it pays for that which has value (the labor power of the worker), but it pays it to that which has no value for capital (the actual living body of the worker). The flipside of this division is that it foregrounds our potentiality, so that “the not-now takes on the modest aspect of something that is at our fingertips.”15 In this way, capitalism both accelerates the simultaneity that makes historical praxis possible and gives our potentiality an empirical, accessible, and common form. As constantly augmenting value, capital cannot help but attempt to capture and enclose our potential, but even as it alienates life from potential, it paradoxically heightens the reverberation of the infinite potentiality of history. This is a significant limit to capital. Not only is our ability to labor expropriated, but the potentiality of history embedded through the social body is estranged, for labor power is ultimately a becoming totality of all possible faculties of being. Eckman’s life under the Law of the Clock is an expression of this division. Submitting to the law, his every movement, his very feeling of potentiality is constrained as if it is predetermined. Knowing there was something more, feeling it in his body, perpetually dissatisfied with the structure he had to move within, he took the closest exit. Living literally above the clock, Eckman’s life after the Law of the Clock is also an expression of this division. We could understand the place where Eckman built his new habitat as being on the other side of the clock’s antagonism. I’m not so sure, however. We get an overwhelming feeling from Duke and Battersby that this aporia isn’t sustainable. Watching A Cure for Being Ordinary, one isn’t convinced that Eckman has really found a cure, let alone a sturdy bandage. The concern Duke’s face betrays could be that of a technocratic

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Figure 2.2 The face of the state

servant who just can’t understand why anyone would make such a home or such a life, or who doesn’t think such living constitutes a life at all (Figure 2.2). The unsettling score of the video, the reverberating single notes and echoing footfalls, prevents an interpretation of Eckman’s escape as viable. And indeed, as much as I identify with Eckman’s rejection of the clock, of the reduction of subjectivity to labor power, I  can’t help but identify with his interviewer. The aporia isn’t utopia, but a compromised resignation. The audiovisual cuts that regularly occur, breaking up his narrative, moving the visual frame of reference, point us to the potential not there and the actual there. We are tuned to it, but nothing more. Eckman has no desire to push the antagonism forward, no force. There is no collective social being, no labor, no organization. While he isn’t reduced to labor power, he is reduced to spectatorship. The break remains within the configuration of capital, remains individual, and so remains a mere escape.

Linguistic saturation As A Cure for Being Ordinary ends, we take leave of Eckman and his perplexed interviewer through a quick series of rapid back-and-forth transitions between the interview scene and the city outside. We are left with a sustained time lapse of the city. Time and space compress, a night and a day pass, and the life of the city never stops. It isn’t a recognizable skyline (unless you by chance know Syracuse University), nor is it grand or really noteworthy in any way. In fact, it’s exemplary in its ordinariness, kind of like Eckman. What this transition signals is that Eckman, on his own, isn’t enough, that we need to break from the rafters, together, city by city, town by town. Consequently, the disquieting musical track

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that previously induced feelings of isolation and despair now generates cautious feelings of hope, possibility, and collectivity. The city is full of potential Eckmans, people who find refuge in the breaks between. Together, they can collectively defect from the alienation of capital and its clock. Closing the video on the city displaces the video from both the figure of defection and the figure of the state and to a collective landscape. There are no concluding words, and so we conclude that the words can’t conclude the scene. By not offering up a final remark by Eckman, whose side the artists clearly take, they point to the limitations of the linguistic state of the class struggle, limitations that Jean-Jacques Lecercle identifies as a reason for the current state of the global class struggle. “The recent spectacular defeats of the workers’ movement on a world scale have in no small measure,” he emphasizes, “been due to the fact that the class enemy has always won the battle of language and that the workers’ movement has always neglected this terrain.”16 By not articulating a communist philosophy of language, the workers’ movement has by default adopted the dominant philosophy of language. In this schema, language is an immanent system that has either no relation to the world or has an arbitrary relation to it. As a closed system, language is devoid of history and power; it’s a simple tool used by an individual—or a collection of individuals—to transparently transmit intended meaning. But even though Duke’s character never says a word in A Cure for Being Ordinary, it’s evident that her language pedagogically structures the direction and possibilities of the conversation. Without a political understanding of language and a partisan proposal for language, Eckman is necessarily on the defensive, and necessarily isolated. The infinite potentiality of labor is rendered invisible and impossible as the bourgeoisie alone saturates the ticking of the clock. To fully understand this, however, we have to turn to the scattered marxist philosophy of language that Lecercle pieces together and extends. In condensed form, a marxist philosophy of language understands language as an irretrievably historical, social, material, and political praxis that ultimately works to subjectivize collectives and situations. In other words, language is an active and constituting material force. It’s material not just because it is spoken by bodies and written on objects, but more importantly because it is produced by concrete apparatuses in dynamic, complex, and contradictory relationships. As such, language is a collective phenomenon that isn’t spoken by individuals but through assemblages; it exists between, as a series of links in between institutions, bodies, and histories, and is nothing without that betweenness. Indeed, the subject is also nothing but this betweenness, this

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relationality that does more than situates the subject in a field of intelligibility, but more fundamentally constitutes the subject in that field as it structures the field.17 This is no determinism, for the subject who is socially (linguistically) constituted comes to act as a result. Lecercle uses Althusser’s interpellation thesis discussed in the last chapter to show this operation. This is the thesis that Dean flipped around, contending that capitalist ideology interpellates the subject as an individual. Dean is concerned with reclaiming the collective nature of subjectivity against the atomized body of private property, and Lecercle, through his formulation of counter-interpellation, gives us a way to understand how that atomized body becomes collective:  “The speaker is therefore interpellated to her place by language, but, in so far as she makes the language her language, she counter-interpellates it:  she plays with it, pushes it to its limits, accepts its constraints in order to subvert them . . . Hence the interpellated one counter-interpellates the ideology that interpellates her.”18 Eckman’s movement is constituted as a solo retreat through the dominating ideology, and the interview is one instance of this interpellation. How can we use a marxist philosophy of language to reconstitute Eckman’s movement to a collective and transformative—perhaps even revolutionary— struggle? The first resource here is Lenin who, in a short pamphlet written during mid-July of 1917, reflects on June 4 of that year, a decisive turning point in the revolutionary struggle, the date at which “power has passed into the hands of the counter-revolution.”19 Thence, July 4 marked a tipping point after which it was no longer possible to think of any power-sharing between the revolutionary, reformist, and constituted/provisional powers. Because the soviets were a site where this cooperation occurred, the slogan “All power to the soviets!” no longer held; to utter it after July 4 would be to work to suture the revolutionary rupture and restore power to the former ruling class. In their analysis of it in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari note that the pamphlet “constituted an incorporeal transformation that extracted from the masses a proletarian class as an assemblage of enunciation before the conditions were present for the proletariat to exist as a body.”20 In other words, the soviets are no longer the body capable of seeing the revolution through, but the new political bodies that are capable—the revolutionary proletariat and the vanguard party—are not yet present. There are revolutionary workers and many leftist parties, including the Bolsheviks, but they are not yet vanguard parties. The notion that the vanguard party announces itself as the vanguard party is one of the most profound and widely circulated misunderstandings of Leninism. It is the revolutionary masses that confer upon the party the title of the vanguard.

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From this succinct text, Lecercle extracts three components of the slogan. First, it diagnoses and classifies “the moment of the conjuncture,” which is historical and linguistic; second, it “names the political task corresponding to the moment of the conjuncture”; and third, it “exercises a power because it condenses and embodies the concrete analysis of the concrete situation.”21 These three components are not reflective but performative and anticipatory, they do not relay a preexisting truth but rather intervene in existing conditions to bring a new truth to presence. It may be better here to replace the word “truth” with “correct,” for, as Althusser held, “the theses of philosophy aim not at the true but at the correct: a correct philosophical thesis is one that enables adjustment to the conjuncture, which, in the last instance, is always the conjuncture of the class struggle.”22 Whereas “truth” denotes an objective or neutral situation, what is “correct” is always only correct from a class perspective, or from the perspective of difference. The slogan, accordingly, serves to mobilize and organize to assert a new reality by presenting the necessary politics needed to respond to the current moment in a concentrated form.23 The collective enunciation of the slogan assembles comrades and enemies alike, creating a new battlefield, partisan coordinates that position one group advantageously (Figure 2.3). The slogan is to be proven through struggle, vindicated through force. David Backer shows that language and truth are always partisan by turning to the fight over the length of the working day in the first volume of Capital.24 Here, Marx stages a dialogue between the worker and Mr. Moneybags. Moneybags, as the buyer of labor power, is within his rights to extend the working day, as he is free to use the commodity purchased as he so wishes. Yet the worker is within her rights to reduce the working day, as they are the owner of the body that contains

Figure 2.3 The collective city

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the labor power purchased. There is, as Marx says, “therefore, an antinomy, right against right, both equally bearing the seal of the law of exchanges.”25 The worker says “the working-day is eight hours!” as the boss says “the working-day is twelve hours!” Both statements can be true but only one can be correct, and this will be determined by the class struggle, by which group is able to force their truth. Whereas Eckman’s escape is presented as a passive project defined only through withdrawal, we can saturate it as a collective, productive defection that, through action, changes the coordinates of the present struggle. As Virno puts it in his first book on the multitude, “defection modifies the conditions within which the struggle takes place; rather than presupposing those conditions to be an unalterable horizon; it modifies the context within which a problem has arisen, rather than facing this problem by opting for one or the other of the provided alternatives.”26 Defection doesn’t just move the arena of struggle but produces a new theatre out of existing conditions, imperceptibly yanking the ground out from under the opponent’s feet. Like guerrilla warriors making battlefields out of the quotidian terrain, defectors thrust disruption into innovation while remaining in the same absolute space. Perhaps, then, this is what brings about Benjamin’s idea of the Absolute, when everything is the same, “just a little different.”27 A slight pedagogical disruption that is difficult to achieve but revolutionary in its potential. Duke and Battersby’s short video bears witness to this disruption, a pedagogical act that still needs to be saturated politically. What I want to do in the following chapter is propose a pedagogical praxis for opening up the space for this disruption.

Notes 1 Tyson E. Lewis, The Aesthetics of Education: Theatre, Curiosity, and Politics in the Work of Jacques Rancière and Paulo Freire (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012), 9. 2 For example, see Chris Meigh-Andrews, A History of Video Art: The Development of Form and Function (New York: Berg, 2006). 3 Ina Blom, “The Autobiography of Video: Outline for a Revisionist Account of Early Video Art,” Critical Inquiry 39, no. 2 (2013): 279. 4 Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby, “A Cure for Being Ordinary,” (2004) [Video]. Available online: https://vimeo.com/43533121 (accessed August 16, 2017). 5 Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. M. Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990/1993), 53. 6 Ibid., 54.

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7 Paolo Virno, Déjà Vu and the End of History, trans. D. Broder (New York: Verso, 1999/2015), 7. 8 Ibid., 14. The sentence on which Virno is riffing is “Our actual existence, then, whilst it is unrolled in time, duplicates itself all along with a virtual existence, a mirror image. Every aspect of our life presents two aspects, it is actual and virtual, perception on the one side and memory on the other. Each moment of life is split up as and when it is posited. Or rather, it consists in this very splitting.” 9 Ibid., 18. 10 Ibid., 24. 11 Ibid., 63. 12 Ibid., 84–85. 13 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Vol. 1), trans. S. Moore and E. Aveling (New York: International Publishers, 1867/1967), 224. 14 Virno, Déjà Vu and the End of History, 164. 15 Ibid., 168. 16 Jean-Jacques Lecercle, A Marxist Philosophy of Language, trans. G. Elliot (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005/2009), 12–13. 17 Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). See also the first two chapters of my Communist Study: Education for the Commons (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016). 18 Lecercle, A Marxist Philosophy of Language, 167. 19 V. I. Lenin, “On Slogans,” in Lenin: Collected Works (Vol. 25: June–September 1917), trans. S. Apresyan and J. Riordan (Moscow : Progress Publishers, 1980), 187. 20 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980/1987), 83. 21 Lecercle, A Marxist Philosophy of Language, 97. 22 Ibid., 40. 23 With this we can grasp Paulo Freire’s misunderstanding of slogans as an act of domination that “deposits” analysis into the struggle and therefore deprives the people of the right to act. See Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. M. B. Ramos (New York: Continuum, 1970/2011), Chapter 4. 24 David I. Backer, “Toward an Activist Theory of Language,” in Truth in the Public Sphere, ed. J. Hannon (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016). 25 Marx, Capital (Vol. 1), 255. 26 Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, trans. I. Bertoletti, J. Cascaito, and A. Casson (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004), 70. 27 Agamben, The Coming Community, 53.

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It is not only “the tradition of all the dead generations” that “weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living,” but the traditions of the present and future generations, too.1 In fact, to many of today’s indebted subjects it seems as though it is the nightmare of the future that weighs most heavily on us, that most constrains our subjectivity, defines our social relations, and guides our movements, decisions, and politics. In this scene, political crisis can feel unbearable, as even the certainty of the future to which we are indebted is put into question. We are put on the defensive. We end up fighting for the smallest scraps, and celebrating those scraps as significant victories. Under such conditions, revolutionary movements require not only critique and inquiry, but also the generation and organization of possibility, imagination, and hope. We have to believe and feel our infinite potentiality in order to saturate the historical moment in a partisan manner. This chapter formulates a pedagogical proposal to harness this potentiality, and in so doing it locates possibility, imagination, and hope in an unlikely place: Lee Edelman’s polemic against the future.2 Part of the “antisocial” turn in queer theory, Edelman’s polemic has triggered much debate within that field.3 And while his work has been considered in educational research, the pedagogy of his provocation has not yet been investigated, nor has the communist potential of the provocation.4 Rather than applying Edelman to education, in what follows I  parse through Edelman’s polemic, his scattered remarks on pedagogy, and his recent essay on “bad education” in order to develop the figure of the sinthomostudier. The point is not to “uncover” a hidden pedagogy in Edelman, but rather to study his hopeless wager, and, in order to push beyond it, to redeploy and direct it toward political ends—communist ends, to be precise. I  propose the sinthomostudier as part of a concept and praxis of queer communist study, a mode of political and pedagogical engagement located in the growing constellation of communist theorizing and organizing. While encompassing various valences, communism

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today flags collective movements embodying and enhancing one side of the antagonism that constitutes the political. In this way, communism stands opposed to democracy, which attempts to mediate, smooth over, and/or police antagonism through inclusion, dialogue, and deliberation. I begin this chapter by characterizing the current structure of capitalism as a triumvirate of capital, learning, and debt. Adding to my analysis in the first chapter, I argue that the logic of learning and the rhythm of debt prop up and reinforce capitalist relations of exploitation and domination. To break out of the capital-debt-learning triumvirate, we need to imagine and enact different pedagogical forms that disrupt its rhythm and that actualize and organize a gap in the world as it is. This is the aspiration of queer communist study. To develop this study, I go first to Edelman’s book No Future, which figures the Child as the organizing principle of reproductive futurism and as that which commits us to the logic of identity, meaning, and repetition, and ensnares us in a future that can only be more of the same. Queerness here opposes the future, and to make this argument Edelman turns to the death drive, the subject of which he terms the sinthomosexual. Through mining and explicating Edelman’s dispersed notes on education and pedagogy and reading them back through No Future, I formulate the practice of sinthomostudying, which paradoxically situates us within the gap of identity and the internal surplus of the symbolic order. The jouissance of sinthomostudying opens up a world of potentialities, but these potentialities do not necessarily stand in antagonism to the capital-debt-learning regime, which brings us to the threshold of Edelman’s political utility. I  demonstrate that this praxis of sinthomostudying is a necessary but insufficient educational axiom, as the configurations of communicative capitalism are sustained by the disruption and instability of the drive. Capital is, in a sense, nothing if not accommodating. Even the refusal to pay back debt can be reabsorbed within its circuits of valorization. Thus, I  ultimately posit that for queer study to be properly communist it must be organized into a force capable of sustaining, inhabiting, and expanding the gap, thereby redirecting the death drive toward a new way of being and relating.

The capital-debt-learning triumvirate First, to recap a bit and draw out a few more components to our understanding of the learning society. Having been eclipsed by learning, education is now comprehended and exercised as the inauguration of subjects into the existing

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social, economic, and political order (in our case, the capitalist mode of production). Education is hence reduced to the acquisition and actualization of skills, knowledges, habits, and beliefs that will help the student fulfill their future role in society. Significantly, these qualities are always predetermined, which is how they are able to be measured, quantified, comparatively ranked, and so on. In other words, it is only because we know what x subject, y citizen, or z worker looks like that we are able to teach students to be those kinds of subjects, citizens, and workers, and that we are able to judge their development and proclaim their competency or inadequacy. Again, this is not in any way specific to the realm of education proper. Learning as a process is now diffused throughout all of society. As one of the learning society’s main advocates said, the “defining quality” of a learning society is that it “has learning as its organising principle.”5 Learning is the educational logic and demand of the capitalist mode of production. Ultimately, with an endlessly shifting economic landscape, we must all become learners who continually retool and reskill ourselves to meet the human capital needs of the globalized and flexible economy. In higher education, for example, we don’t necessarily learn things; rather, we learn how to learn. The assumption here—which I hear regularly from administrators and admissions officers, and which I tell prospective students and their parents—is that we are preparing our students for jobs that don’t yet exist. We are interpellated as lifelong learners through the capitalist regime of debt: “Graduates will live in the shadow of their debt, either through defaulting or living to service their debt.”6 Even prior to graduation, “students and their families sense the pressure of debt at every turn: which classes to take, books to buy, and food to eat.”7 The logic of learning works hand in glove with capitalism to produce the perpetually indebted lifelong learner. The subject in this triumvirate is pedagogically structured by the social, economic, and political dictates of the present order and its promissory future. Whereas learning is about actualizing predetermined potentialities, studying is about forgetting ends and dwelling within a state of suspension, it is about appropriation and redeployment. Studying scorns attempts to quantify or measure it, as it is a pedagogical style that renders existing and foreordained norms, conditions, and standards inoperative. By rendering such conditions inoperative, studying radically opens up the possibilities of what can be, as the dictates of what is, must, or even ought to be are held in abeyance. It is not, then, that these edicts or other objectives and standards of learning are abolished or negated, but rather that their smooth functioning is interrupted as they enter a state of latency. The ebbing of already-existing meanings and identities enables the learner to become a studier, wherein they open up to the world as otherwise

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than it is, and indeed even construct an otherwise, an outside that is really here. The logic of studying therefore unfolds within the capital-learning-debt triumvirate as the annexation of its internal surplus. Efforts to theorize study have focused on a range of pedagogical attributes, such as studying’s rhythm, architecture, eros, and affect.8 What has not been thought through thus far is the relationship between studying and the future. This lacuna is surprising given the absolutely pivotal role of futurity in both the learning society and the capitalist economy. Regarding the learning society, Backer and Lewis note that “the learner is the result of a learning process whose only result is the process itself: hence the eternal return of labor built into the very structure of lifelong learning and lifelong indebtedness.”9 Accordingly, to interrupt the functioning of the learning society we need to wrest ourselves away from this eternal future that must be actualized, even if the exact contours of that future are to be determined. Regarding the capitalist economy, we can look to Marx’s analysis of capital, which he insists is not a thing but rather a social relation that is constantly in process. Marxist educational theory focuses on capital as a social relation but, interestingly enough, it has neglected to consider capital as a process without end. This, I suggest, has to do with a preoccupation with volume 1 of Capital, and a neglect of the second volume. For whereas the first volume focuses on an analysis of the production of capital—focusing on the scene and agents of production—the second volume focuses on the realization of capital, the fact that what is produced must be financed, transported, and sold. Marx here breaks down the circulation of capital into the circulation of money capital (finance), productive capital (production), and commodity capital (merchant), locating the different breakages and disruptions inherent within and between each of these circuits.10 For example, if capital doesn’t flow into commodities then money forms a hoard; if capital doesn’t flow into production then labor power is rendered inactive and no surplus value is produced; if capital isn’t realized on the market (i.e., if goods aren’t sold), then backlogs of commodities prevent capital from being transformed back into money. As a whole, then, for capitalism to function properly it needs (among other things) the future as repetition. After all, no one is going to invest in production if they don’t have some confidence that the circuit will be realized, that their capital will be returned in an augmented fashion. There is a drive to make sure that what is desirable today will be desirable tomorrow or, alternatively, that what is produced or invested in today will be desirable when it reaches the market. The shape and details of the future can be drawn and filled in later, but the future as a continuation of the present as such

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must come, must be inevitable. In other words, while the particular contours of the future are open and flexible, its structure will necessarily be that of today, which paradoxically traps the future in an eternal procession of the present. The debt regime solidifies the learnification of capital and subjectivity through futurity. Here, the recent work of Wozniak is helpful. Wozniak establishes how debt institutes a distinct rhythm that depends on the futural fulfillment of the present by producing “a memory in a person of a future-to-come,” one that is “lodged in a subject’s memory.”11 Wozniak spells out the subjective implications of this: The memory of a future-to-come ends up shaping the way that one lives in the present. The memory of debt haunts the subject; it is an ever-present specter in the present of a future already colonized and delimited. Thus, with a memory of debt ever hovering, one ends up shaping one’s self and daily activities so that one will be able to survive as an indebted subject . . . Stated in different terms, debt, as an obligation to repay one day, travels back from the future to occupy the present.12

The best I can do is defer my student loans to a further point in the future or to default on them, and in either case the specter of my debt has only grown heavier on my being in the present. Every decision that I  face—from where, what, or if to eat or drink, to where and how many hours I will sleep at night— is governed by the future-to-come. This is a credit–debt rhythm, and the proposal, for Wozniak, is to construct schools as a kind of temporal hideout—an undercommons, perhaps—from this rhythm, spaces that “will not only offer a much needed respite from the pace and pressures of indebted life, but also . . . defamiliarize people from habituated indebted life and the routines it forces on us and, maybe, inspire us to imagine days and nights that are once again our own, rather than the userers.”13 Capital is a barrier to this defamiliarization, to our ability to suspend the given and open up to an otherwise, an otherwise that belongs to us and not to our lenders. Through the continual expropriation of our lands and labors, it binds our lives and relations to its needs. Faced with our debt and the daily struggle for survival, our stupidities are cut short and devalorized. The argument that we live our lives according to an indebted rhythm is not only compelling but, more importantly, also accurate. Debt deeply shapes our subjectivities and our social relations, the ways in which we encounter ourselves, others, and the world. Taken together, the logic of learning and the regime of debt prop up a system of oppression and exploitation, in which the suffering and injustices of today are undergone for a future that never quite seems to

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arrive. As recent social movements on campuses and in cities across the United States have unequivocally demonstrated, we the indebted are well aware of our status and its seemingly permanent nature. We don’t need yet another analysis of the law of value, or another screed against neoliberal authoritarianism. The task, rather, is one of imagining and enacting. We need to imagine, feel, and inaugurate a different educational logic that is tethered to a different mode of production and, therefore, a different temporality. While Wozniak’s proposal that we hope for inspiration to imagine is a fine and necessary one, it is politically and pedagogically wanting. To address this lack, I  propose a theory of queer communist study that rejects futurity, forces the inhabitation of a gap, and moves us to organize this gap and this rejection for something else.

The queer against the future Edelman contends that it is not the right wingers, the bourgeoisie, the neoliberals, or the religious conservatives that we have to combat. Rather, we have to turn our attention and our polemics to that which we have in common with these forces: the Law of the Child. The Child holds our supposed enemies and us captive together. The Child totally dominates the horizon of possibility in our world, dictating the limits of what can be said, thought, proposed, learned, debated, studied; determining not only political possibilities but the political itself. The Child, he says, “terroristically holds us all in check and determines that political discourse conform to the logic of a narrative wherein history unfolds as the future envisioned for a Child who must never grow up.”14 That is to say, political struggles are all framed entirely around and for the Child. We have to ban abortion for the Child! No, we have to allow abortions for the Child! We have to ban gay marriage for the Child! No, we have to legalize gay marriage for the Child! The logic of the Child even allows the religious right to maintain completely contradictory positions, such that those who will oppose abortion on the grounds that it takes the life of a child can wholesale argue against the humanness of the child-cum-queer-adult. More than dictate the content of politics, the Child draws the entire grid of social intelligibility, framing everything around the logic of reproductive futurism: the idea that we must reproduce so that we can have a future. What are we to do to resist this? We have to break out of this opposition, oppose it in some way. We can’t negotiate with this terrorist of a Child. Rather than insisting that we are really the ones operating in the best interest of the Child, we have to

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embrace the radical negativity placed on the queer, our radical opposition to the Child, our opposition to the opposition that it frames so completely. The right, in other words, is right: queers are a threat to the social order; “Queerness names the side of those not ‘fighting for the children,’ the side outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism.”15 Whereas the Child guarantees the endless drive for stability and equilibrium, fulfillment and resolution, the queer figures as the social order’s inevitable and constitutive failure, the endless yet suppressed disruption of identity and regulation. We routinely unsettle the social order and the very possibility of regulation: “Queerness can never define an identity,” as Edelman puts it, “it can only ever disturb one.”16 There is no political program here, nor are there steps to be taken to break out of this paradigm. What Edelman latches onto is pure negativity. As he so eloquently and pointedly puts it, “Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the Net; fuck Laws both with capital ls and with small; fuck the whole network of symbolic relation and the future that serves as its prop.”17 While Edelman’s conclusion may be—or may appear to be— simple, the way he reaches it isn’t quite so. First, the Child to which Edelman refers is not actual, fleshy, or living. Rather, the Child is a figure of reproductive futurism. As he makes clear early on, “the image of the child” is “not to be confused with the lived experiences of any historical children.”18 The Child, that is, represents a telos and a guarantee of and investment in the future. Some have argued that Edelman projects a privileged child to the status of Child, noting that not all children are imbued with the promise of the future.19 This is an absolutely correct observation, one that is traumatically amplified every time police, security forces, or soldiers brutalize and murder young children of color, children from oppressed communities, nations, and states, poor children, queer children, disabled children, and working-class children. Yet instead of disproving Edelman’s argument, this observation in fact confirms it:  the innocent (US-born, white, heterosexual, bourgeois, abled, English-speaking) Child is precisely that which makes some children not children: those who can never be disciplined into growing up into the social order. Further, as Edelman has recently rebuffed in a footnote, “The figure of meaning and cultural promise in a racist and antiblack order will disproportionately find representation in images of the dominant racial class, the Child itself does not have any intrinsic relation to whiteness and can, where useful, be embodied, even by that dominant order, in (the image of) children of color as well.”20 He gives the example of how

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Black and Latinx children are used by antiabortion activists to stand in for the innocent future. Second, the Child is bound up in the symbolic that is the social order, and Lacan therefore plays a primary role in his argument. Edelman’s reading goes something like this: the symbolic order is the arrangement we enter that allows us to participate in society, the order that establishes the rules concerning language and desire, epistemology and ontology. The symbolic order stands opposed to— or, better, beyond—the Real, which is authentic reality, that which is prior to signification and symbolization. Because the symbolic cannot capture all of the Real, there is a permanent remainder of the Real that is internal to the symbolic. We are always in excess of who we are. The symbolic order, consequently, “only bestows a sort of promissory identity, one with which we can never concede in fully coinciding because we, as subjects of the signifier, can only be signifiers ourselves, can only ever aspire to catch up to whatever it is we might signify by closing the gap that divides us and, paradoxically, makes us subjects through that act of division alone.”21 Because all identity is promissory, it rests on a continual deferment to the future, and so to be queer is to not require that future. Third—and this is the focal hinge on which Edelman’s polemic rests—there is a determining link between queerness and the death drive, wherein “the death drive names what the queer, in the order of the social, is called forth to figure: the negativity opposed to every form of social viability.”22 The death drive is the excessive surplus endogenous to the symbolic that threatens that order’s stability, working against the order to disrupt and unravel it. The symbolic is, then, a nonidentity of being and nonbeing, possibility and impossibility. This order is plagued by a remainder beyond meaning that Lacan names jouissance, which is something more than enjoyment, something in excess of the split between pleasure and pain. Jouissance can head in two directions. On the one hand, it can solidify around some “particular object or end . . . congealing identity around the fantasy of satisfaction or fulfillment by means of that object.”23 On the other hand, jouissance can break these attachments, “undoing the consistency of a social reality that relies on Imaginary identifications.”24 The first represents the future, and the second represents the queer. Queer jouissance thus “tears the fabric of symbolic reality as we know it, unraveling the solidity of every object, including the object as which the subject necessarily takes itself.”25 Queerness marks the spot of the gap in the symbolic, the opaque place between discourse and its other, and Edelman is calling on the queer project to inhabit this gap, this negative non-place that the Law of the Child seeks to continually cover.

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Sinthomostudying The sinthomosexual is the queer political subject without a future, against the future. The sinthome is a Lacanian concept that enunciates the radical singularity of the subject, or the singularity of the subject that cannot be articulated or expressed within the symbolic. It is not, however, excluded from the symbolic, and actually occupies a foundational place within that order. The symbolic, to put it differently, depends on a gap between what is and what can be signified, between the world and the word. Whereas the subject is driven by the belief that this radical singularity will one day be articulated, the sinthomosexual embodies the gap of the symbolic order and the jouissance that this gap allows. The sinthomosexual “scorns such belief in a final signifier, reducing every signifier to the status of the letter and insisting on access to jouissance in place of access to sense, on identification with one’s sinthome instead of belief in its meaning.”26 In the same moment as the future-looking subject faithfully awaits the closure of the gap, the sinthomosexual subjectivizes it. The gap between the world and the word becomes the position from which we act and experience. Another way to understand the sinthomosexual is by way of the distinction between desire and drive. Edelman understands desire as requiring futurity. The objet petit a—a stand-in for the object of loss—is the cause of a desire that can never be fulfilled. Desire becomes an end in and for itself—we desire to desire; we desire now to desire in the future, because we want to attain objet petit a and, like the subject, must cling to some faith in our final attainment of it, lest desire collapse in on itself. Hence desire, on this reading, “does not partake of desire itself; instead it consists of the jouissance that desire must keep at a distance insofar as desire relies on that distance, on that lack, for its survival.”27 Desire guards against jouissance, while the sinthomosexual accedes to it, dissolving the futurity of desire. Edelman doesn’t write about education or pedagogy in No Future, but we can feel a pedagogy within its pages or, perhaps, in excess of its pages, and this excess anticipates his dialogues with Lauren Berlant, in which he makes a few explicit references to both pedagogy and education, as well as his more recent article on Bad Education. These are never developed in any way, but remain rather potential sources for excavation and study. We can study these references in relation to No Future, reading Edelman back on himself. In doing so, we can sense a kind of queer studying, or rather we can advance the thesis that studying is necessarily a queer thing to do. Queer study is a method of educational engagement that

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wrests us from our endless learning and from the indebtedness that keeps us wedded to the present through the logic of the future. I  call such a mode of engagement sinthomostudying. In Sex, or the Unbearable, Berlant and Edelman engage in an exchange around the political and theoretical openings offered up by sex, which is figured as the site of an encounter with otherness that is as unbearable as it is necessary. Sex, for Edelman, is in some ways averse to education. Early on in the book, he offers what could be read as a hedge against his stronger claims against narrativity in No Future, that also introduce a concern with educational theory. He prefaces the story that he tells by examining the logic of the story itself. “However attenuated, qualified, ironized, interrupted, or deconstructed it may be,” he says, “a story implies a direction; it signals, as story, a movement that leads toward some payoff or profit, some comprehension or closure, however open-ended. This leading toward necessarily entails a correlative ‘leading from,’ the ‘leading from’ or ‘out of ’ at the root of ‘education.’ ”28 The story occasions a linear progression that is nothing without a finale, a finale that sets the coordinates of what is possible in the meantime. Edelman, for his part, is quick to acknowledge that even the rejection of narrative calls for a narrative of rejection. Here education as narrative emerges as something done in the name of the Child, the frame of the Real that holds us hostage. What Edelman wants to do, then, is explore sex by “posing it over and against education as a ‘leading out’ of ignorance, inability, and bewilderment and into the condition of mastery, understanding, and realized sovereignty.”29 As he later formulates it, education “rests on escaping the negativity of the signifier’s movement by equating reading or interpretation with the process of making sense, of positivizing meaning, even with regard to reading practices identified as nonhermeneutic.”30 Even the most critical form of education guards against jouissance and renders phenomena, feeling, and drive comprehensible. If education leads one from incompetency to mastery, then sex turns the subject around. Sex is “experiencing corporeally, and in the orbit of the libidinal, the shock of discontinuity and the encounter with nonknowledge.”31 Sex, that is, marks the duration of time and being when we enter into a radical relationality that disrupts our sense of self and sovereignty such that we become incoherent to ourselves. We transition from a sense of self to a nonsense of self. This is no steady course of action, but is rather a shock, something that disrupts any possibility of an intelligible transition that could, even in retrospect, be brought to signification. Such a shock “displaces what we thought we knew or could reliably predict and reveals the presence

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of something else at work in the decisions, desires, and acts we think of as our own.”32 Subjective displacement bears a pedagogical force that signals beyond the symbolic and toward the Real. It is a displacement that places us firmly in the gap that is both within and beyond the symbolic. This is, so I  suggest, a displacement into the gap that is proper to study. With this in mind, Edelman is not writing about education but rather about learning. While Edelman is surely right that education is necessarily a process of leading out, the nature, content, and direction of that process are not definitional to education at all. Education, in other words, can be both a leading out of ignorance and into mastery and a leading out of mastery and into ignorance, both a construction and a deracination of sovereignty. In the first and last instances, the difference will hinge on the mode of the educational encounter. This is not solely a matter of semantic clarification. On the one hand, the latent yet prominent status of educational theoretical concepts in Edelman’s remarks indicates that they are important to his project. Indeed, his most recent article is titled “Learning Nothing,” and is a reading of the film Bad Education. Here he proposes an alternative formulation, an oxymoronic bad education in which nothing is learned and the subject is obliterated. Bad education brings us to the edge of the void that we can never know, but only be seized by. This is “a lesson that no one can ever learn and that no ‘one’ could ever survive.”33 And yet the text still only gestures broadly and abstractly to education and pedagogy. More significantly, however, if there is indeed a relationship between education and reproductive futurism—and the permanently indebted lifelong learning upon which capitalism depends—then we must be precise about how we conceptualize education. Reading Edelman’s remarks back into No Future, we can appreciate the queerness of study as a distinct form of pedagogical encounter of bewilderment, interruption, and presence. Sinthomostudying directs us away from the false promissory note of the future—wherein the gap that founds identity is finally and fully filled in—as it exposes and rejects the possibility of fastening the gap. The pressing pedagogical question is how one is to enact this study, what such an act of study would look like. One answer can be found in Edelman’s observations on irony and the queer, which will also allow us to continue to flesh out the political role of narrativity and futurity. The irony of which Edelman writes, should not be confused with some particular form of affect—with a hip sensibility, a casual indifference, a privileged aloofness, a hard-boiled attitude, or any other mode of self-presentation. Instead, such irony undermines every affirmative presentation of self and guarantees only the persistence, in its

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Sinthomostudying is to learning as irony is to narrative:  irony dwells within narrative, thereby introducing a discontinuity into it, while sinthomostudying actualizes a state of suspension and quiescence within the path to comprehensive surety; it is stupefaction in the face of incontrovertible facts. In his somewhat brief remarks on studying, Agamben points to the relationship between studying and stupidity. He writes, “Those who study are in the situation of people who have received a shock and are stupefied by what has struck them, unable to grasp it and at the same time powerless to leave hold.”35 Those who are stupefied—the stupid—are neither ignorant nor naïve. Instead, they are in awe of an encounter, lost in a place of non-knowledge, overwhelmed by the other, the idea, the scene. Capitalism and the learning society look upon such a reaction as inadequate and inefficient, as failure, as a display of deficiency to be conquered as quickly as possible or cast out. The studier, on the other hand, makes the choice to take up residence in stupidity, and irony is an opening to this home. Irony derealizes the linear unfolding of the story and marks within it interruptions of opacity, which, in turn, decompletes the narrative. It’s a move into the rafters. The temporality of irony is the architecture of the present and the instant, an intervention that abbreviates our gaze and leads us away from the moment of resolution. At the same time, irony is infinite and inexhaustible, always arriving too early and too late. Irony represents a paradigm for sinthomostudying, and not a tool or a tactic. The value of pedagogical philosophy is that it short-circuits the demand for “practical application,” a demand that prohibits thought from taking place. Nonetheless, before giving an example from Edelman of queer study, I  want to sketch a bit more precisely what queer study as a mode of collision entails. When we engage an educational object—say, a text or a piece of artwork—as learners, we form an identification with it through rendering meaningful the symbols or lines on or in the object. Through processes like contextualization and historicization, we make sense of the object. When engaging the object as sinthomostudiers, by contrast, we uproot the object and ourselves, engaging the lines not as representations but as lines, as libidinal charges that exist outside of graphic, textual space.36 The assignment here is to obliterate the sense of the object, to forget its context and history, its placement within the narrative of its discipline. Through this engagement, we lose our own footing as learners and identities, undergoing a traumatic process of desubjectification.

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The ultimate irony in Edelman’s schema, which he introduces at the very end of No Future, is the sinthomosexual repeating of the US (educational) mantra of the early twenty-first century: Leave No Child Behind. Through this queer repetition we “bring out what’s ‘impossible, inhuman’ within it:  a haunting, destructive excess bound up with its pious sentimentality, an overdetermination that betrays the place of the kernel of irony that futurism tries to allegorize as narrative, as history.”37 This ironic scene makes more consistent the political slogan we noted earlier: “Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized.”38 Whereas this slogan reproduces the structural logic of opposition that disavows negativity, the ironic scene Edelman ends with resists this reproduction the only way one can: by airing, drawing out, and ultimately inhabiting the gap always already within the logic, the narrative, the story. Stated otherwise, rather than learning a story, sinthomostudying effectuates the founding gap of the symbolic, exerting a pedagogical force that harnesses the death drive, opening up the present beyond the possible.

Making queer study communist Edelman’s polemic against the fascism of reproductive futurism and the future to which it binds us is, to be sure, a political one. By identifying the Child as comprising the field of the politically possible, Edelman forces open that field. What was formerly the impossible of thought—the inhuman of the human—becomes possible. Queerness as pure negation is conceivable. The political disposition here is one of a fundamental division: “The division within community as well as the division from community; the division that leaves community, like the self, an always unresolved question.”39 Edelman’s reliance on psychoanalysis indicates that he is interested not in historical phenomena but rather in what he understands as phenomena structural to the psyche, for the death drive is not the product of a particular mode of production, system of political representation, stage of linguistic development, and so on. The death drive persists, is characteristic of human being in general. One critical question that arises for me is: If the death drive is a general and persistent attribute of the psyche, and if politics is about division, then how precisely does the death drive motivate a politics of division and antagonism? In raising this question, the point is not (only) to critique Edelman or point to an inconsistency in his theory, but rather to insist that, if we are to study Edelman’s provocations and deploy them to construct a theory of study that is

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antagonistic to the learning society, perpetual indebtedness, and the capitalist order that they together sustain, then we have to insist on a division that is both uncommon and common. If we don’t take this step then we risk writing a theory that remains a mere alternative—and not an opposition—to capital. For capital has an exceptional capacity to absorb all sorts of alternatives within it, alternatives that can work to increase the functioning and performativity of its system.40 Take, for example, Strike Debt, a decentralized network that facilitates debt refusal. On the surface, this seems to threaten the future of capital, for it severs the circuit of capital and prevents its realization. And yet capital is able to accommodate this strategy through financial derivatives and securities that allow capitalists to bet on defaults and repayments, so our refusal to repay debt can end up fattening the coffers of savvy investors. Indeed, the social order depends on instability as much as it depends on stability, depends on disorder just as much as order. What I offer then is, in the last instance, an ironic deployment of Edelman’s polemic. Moreover, even though the death drive may be more structural to the psyche than to history, it undoubtedly bears a relation to history that we have to take into consideration. As such, I want to make one final formulation in this chapter: for queer study to be communist, it has to be organized. To justify this, I want to turn again to Dean, who shows us how in the contemporary moment the death drive can be that which actually nourishes capitalism. This, in turn, provides a bridge of sorts between psychoanalysis and historical materialism, for it demonstrates how society’s position relative to the drive is bound up with particular political orders. In other words, although the death drive is a permanent feature of being in general, the relation of being (and the organization of beings we call society) to it will transform throughout history. As discussed in this book’s introduction, communicative capitalism is the consolidation of capitalism and democracy by way of communicative networks. Although the proliferation of communications technologies makes it so that increasing numbers of people can debate and weigh in on all sorts of disputes, the meaning and effect of this participation dims in the endless circulation of words. Our desires, beliefs, likes, and outrages are swept up in the valorization of capital, converted into raw materials for capitalist production and prediction. Production takes place across society and throughout the day. Even when we are on break from work (or study), checking our phones and social media accounts, we are producing for capital. Communicative capitalism can for this reason be distinguished from modern capitalism through a change in the mode of production’s relationship to the drive. Under modern capitalism, the drive was

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held at bay through various kinds of symbolic authority (the nation, the state, the family, etc.), while communicative capitalism is marked by the absence of symbolic authority. The death drive is the constituting instability of the subject, the social, the symbolic. It is the enduring wrench in the world of meaning and sense. Its instability, however, also constitutes a primary motor of communicative capitalism, which is a formation that relies on this imbalance, on the repeated suspension of narratives, patterns, identities, norms, etc. Under conditions of the decline of symbolic efficiency, drive is not an act. It does not break out of a set of given expectations because such sets no longer persist as coherent enchainments of meaning. On the contrary, the circulation of drive is functional for the prevention of such enchainments, enchainments that might well enable radical political opposition.41

We are trapped in circuits that depend on the death drive’s refusal to reach a goal or an end, in relations of production that succeed on the failure inherent in the drive. The lack of solidified meaning and closed identity doesn’t actually disrupt capitalism. This absence fuels capitalism as it sends us googling, clicking, writing, and posting, generating raw materials and revenue for capital. The problem at hand is that of either escaping or redirecting the drive. The drive’s loop engenders jouissance, but communicative capitalism capitalizes on this jouissance. Crisis, after all, can be incredibly productive for capital. Crises discipline workers and students (by driving down wages and increasing insecurity) and lay the groundwork for new rounds of investment and accumulation. Instability and crisis only create the conditions for political action and open up the possibility of rupture. The same goes for studying. Sinthomostudying is, after all, a mode of educational engagement, and doesn’t have an inherent political orientation. The gap instituted through the act of sinthomostudying needs not necessarily a predetermined direction, but an organizational ethos and form capable of providing direction for the gap, organizing the remainder of the Real internal to the symbolic and generating the force to redirect the death drive. Edelman comes close to recognizing this in his analysis of Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. He offers us Leonard as an exemplar of a sinthomosexual. Leonard, at the direction of his (communist) boss, ruthlessly plots the death of the film’s protagonist Roger Thornhill. Leonard “materializes the force of negation, the derealizing insistence of jouissance, from which Scrooge and Silas Marner were led by the hand of a little child.”42 Edelman

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notes in passing that Leonard is an “agent of America’s cold war enemies,” but he doesn’t draw any implications from this. Fundamentally, he misses the categorically crucial aspect of Leonard’s drive: it was a drive organized under the banner of communism. Subjectifying the gap of the present isn’t enough. Once inhabited, the gap must be organized and wielded. This is what Harney and Moten miss in their writings on study. They romanticize the indebted studier who dwells within the crevices of capitalism:  “They study in the university and the university forces them under, relegates them to the state of those without interests, without credit, without debt that bears interest, that earns credits.”43 The opposite is the case. The capital-learning-debt triumvirate compels the student to take up interests, to graduate, and to actualize their potential. The credit–debt rhythm disciplines our capacities and potentialities, and it is not enough to flee, to refuse to pay our debt. Rather, the construction of an entirely new social order is necessary. If sinthomostudying is to be deployed as part of a strategy against the capitaldebt-learning triumvirate, it must not play an ancillary role. The educational rhythm of this triumvirate structures our subjectivity and world so deeply, it so profoundly impacts our sense of self, other, and social. If we are to stand a chance, we need to theorize and practice alternative pedagogical styles that seize on the gap in the order of things, on the jouissance that stands against the Law of Capital and the Law of the Child, which consign us to a life of indebted learning. The educational logic of queerness has to be mobilized not just as something that can affect a disturbance of identity, but as a way of being and relating that can bring about an entirely new order. Queer communist study is a pedagogical formulation for generating such effects, for getting us collectively into the rafters and then out into the city, which is the subject of the next chapter.

Notes 1 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International Publishers, 1963), 15. 2 Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 3 See, for example, Robert L. Caserio, “The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory,” PMLA 121, no. 3 (2006): 819–821; Tim Dean, “The Antisocial Homosexual,” PMLA 121, no. 3 (2006): 826–828; Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The

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5 6 7 8

9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

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Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009); Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child: Or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). Jen Gilbert, “Imagining Sex,” Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 3, no. 2 (2006): 38–42; Adam J. Greteman and Steven K. Wojcikiewicz, “The Problems with the Future: Educational Futurism and the Figural Child,” Journal of Philosophy of Education 48, no. 4 (2014): 559–573; Erica R. Meiners, “Trouble with the Child in the Carceral State,” Social Justice 41, no. 3 (2015): 120–144. Steward Ranson, “Towards the Learning Society,” Educational Management and Administration 20, no. 2 (1992): 71. David I. Backer and Tyson E. Lewis, “The Studious University: A MarxistPsychoanalytic Groundwork,” Cultural Politics 11, no. 3 (2015): 334. Ibid. See Sam Rocha, Folk Phenomenology: Education, Study, and the Human Person (Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2015); Weili Zhao and Derek R. Ford, “Re-imagining Affect with Study: Implications from a Daoist Wind Story and YinYang Movement,” Studies in Philosophy and Education 37, no. 2 (2018): 109–121. Backer and Lewis, “The Studious University,” 338. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Vol. 2), trans. D. Fernbach (New York: Penguin Books and New Left Review, 1892/1972). Jason Wozniak, “The Rhythm and Blues of Indebted Life: Notes on Schools and the Formation of the Indebted Man,” in Philosophy of Education 2015, ed. E. Duarte (Urbana: Philosophy of Education Society), 75. See also his article, “Towards a Rhythmanalysis of Debt Dressage: Education as Rhythmic Resistance in Everyday Indebted Life,” Policy Futures in Education 15, no. 4 (2017): 495–508. Wozniak, “The Rhythm and Blues of Indebted Life,” 75. Ibid., 78–79. Edelman, No Future, 21. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 29. Ibid., 11. Meiners, “Trouble with the Child in the Carceral State”; Muñoz, Cruising Utopia. Lee Edelman, “Learning Nothing: Bad Education,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 28, no. 1 (2017): 167. Edelman, No Future, 8. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 25. Ibid. Ibid.

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26 Ibid., 37. 27 Ibid., 86. 28 Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, Sex, or the Unbearable (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 3. 29 Ibid., 3–4. 30 Edelman, “Learning Nothing,” 148–149. 31 Berlant and Edelman, Sex, or the Unbearable, 4. 32 Ibid., 15. 33 Edelman, “Learning Nothing,” 166. 34 Edelman, No Future, 108–109. 35 Giorgio Agamben, The Idea of Prose (New York: SUNY Albany, 1995), 64. 36 See my article, “A Figural Education with Lyotard,” Studies in Philosophy and Education 34, no. 1 (2015): 89–100. 37 Ibid., 153. 38 Ibid., 29. 39 Berlant and Edelman, Sex, or the Unbearable, 109. 40 Derek R. Ford, Communist Study: Education for the Commons (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016). 41 Jodi Dean, Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2010), 31. 42 Edelman, No Future, 70. 43 Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Autonomedia, 2013), 67.

4

Stupid Urbanism

The frequency and intensity with which social struggles erupt, and the speed at which they jump scales, attests not only to the heightened level of general antagonism that defines our era, but also to the urbanization of our globe. The struggles of our moment are often responses to injustices like state violence and murder, imperialist war, or exploitation, but they are also in themselves proposals for a new world. What makes these struggles urban, I proffer, is not their location or the density of the surrounding population, but instead their effects, aspirations, and amplitude. In other words, that these are urban struggles means that they respond to, propose, and intervene in the constant creation of an urbanized world. The creativity of urban struggles, however, is not connected with their outcomes or the projected futures, but rather with the very events and characteristics of their actions. In this chapter, I offer an urbanist pedagogy, a particular mode of educational praxis that arises out of—and, more importantly, is oriented toward—the creation of the urban, a praxis that is internal to and constitutive of urban revolt. I  do this with the help of two thinkers who are seldom theorized together:  Henri Lefebvre and Jean-François Lyotard. Taken together, Lefebvre and Lyotard allow me to advance a conception of the urban not as an object or thing (like the city), but as an incommunicable process that entails two distinct and interrelated creative educational elements:  explosive confrontation and stupor. At the end of the chapter, I read this urbanist pedagogy through a set of protest movements in West Germany. Urbanist pedagogy is mobilized toward the production of a radically different world than we currently inhabit, as it responds to and defends against the continual attacks on the urban. Attacks on urban life are never framed as such, of course. In fact, today the attack on the urban is often done in the name of creativity, in the name of the urban itself! Richard Florida, for example, has taken recent census information and developed (and, of course, sold) a theory of a “creative class,” proposing standards and metrics so as to judge

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how creative cities are, and how cities can attract this creative class, which is not so much a class as a cluster of entrepreneurs, scientists, academics, and artists.1 Local and state governments, together with their urban planners and financiers, can then produce the city for this creative class, who will then go on to make the city creative (and therefore, apparently, profitable). Michael Peters shows how this all depends on educational capitalisms, which “give a new emphasis to the entrepreneurial subject, encourage teaching for giftedness and creativity, prioritize accelerated and personal learning, and lend weight to ‘consumer-citizens’ and a new ethic of self-presentation and self-promotion.”2 Creativity on this model is a set of skills possessed by a privileged enterprising individual, something that contributes to personal and economic growth. Florida and his ilk ultimately want to change our world by constructing urban spaces so as to facilitate the appropriation of exchange value by the state and capital in a way that actually fundamentally represses and blocks the urban. Against this educational capitalism for creative cities, urbanist pedagogy rests on an understanding of creativity as a collective, embodied, confrontational, unpredictable, and stupid encounter that produces urban life. From this perspective, the urban is less an accomplished reality and more a permanent and present aspiration. The fact that we are living in an urban age appears as an indisputable fact. The United Nations, for example, has issued several reports over the last two decades concerning recent historic shifts in living patterns. As of 2008, for the first time in world history, the majority of the earth’s people live in the city rather than the countryside.3 UN-Habitat expects 60 percent of the world’s population to live in cities by 2030, and is now explicitly concerned with a “better urban future.”4 The urban age affirmation is repeated, as Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid note, with “monotonous regularity across diverse discursive, institutional and political terrains.”5 Brenner and Schmid reject the urban age thesis for methodological and theoretical reasons, on the grounds that there is no way of empirically determining what urban populations are and, relatedly, that the definition of the urban is messy and anarchic. In other words, with constantly shifting boundaries and absent a consensus on how and on what grounds to draw those boundaries, the ubiquity of the urban age narrative reifies the urban. In response, Brenner and Schmid draft a set of axioms for a different approach to the urban. Chiefly, they urge us to approach the urban not as an empirical reality or even a given form, but as a theoretical, historical, dynamic, contradictory, worldwide, and constantly differentiating process in need of a new vocabulary.6 Because the urban age thesis presents the urban as a concrete and existing object,

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it forecloses the possibility of engaging the urban as a collective and creative process.

From the city to the urban I begin with Lefebvre to tease out the differences between the city and the urban, to show the value of Brenner and Schmid’s axioms, as well as to articulate the current creative possibilities inherent in each. Lefebvre’s wide body of work has been edging its way into educational theory over the past decade.7 Yet so far his distinction between the city and the urban hasn’t been considered, which has limited our view of the pedagogical properties and possibilities of the urban. Between 1967 and 1974, Lefebvre wrote and published eight books on cities and urbanism, culminating with Production of Space, one of his most well-known books in the English-speaking world. This period is marked by a reading of Marx and Engels’s (scattered and systematic) remarks on the city, and this dense and dynamic period of Lefebvre’s thinking birthed two books—Right to the City and The Urban Revolution—that are marked by a fairly radical discontinuity in perspective: a shift from “the city” to “the urban.” Taking this discontinuity into account is crucial for educational projects in our urbanized world, but even within Lefebvre’s conceptual shift as an urban philosopher there lies a haunting pedagogical problem, limiting both his philosophy and his anti-capitalist urban project. But more on that later. Published on the hundredth anniversary of the first volume of Marx’s Capital, Lefebvre’s Right to the City is a set of fairly obscure and haphazard remarks. But in it Lefebvre gives us a philosophical, historical, and political history of the city rooted in historical materialism, and he proposes a set of hypotheses that resonated immediately not only with other theorists at the time, but also with social movements (he was clearly onto something, writing the book a year before the 1968 uprisings). Historically, the city comes about in opposition to the countryside. The city incorporates and rules over a vast territory. Dominating the countryside politically and depending on it economically, the concentration of wealth and power in the city is initially culled from usury, taxation, and/or tithes, but is later extracted from rents and appropriated from surplus labor. As products, cities are conglomerations of a social surplus.8 Cities are also sites of contestation over that surplus. As contradictory formations, “struggles between factions, groups and classes strengthen the feeling of belonging” in the city, and the dominant faction spends the surplus on the city to justify their rule.9 Cities

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concentrate people and things in space, increasing the quality and quantity of interactions and communication, becoming sites of contestation. The mode of production will alter the form of the social surplus, and hence also the character of the city.10 The primary transformation Lefebvre is concerned with is the transition to capitalism, where the motor of the city’s function and development is exchange value. Whereas use values concern taste and consumption, and are therefore qualitative and finite, exchange values are about accumulation and production, and are therefore quantitative and infinite. The germ of the urban is found in this transition: The importance of the city for the social whole became such that the whole seemed to shift . . . From this moment on, the city would no longer appear as an urban island in a rural ocean . . . It entered people’s awareness and understanding as one of the terms in the opposition between town and country. Country? It is now no longer—nothing more than—the town’s “environment,” its horizon, its limit. Villagers? As far as they were concerned, they no longer worked for the territorial lord, they produced for the city, for the urban market.11

Industrial factories, initially located by energy sources outside of cities, move into the city center, where they can draw on nearby available (and desperate) labor power. In this narrative, the city is a primary mover in the emergence of capitalism, rather than being merely the product of it. For marxism, in other words, space is not the passive product of history but an active subject.12 The consolidation of capitalism marks a key phase in the history of urbanization, and Lefebvre refers to it as an “implosion-explosion.” Capital takes hold of the city and reorganizes it according to its needs—although this organization accompanies and facilitates a disorganization. This is the implosion, and there is perhaps nothing that crystallizes and represents this contradictory double-movement more than Baron Haussmann, the “Butcher of Paris.” Appointed to take control of Paris’ public works by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1953, Haussmann put the social surplus of the city to work through large-scale projects. Before his resignation in early 1970, Haussmann had completely transformed the narrow, winding streets of Paris with their small, diverse, and distinct neighborhoods. This Paris, occupied primarily by the working and poor classes, was too crowded, poverty-stricken, and riddled with disease for Haussmann. The cure was to open Paris up, demolishing small neighborhoods and their alleys, and building in their place massive boulevards, grand hotels, theaters, parks, railway stations, market places, and hangouts for the bourgeoisie.

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The right to the urban This grand transformation is an implosion, a sudden and radical concentration and deployment of the surplus. Yet it is also an explosion, as the boulevards and population expulsions simultaneously cast the city out, far beyond its previous geographic boundaries. The boundaries that might contain the city are thrust open, and from this implosion-explosion we arrive at a first definition of the urban as a fabric that signifies “a kind biological proliferation of a net of uneven mesh,” a “coherent unity constituted around one or several cities,” and a kind of “society and life” that “penetrate the countryside.”13 The implosion-explosion, to put it otherwise, attacks the division between the city and the country, these being distinct spaces that facilitate distinct social relations, forms of community and belonging, and subjectivity.14 Previously, the countryside was defined by the domination of landed (and seemingly natural) property in which people were joined through bonds of community or tradition, while the city was defined by the domination of capital in which people were joined through exchange.15 The country was defined by privacy and homogeneity, and the city by publicity and heterogeneity. Don Mitchell provides a succinct articulation of the inherent qualities of city spaces, writing that “publicity demands heterogeneity and the space of the city—with its density and its constant attraction of new immigrants—assured a thick fabric of heterogeneity, one in which encounters with difference were guaranteed.”16 The city is a built-environment dominated by capital but appropriated endlessly by workers (and it is important to note that for Lefebvre, as for Marx and Engels, “workers” is a tremendously expansive category that encompasses all those who participate in productive and reproductive processes). The city is defined by and is a product of struggle. There are struggles that take place in the built-environment of the city, and these are for immediate goals that center around the right to appropriate the city, and who or what class has, or should have, that right. In Lefebvre’s time, much as in our own, the city was the province of city planning, real estate, finance and merchant capital, and state bureaucrats who produced the city as a finished product to be consumed, or what Lefebvre called the city as habitat. A  habitat is a carefully planned environment that prescribes and polices the flow of information and people through symbols, landscapes, laws, police, surveillance equipment, and general institutional practices and regulations (e.g., signs that say what one can and cannot do in a park). In some cases, city habitats even plan the encounters one is supposed

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to have! Within and against this, the subjects of the habitat struggle to inhabit the city, to reclaim it, appropriate it, play in and with it. Lefebvre designates this project as the struggle for the right to the city, which includes “the need for security and opening . . . for certainty and adventure . . . of organization of work and of play, the needs for the predictable and the unpredictable, of similarity and difference, of isolation and encounter, exchange and investments, of independence (even solitude) and communication, of immediate and longterm prospects.”17 These rights respond to an ontological drive, “the need to accumulate energies and to spend them, even waste them in play.”18 The right to the city includes the rights necessary for people to create the city for themselves, a process that will necessarily be in excess of what can be planned and predicted, and so will always be messy, contradictory, and rife with struggle. It is also a right—or set of rights—that aren’t achievable within capitalism, and so are best conceptualized as a revolutionary reformist demand; a demand that must be put forward but which cannot be met by those who would meet it, and thence serves as a slogan of transition. In other words, raising and organizing around a slogan that cannot be met within the existing framework exposes the limitations and insufficiencies of that framework for all to see, at the same time as it formulates and condenses revolutionary drive. Three years later, with the publication of The Urban Revolution, Lefebvre declares his break with the city, backtracking on the idea that the right to the city is really revolutionary. “I’ll begin with the following hypothesis,” he says at the book’s opening: “Society has been completely urbanized . . .. This urbanization is virtual today, but will become real in the future.”19 We definitively reach the urban as distinct from the city, and in many ways as opposed to the city. The city is too bound and constraining, and no longer the adequate theoretical frame for understanding our contemporary world. The city is the birth place of the urban, the built-environment that historically gives rise to the urban, which is now defined in terms of encounters with difference and centrality, or the ability of groups to make themselves central: “The fact that any point can become central is the meaning of urban space-time.”20 With the urbanization of society, the implosion-explosion of the city is completed, and now any point can be central. The urban escapes the city. There is no longer any dichotomy between the country and the city, for with the dense networks of production distributed across the globe any point—no matter how “rural”—can indeed become central, and can thereby contribute to the constant creation and recreation of the urban itself. Think, for example, of the Sacred Stone Camp, founded by—and on the land of—the Standing Rock

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Sioux tribe, to serve as the base of resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline. The camp was not only a base of struggle, but was, more fundamentally, a new center in national and even international politics. Solidarity protests in metropolitan centers like New York and Los Angeles were peripheral and secondary, formed in response to the call from a newly asserted center. This example also brings out one qualifier for centrality: it has to be done for use and use value, and not exchange value. There is no right for the bankers, real estate moguls, or energy corporations to make themselves central; class antagonism frames engagement with the urban. Thus, unlike Andy Merrifield, who asserts that the urbanization of society means we “need to dispense with all the old chestnuts between global North and global South, between developed and underdeveloped worlds, between urban and rural,” we can’t see our urbanized world as one undifferentiated and striated mass.21 The struggle Lefebvre postulates here is no longer just a right to the city, to appropriate the resources in the built-environment to create that builtenvironment anew; it is instead a right to the urban, the right to participate in the global production of our world through centrality, which both forces and depends upon an encounter with a difference. Centrality and the encounter with difference are linked, and together I propose they constitute the explosive confrontation that is a constitutive element of the urban. Centrality is constantly in flux, for any place or thing “can become a home, a place of convergence, a privileged site, to the extent that every urban space bears within it this possibleimpossible, its own negation—to the extent that every urban space was, is, and will be concentrated and poly(multi)centric.”22 Centrality is therefore an interminable movement that ensures a constantly shifting physical and social iteration of space. In any particular place anything can happen, any number of conflicts, involving any number of social groups; things condense, consolidate, momentarily solidify, and centrality is claimed. This is not an idyllic movement; the process of the urban is not always peaceful. In fact, through the urban process confrontations come to a head and are worked out. Centrality is, in the end, the ability of social groups to assert their differences, which is a confrontational, disruptive, and excessive event that always tends toward use and use value. Urban struggles, in turn, concentrate on creating the conditions for those assertions to happen, working against those interests that seek to order the city into predictable flows. The urban as explosive confrontation is a kind of permanent revolution that gives theoretical name and shape to the production and appropriation of the endless excessive surplus of the social. Today’s urban governance structures (and their educational

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and policy personifications) aim to repress exactly this kind of confrontation and the inherent unrest and risk it threatens. Without this risk, creativity is held hostage by the logic of capital and the demand for accumulation. The explosive confrontation opens up the realm of the possible by disrupting and disarticulating the given social arrangement, and therein lies its creativity.

Quantifying and qualifying the urban The urban does not always have to take place in what is labeled as a city, in whatever flexibly drawn and shifting borders it has. It doesn’t concern brick or mortar. For one, this is simply inaccurate. With the implosion-explosion of the industrial city, an urban fabric was cast out. While cities are certainly important sites, places where power and wealth concentrate, they are not the only battlefield. Moreover, because the city is fundamentally a delineable topography with particular characteristics, because it refers to a built-environment, the urban remains something that we have not yet been, but must instead always be striving to be. There are two reasons for this. One is that explosive confrontations as singular events are not permanent features or happenings, but are by definition ephemeral. The other reason for this has to do with the city’s essential quantifiability. The boundaries of the city may shift depending on the time of analysis or the conceptual method used to examine it, but the city can always be measured. Here we run up against a limitation in Lefebvre’s political project, a limitation that is at heart pedagogical. It is a limitation that reveals a tension within his thinking, and that is dangerous only insofar as it works to block the urban encounter. This is Lefebvre’s drive for epistemological certainty and clarity. On the one hand, Lefebvre rails against the quantitative: Ideologically, technically, and politically, the quantitative has become rule, norm, and value. How can we escape the unquantifiable? Even in business, bodies that represent the working class express their demands and aspirations in quantifiable terms:  salary and work week. The qualitative is worn down. Anything that cannot be quantified is eliminated. The generalized terrorism of the quantifiable accentuates the efficiency of repressive space, amplifies it without fear and without reproach.23

Here we see Lefebvre’s disgust of performativity, of the domination of what has become the era of big data, of performance metrics and indices. This disgust

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is rooted in Lefebvre’s marxism and his political projects to reclaim use value (quality) from exchange value (quantity). An advocate of the encounter and of difference, Lefebvre knows you cannot reduce humanity to numbers, not without doing violence to the humanness of it. On the other hand, Lefebvre’s polemic against the terrorism of the quantifiable, which he associates with the state and capital, is the qualitative. This defense is not only inadequate, it can actually be detrimental to urban social relations, for centrality and the encounter with difference. To make this argument—and to propose an additional pedagogical component of the urban—I want to call on a few essays by Jean-François Lyotard, in particular “Domus and the Megapolis.” In this essay Lyotard presents another version of the development of the city, one that is neither based in nor unrelated to industrialization and capitalism. The history of the city is not a struggle over the value form of life—whether exchange value or use value reign—but about something more fundamental, more historical. What is at stake is not just the right to be central, the right to encounter, the right to create and recreate our urban world, but thought itself. This allows me to move to the second component of urbanist pedagogy: stupor. To begin, Lyotard presents us with the domus, a domestic community based on rhythm and work. There is a connection with Nature and God, the creation of customs and narrative. The domus is a “domestic monad,” and everyone is welcome; there are no exclusions:  “The poor man, the solitary traveler, has a place at the table. Let him give his opinions, show his talent, tell his story.”24 Lyotard gives his own telling of the town-country dialectic: The city spends centuries, millennia slowly gnawing away at the domus and its community. The political city, imperial or republican, then the city of economic affairs, today the megapolis spread out over what used to be the countryside. It stifles and reduces res domesticate, turns them over to tourism and vacation. It knows only the residence [domicile]. It provides residences for the presidents of families the domini, it bends them to egalitarian citizenship, to the workforce and to another memory, the public archive, which is written, mechanographically operated, electronic. It does surveys of the estates and disperses their order. It breaks up god-nature, its returns, its time of offering and reward. With another regulation of space-time set in place, it is in relation to this that the bucolic regime is perceived as a melancholic survival.25

Whereas for Lefebvre the city concentrates power, for Lyotard it disperses power. Indeed, for Lyotard the problem with the city is not that it is ruled by capital and subjected to the logic of exchange, nor is the answer to the problem to open the

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city up. For Lyotard, the problem lies with the demand for that which Lefebvre praises the city for facilitating:  communicability. And the political problem is not capitalism, but liberal democracy. While totalitarian systems assume that the subject is not fully transparent, and thus in a paradoxical way tolerate that opacity even as they endeavor to discover it through surveillance and other mechanisms, liberal democratic systems demand a subject that is fully transparent. Democratic subjects have to be excessively public, there can be no secrets. If you do not post on social media, you disappear. If you do not exercise your rights, then you have no rights, or you do not deserve any. If you are not unique, if you do not express your uniqueness, then you are not really human; you are a drone, a drab, a lifeless communist. For democracy to really flourish, it needs differences, and needs those differences to be communicable and communicated. As such, democracy fashions subjects who will not shut up, who compel themselves to communicate, to express. To understand this, it may be helpful to briefly consider one of Lyotard’s fables, in which liberal democracy is identified as the logical conclusion of the earth’s development. It begins with the dispersion and grouping of energies in celestial arrangements. In one of these, a star we know as the sun, in combination with the assembling of energy types on the planet we know of as earth, there are created the conditions for the emergence of cells. Cells reproduce through division, and need to consume external energy to survive. They multiply and develop. They make up human beings, who themselves multiply. Societies develop and multiply. Languages, too. All of this development begets regulation and disruption. And, finally, After a time, it happened that the systems labeled liberal democratic showed themselves to be the most appropriate at exercising these regulations. They in effect left the control programs open to debate, they in principle allowed each unity to accede to decision functions . . . This flexibility turned out in the long run to be more efficient than the rigid fixation of roles in stable hierarchies . . . Of course, there thus resulted frequent crises that were sometimes dangerous for the survival of these systems. But, on the whole, the performativity of the latter found itself increased. This process was called progress. It induced an eschatological representation of the history of human systems.26

Development depends on both disruption and regulation. Development would stop were it not for instability, crisis, decenteredness. Performativity requires difference, contradiction, and complexification. Performativity threads capital

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and democracy together, for the differences that democracy solicits are entered into circuits of production, exchange, and consumption. Through his concept of the megapolis, Lyotard presents the dark side of both industrialization and urbanization, a side that Lefebvre leaves unremarked. The development of cities is about, well, development, about complexification, about movements toward totalization. All kinds of knowledges—even oppositional ones—are gathered to contribute to the development of the system. But our problem is not about increasing participation, dialogue, or access to information, but about insisting on and cohering around one side of the social antagonism in a communist political project that is directed against democratic communicative capitalism. What I argue in this next section is that Lyotard’s domus gives urban struggles a pedagogical block to communicative capitalism, or an educational route away from recuperation within the system, so that urban confrontations can bring about a radically new urban world.

The right to the urban domus Lefebvre praises the city for aggregating people together, for concentrating the productive forces of society in space, amplifying social relations, intensifying communications, making encounters with difference possible. And it is this “good side” of the dialectic of the city that the agents of capital plunder, and that we need to fight to reclaim, not in order to produce a different kind of spatial arrangement (the city), but to produce a new way of being (the urban). Lyotard shows that this is not as liberatory as Lefebvre wants to think. It is not just the terror of the quantifiable that oppresses and forecloses, but also the terror of the communicable. Even “secrets,” Lyotard writes, “must be put into circuits, writings programmed, tragedies transcribed into bits of information. Protocols of transparency, scenarios of operationality . . . The secret is capitalized swiftly and efficiently.”27 Since secrets are, by definition, uncommunicable, to communicate the secret is to eliminate the secret. And if secrets only exist so that they can enter into circulation, then the possibility of the secret is foreclosed. So it is with thought. The only kind of thought accepted by the megapolis is communicable thought: “In the name of ‘communicative action,’ ‘conversation’ and the relegation of philosophy, in the name of performativity, we are begged to think useful. Useful for the composition of the megapolis.”28 The megapolis city expands geographically as the logic of development and complexification extends politically, economically, and socially. The liberal democratic impulse

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of the city is propelled not only through the terror of the quantifiable, but also through the terror of communication, the dictate to communicate, to express. Whereas Lefebvre wants to reclaim use value against exchange value, Lyotard emphasizes the dialectical relationship between the two, and in this sense could be read as more radical than Lefebvre, in that the domus has no utility. He is after something different from use value, different from useful thinking, and different from communication. Lyotard is after stupidity, and he finds this resistance not in the megapolis, but in the domus. Lyotard does not glorify the domus (indeed, Lyotard never glorifies anything), and he explicitly acknowledges that it is neither a model of resistance nor a type of community that could be a counterpower to the megapolis. The domesticated monad has its repressions and violences, if it ever even really existed. But the domus is significant because of the untamable that makes it possible and that it has to domesticate. “What domesticity regulated—savagery—it demanded. It had to have its off-stage within itself.”29 If it were not for the wild, the unpredictable, the event, there would be no justification for any process of domestication. The crux of the problem of the megapolis is that it is founded on preventing the untamable, on predicting the unpredictable, on making thought legible and intelligible and rendering stupidity to the order of non-order. It does this through capitalist production relations and through the performative demand for use and liberal democratic subjectivity. The pedagogical impulse that resists the megapolis is an accommodation to stupor. Only by giving ourselves over to a stupor can we access—or, better, encounter—the secret. The secret is a timbre that cannot be analyzed, only encountered, only witnessed. “A no-saying amid the always already said: stupor. A  stupid passion rises in the domestic dough.”30 The purpose of stupid thinking is to think some more, to think forever. This, for Lyotard, is at heart a philosophical pursuit, for the task of philosophy is to ask questions that cannot be answered (and if they can be answered, it is only because they were incorrectly formulated).31 Pedagogy is not about the pursuit of knowledge but exactly the opposite: the endless pursuit of stupidity, of stupor. The pursuit is without end because stupidity is a permanent excess. No matter how hard we may try, we can’t eradicate it. Capital can try to order it out of existence, or make it into a utility that will at some point lead to greater knowledge, but it nonetheless perpetually resists and threatens to assert its centrality. In fact, stupidity itself can be thought of as a kind of explosive confrontation with an excessive difference that escapes knowledge, a permanent and inherent threat or risk. Moreover, the explosive confrontation is structured by stupor, for without such a structure the explosion

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can’t properly unravel and disarticulate the given social order; it would only be able to immediately communicate a new answer. This is a risk that Lefebvre’s own thought seeks to eliminate. Lefebvre presents the urban as a “black box” or a “blind field.” He denounces our “blindness” as “the fact that we cannot see the shape of the urban, the vectors and tensions inherent in this field, its logic and dialectic movement, its immanent demands.”32 As such, we have Lefebvre’s own urban turn, his research to uncover precisely what the urban is and what it is not. Along the way, Lefebvre discovers that the urban appears, is at heart ephemeral, is a yearning that permanently remains a virtuality only to be realized again and again. Lefebvre positions our blindness to the urban as a deficit to be overcome, as an obstacle we have to clear from our path. Yet blindness, as a kind of stupor, is an essential pedagogical attribute of the urban. As Rod Michalko says, we must understand “blindness and all disability as a social identity—an identity which embodies living and learning, and not one which is contingent and from which we must escape.”33 It is not blindness we must overcome, but our insistence on sight. It is not stupidity we must overcome, but our insistence on knowledge and communication. Lefebvre thus ends up as another thinker of and in the megapolis, babbling into the circuits of exchange. To seek to eradicate blindness, as Lefebvre does, is actually to work against centrality and the encounter, to prevent confrontational explosions from erupting in social space.

Stupid confrontations In West Germany, in the 1980s, an urban struggle emerged that is emblematic of the link between confrontational explosions and stupor. The object of the struggle between urban inhabitants and the capitalist state was the approaching April 1983 state census. This was the first census since 1970, and the first ever for which the state was employing people to enumerate. By the end of March 1983, there were around 500 local boycott movements, which suggested multiple tactics, “from the ‘soft’ forms involving false information, crumpled or illegible census forms to the ‘hard’ option of returning empty forms to the government (with identifying bar codes clipped off ) for ‘recycling.’ ”34 Boycott leaders articulated the movement as a response to “the sometimes disastrous results of urban planning” as well as the strengthening power of the state over the people.35 With upward of 25 percent of the population planning on boycotting, two federal lawsuits against the census were filed and, after issuing a restraining

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order on the government, the courts struck down parts of the law passed to facilitate the census. However, although the courts codified the boycott’s victory, this very codification revealed to the state how to better craft the legislation for the next census. A similar but larger and wider boycott movement erupted in advance of the 1987 census. This movement wasn’t able to stop the census, as the state exerted more force than before, compelling participation in court and through threat and issuance of fines. True centrality is never guaranteed, and has always to be struggled for. In this 1983 movement, a nebulous network of hundreds of movements coalesced around the demand to remain ineffable in the face of the state, asserting the right not only against quantifiability, but also for collective stupor. We can imagine Tim Eckman would be right at home here, having finally found his people. The differences asserted in this movement were indifferent, claiming centrality and creating the urban by not allowing the state and capital access to the quantitative and qualitative information that would allow them to attack the urban through planning, regulation, and surveillance. The urban contradiction here, as Lefebvre foresaw it, is not between the town and country, but “between the centrality of power and other forms of centrality, between the ‘wealth-power’ center and the periphery, between integration and segregation.”36 This centrality didn’t take the form of a communication, but a refusal to communicate. As an explosion and organization of stupor, it presented a radical block to the system through the abnegation of a positive program. As an example of urbanist pedagogy, the struggle opened hundreds of new secret centers within the German State, recreating the urban plane in the name of an incommunicable common.

Notes 1 Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2004). 2 Michael A. Peters, Education, Science, and Knowledge Capitalism: Creativity and the Promise of Openness (New York: Peter Lang, 2013), 42. 3 United Nations Population Fund, “State of World Population 2007: Unleashing the Potential of Urban Growth,” (2007). Available online: http://www.unfpa.org/ swp/2007/english/introduction.html(accessed May 30, 2018). 4 UN-Habitat, “UN-Habitat at a Glance,” (n.d.). Available online: https://unhabitat. org/un-habitat-at-a-glance/ (accessed May 30, 2017).

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5 Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid, “The ‘Urban Age’ In Question,” in Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization, ed. N. Brenner (Berlin: Jovis, 2014), 314. 6 Ibid., 331–334. 7 See, for example, Sue Middleton, Henri Lefebvre and Education: Space, History, Theory (New York: Routledge, 2014); Derek R. Ford, Education and the Production of Space: Political Pedagogy, Geography, and Urban Revolution (New York: Routledge, 2017); “Lefebvre’s Teachings,” a special issue of Policy Futures in Education 15, no. 4 (2017). 8 David Harvey develops this further in the second part of Social Justice and the City, rev. ed. (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1973/2009). 9 Henri Lefebvre, “Right to the City,” in Writings on Cities, trans. and ed. E. Kofman and E. Lebas (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1996), 67. 10 And it will not do so uniformly across the globe and history. 11 Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, trans. R. Bonnono (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1970/2003), 11. 12 This is the thesis of another book published during this period, Lefebvre, Marxist Thought and the City, trans. R. Bonnono (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1972/2016). 13 Lefebvre, “Right to the City,” 71–72. 14 There is a definite Eurocentrism here, and for a troubling of this, see Kelsey Dayle John and Derek R. Ford, “The Rural Is Nowhere: Bringing Indigeneity and Urbanism into Educational Research,” in Forgotten Places: Critical Studies in Rural Education, ed. W. M. Reynolds (New York: Peter Lang, 2017), 3–14. 15 See Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology: Part One (New York: International Publishers, 1945/1970), 68–69. 16 Don Mitchell, The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space (New York: Guilford Press, 2003), 18. 17 Lefebvre, “Right to the City,” 147. 18 Ibid. 19 Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, 1. 20 Ibid., 116. 21 Andy Merrifield, The New Urban Question (London: Pluto Press, 2014), 4. 22 Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, 39. 23 Ibid., 185. 24 Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. G. Bennington and R. Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988/1991), 193. 25 Ibid. 26 Jean-François Lyotard, Postmodern Fables, trans. G. V. D. Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993/1997), 89–90.

90 27 28 29 30 31

32 33 34 35 36

Politics and Pedagogy in the “Post-Truth” Era NewLyotard, The Inhuman, 201. Ibid., 200. Ibid., 201. Ibid., 202. See Jean-François Lyotard, “Can Thought Go on without a Body?” in The Inhuman; Lyotard, Why Philosophize? trans. A. Brown (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013); Derek R. Ford and Tyson E. Lewis, “On the Freedom to be Opaque Monsters: Communist Pedagogy, Aesthetics, and the Sublime,” Cultural Politics 14, no. 1 (2018): 95–108. Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, 40. Rod Michalko, “Blindness Enters the Classroom,” Disability & Society 16, no. 3 (2001): 358 Matthew G. Hannah, “Calculable Territory and the West German Census Boycott Movements of the 1980s,” Political Geography 28, no. 1 (2009): 71. Ibid. Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, 170.

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(Un)communicative Aesthetic Education

Struggles against capitalism today are increasingly posed as struggles for democracy, especially with the ascendency of brute racist, chauvinist, semi-fascist, and fascist forces across the globe. On one level this has appeal, for there seems to be an enduring contradiction between capitalism and democracy. For whereas democracy is the rule of the many, which demands the maximum political participation of the citizenry, capitalism is the rule of the few, which demands the minimum political participation of the proletarians. Whereas democracy demands equality (one person, one vote), capitalism demands inequality (one dollar, one vote). Education has been integral in managing this contradiction. For example, in the United States one of the founding rationales for the public school system was that it would suspend this contradiction through the introduction of meritocracy and equal opportunity, and the creation of a citizenry that viewed itself in terms of nation and not class. David Labaree thus writes that the formation of “the public school system was part of a grand compromise between democratic politics and capitalist markets that has proven essential for the durability of the United States as a liberal democracy.”1 Education is the hinge that allows capitalism and democracy to cohabitate. Much of radical and critical educational thought has seen education as a lever that can push us away from capitalism and toward democracy, moving us to one side of the antagonism. Through changes in curriculum and content, pedagogy, and teacher–student relationships, so the thinking goes, we can create a better set of social relations. Some even suggest that we can become so democratic and participatory that the class enemy will vanish or surrender. All we need are more blog posts. Within this literature addressing the relationship between education and capitalism, relatively little attention has been paid to aesthetics. At the same time, in explorations of the aesthetic realm and its possible anti-capitalist tendencies, little attention has been paid to questions of pedagogy. There is a crucially neglected moment here for a more robust articulation of the relationship

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between anti-capitalist pedagogy and aesthetics that can enrich both sides of this dialectic and provide key insights for political educators and organizers. However, to intervene on this terrain alone would be a mistake, for there is an error that runs the gamut of this educational and aesthetic conversation that has yet to be corrected, and that is the supposition that there is an inherent antagonism between democracy and capitalism, and that in order to be opposed to one, we must be for the other. As I’ve argued in this book, there is a taut connection between capitalism and democracy that consists of a shared logic that revolves around communication, inclusion, and transparency. This chapter shows that there is another shared logic, an aesthetic force that co-constitutes these systems, and that without grasping this aesthetic connection, anticapitalist struggles are reduced to liberal reforms that end up reinforcing and deepening capitalist production relations. To sufficiently respond to this, we have to articulate a communist aesthetic pedagogy. This pedagogy will be constructed by blocking together several political, philosophical, and aesthetic theories that might otherwise be thought of as mutually exclusive. The foundation is a return to Immanuel Kant and his theory of the beautiful and the sublime, which demonstrates that connections between capitalism and liberal democracy rest on an unexamined aesthetic of the beautiful. To break this connection, and thus to push democratic struggles for equality toward a communist horizon, we need a new alignment between radical politics and aesthetics of the sublime. The two links here should not come as a surprise at this point in the book: Lyotard and the Communist Party. The former is a point of intersection between communist pedagogy and sublime aesthetics, while the latter provides an example of how this aesthetic is figured politically and organized concretely. The chapter closes by reading the aesthetic communist pedagogy through a communist study group in the Jim Crow south. What we find there is a different aesthetic relationship between self and world that is not prefigured in various forms of liberal reformism. Indeed, an excessive surplus is discovered that presses beyond the boundaries of what can be known and what can be imaginatively figured, thus provoking a sense of ineffable sublimity or political opacity. This excess is the aesthetic dimension of (un)communicative communism.

The endless loop of communicative capitalism The problem posed by communicative capitalism and its process of individualization is that it covers division—divisions that resist articulation

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within debates and thus resist the transparency and communicability so privileged by democracy. Rather than fundamental antagonisms, politics becomes an exercise in individual differences of opinion and feelings struggling to assume visibility within a political community. The demand for inclusion and participation excludes division from the purview of the political, and from subjectivity. For one, the people are divided as a collective:  “The split in the people goes all the way down. It can’t be limited to the idea that some are excluded from the people (and hence that including them would solve the problem of the gap). Nor can it be rendered as the problem of representation (and hence addressed via ontology).”2 The division is such that “the people do not know what they want. They are not fully present to themselves. Conflicting and contradictory desires and drives render the people a split subject perpetually pushing to express, encounter, and address its own non-knowledge.”3 Second, as we discussed in chapter 2, the collective constitution of the subject institutes an inescapable relationality, dependency, and opacity that persists at the very heart of being. Communicative capitalism individuates us as subjects (and indeed sustains itself through the production of autonomous subjects) and ideologically fosters the illusion of the transparent individual.4 One primary function of the Communist Party is to deindividualize us and organize us as a collective subject that produces another split: a gap between the word as it exists and something else. This is the gap inhabited by the sinthomostudier who, in being undone by the derealization of the symbolic and dissolved into a radical singularity, needs to become something else. Since, as Edelman says, “no ‘one’ could ever survive” the queer lesson that teaches nothing, the queer lesson has to be (un)learned collectively.5 The party is precisely this collective form, which seizes the gap of irony, projects it into a worldview, and organizes on its basis. This produces an affective disjointedness in which we can feel ourselves otherwise, where we can experience our potentiality divorced from the demands for communication, recognition, and integration within a liberal system. Because communicative capitalism is itself a deeply aesthetic project, one that, as will be argued below, is founded on Immanuel Kant’s aesthetic community, opting for the party will necessitate an aesthetic alteration, what we refer to as a shift from the beauty of communicative capitalism to the sublimity of (un)communicative communism. There is something supersensible about the party that denies full, transparent communication as dictated by liberal democracy and communicative capitalism. More to the point of pedagogy, however, by articulating a sublime aesthetic dimension to the party, we can

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develop a crucial resource for educators and organizers in our struggle for a different world along radically different aesthetic lines.

The question of the beautiful and the sublime The sublime has become an increasingly important contemporary aesthetic category. While the concept of the sublime can be traced all the way back to ancient Greek philosophy and the work of Longinus, in the modern era Kant’s discussion of the sublime has become as fundamental as it is controversial. But before we can appreciate Kant’s analysis of the sublime and how it is related to the political (and pedagogical), we first have to take a short detour through his understanding of the beautiful. According to Kant, there are three kinds of aesthetic judgments. While differing among themselves, they are all nevertheless aesthetic because they rest on subjective grounds. Judgments of the agreeable, the beautiful (taste), and the sublime thus find their justifications in feelings rather than on objective properties of things or rational concepts. Pleasure in the agreeable is based on desire/need and is therefore particular to individual cases.6 Because it is personal, agreeableness cannot be universalized, and in this sense, agreeableness is in the eye of the beholder. Here Kant makes another distinction between the beautiful and the good.7 Pleasure in the good, like the agreeable, is based on desire. We desire the good because it will somehow improve our lives or make us excellent. Agreeableness and the good are concerned with pleasure and with some kind of interest in the object. Yet there is a key difference. Unlike the merely agreeable, the pleasure from the good comes from the application of a concept of what something is intended to be. At this point we can turn to Kant’s reflections on the beautiful.8 Like the agreeable and the good, the beautiful is subjective. For Kant, the beautiful is the sensation of a harmonious resonance between the imagination and understanding, and is therefore not found in the objective properties of things. Yet, unlike the agreeable and the good, the pleasure from the beautiful is not a satisfaction based on desire or on respect for a law or standard. Two implications follow. First, judgments of taste are free. They are free in the sense that they do not need to obey the body (and its desires or needs) or the law (and its conceptual standards of practice or acceptability). Second, judgments of taste are disinterested in that we do not need to have our desires fulfilled or achieve congruency with a set standard in order to feel a beautiful pleasure.

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Because judgments of the beautiful are free and disinterested, we are committed to the claim that everyone should also judge the object as beautiful.9 Aesthetic judgments are universal (no exceptions) and necessary (it must be the case). Kant has put his finger on a very real phenomenon here. There are indeed times in our lives when we are prepared to defend our judgments of taste from attack and to assert that we regard others as wrong when they do not agree with us. Unlike the agreeable, where we simply throw up our hands and say, “well you like what you like and I like what I like,” and go separate ways, in judgments of the beautiful, an argument ensues wherein each party attempts to convince the other of the rightness of a certain judgment of taste. Many of us have likely had the experience of being shocked when someone does not agree with our taste. This indicates that we have presumed that there is something universal in our judgment, something not reducible to the agreeable. There is a sense of purposiveness in the object, yet, unlike the good, we cannot put our finger on what that something is or what specific purpose an object teleologically fulfills. The judgment must remain subjective (thus lacking a concept of reason to guide it) even in its claims to universality. Judgments of this kind are, paradoxically, subjectively universal. For the purposes of this chapter, there is one other small point about Kant’s analysis of the beautiful that’s important. When we state “X is beautiful,” we are assuming everyone can and should agree with the statement. We believe others ought to agree with our judgment of taste because our pleasure is free (and thus not bound to personal desires or needs and is not beholden to any law or standard that can be measured). But in practice this is rarely the case, and we find ourselves in constant dispute over who does and does not have taste, what is and is not tasteful. Kant describes this situation as follows:  someone makes an aesthetic judgment and makes it public, “then he expects the very same satisfaction of others: he judges not merely for himself, but for everyone, and speaks of beauty as if it were a property of things . . . he rebukes them if they judge otherwise, and denies that they have taste, though he nevertheless requires that they ought to have it.”10 Because judgments of taste are never guaranteed in relation to a concept (for that would be a judgment of the good), there is no way to absolutely verify that anyone’s judgment is truly disinterested (and thus free). The result is as follows for Kant: Whereas the taste of reflection, which, as experience teaches, is often enough rejected in its claim to the universal validity of its judgment (about the beautiful), can nevertheless find it possible (as it also actually does) to represent judgments

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Politics and Pedagogy in the “Post-Truth” Era that could demand such assent universally, and does in fact expect it of everyone for each of its judgments, while those who make those judgments do not find themselves in conflict over the possibility of such a claim, but only find it impossible to agree on the correct application of this faculty in particular cases.11

This is a community that is open and pluralistic because no one can prove or disprove that such and such is a real judgment of taste. A beautiful community is, on this reading, a liberal, inclusive, democratic community open to everyone— an everyone that is always communicating judgments and thus always in dispute. We will come back to the political implications of Kant’s theory of an aesthetic community in perpetual dispute, but now we are finally set to turn to our central topic: the sublime. Kant divides the sublime into two basic varieties. The mathematical sublime is defined as something “absolutely large,” that is “large beyond all comparison.”12 Usually when speaking of the size of things, we make either an implicit or an explicit comparison. For instance, when we say things like “that person is tall!” we usually mean tall compared with other people. Yet, when referring to the absolutely large, we do not make any comparison, meaning that the thing is large in and for itself (“the universe is vast”). The dynamically sublime refers to a magnitude of power (rather than size). Here we can think of vast storms raging or the power of the atomic bomb. In both cases, the subject feels terror at being overwhelmed by something so vast that it cannot be properly measured or calculated. And, different from a judgment of the beautiful, the sublime has (at least on the first pass) no sense of purposiveness. Indeed, there is a profound feeling of contra-purposiveness that forces us to ask the question “Why did that hurricane have to happen?” Or, when staring up at the universe, “it all seems so meaningless and empty.” In both cases, there is a sense of pain attached to the sublime. We are finite, and there are forms and forces out there that we cannot hope to represent through our fallible, precarious senses. Crucially, however, this is not the end of the story for Kant. While the sublime first gives the impression of contra-purposiveness in which we feel our sense of finality through our failure to grasp something as a whole (and thus make sense of it), there immediately emerges a second feeling. The failure of the senses to represent the immensity of the sublime leads us to contemplate the nature of reason itself, and its ability to think the world beyond the senses and the imagination. Thus the sublime gives way to the supersensible realm of reason and critical self-reflection on the mind’s free autonomy from brute, material existence. Whereas the aesthetic community argues endlessly about what is and is not beautiful, the sublime community—faced with what is unfathomable,

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supersensible, and opaque—pauses to reflect on its own conditions of possibility. It therefore returns us to the potentiality of reason to touch on an excess that cannot be figured through imaginative resources or linguistic discourse.

The politics of the beautiful and the sublime Kantian reflections on the beautiful and the sublime may appear arcane, abstract, or hopelessly detached (“What the hell does this have to do with the class struggle?” my comrades might ask). But there is a connection to more contemporary political issues and ideas. This move is not as far-fetched as it might at first appear. Indeed, scholars from Friedrich Schiller to Hannah Arendt to Joseph Chytry have linked Kant’s description of aesthetic judgments with some form of participatory democracy.13 For instance, Arendt argues that the judgment of the beautiful can be a paradigm for a nonpossessive, nonconsuming political society and a shared world characterized by unrestrained communication. While there are many merits to this line of inquiry, in the rest of this chapter we would like to offer a possible criticism of the links between the beautiful and the particular form of democratic politics unique to democratic communicative capitalism. As outlined above, the aesthetic community argues about what is and is not beautiful. Because all positions are subjective yet claim universality (without clear guarantee), all must be included, and the debate appears endless. There is a constant circulation of criticism, verbiage, opinions, and commentary. In this sense, the beautiful forms the aesthetic background of communicative capitalism’s liberalized democracy. Stated differently, the democracy of communicative capitalism is modeled on Kant’s aesthetic community. It might at first appear that communicative capitalism is predicated on judgments of the agreeable and/or the good. For instance, it might appear that all choices within communicative capitalism are simply personal preferences, thus prioritizing the individual self as the autonomic unit of political and economic organization. To put it in other words, the agreeable applies to individual cases of consumption, which cannot be universalized, and drives economic production through the proliferation of desires. On another level, it might appear that communicative capitalism equates its judgments with that of the good. This good is derived strictly from financial logistics: the market decides what is best and what is right; profit is the ultimate bottom line. Thus we are told that “the economy is improving” even though

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working conditions worsen and the income gap increases. Although both of these observations are right in a certain sense, the real heart of democratic communicative capitalism is the subjective universalism of the beautiful. Thus the fundamental claim is that “democratic capitalism is the best possible economic system.” This is the most basic form of subjective universalism in that it does not rest on any objective criteria or economic law (indeed, material conditions would suggest precisely the opposite), yet it is taken to be a universal truth to which all rational individuals should agree. Presupposed here is a fundamental consensus that is not predicated on any concept besides the feeling of seemingly spontaneous accord between human self-interest and economic advantage. Because of this spontaneous feeling, capitalism—as a system—cannot be reduced to any class-specific set of interests. Indeed, it takes on a radically disinterested (and thus economically objective) appearance. Capitalism is a taste for a certain kind of disinterested community where everyone and everything can be put into circulation (and thus argued about and debated). In all cases, democratic communicative capitalism circulates judgments of the agreeable and the good, thus excluding a sublime excess that cannot be communicated. While such a community constitutes itself through channels of communication, it is also predicated on an excess that it does not communicate, which remains supersensible: economic inequity and the class struggle that it engenders. The political question becomes:  How to conceptualize this excess beyond the beautiful? Such a question is also pedagogical:  Can one teach an excess that denies communication, that defies figuration/formalization? Instead of communicative inclusion as the bedrock of educational responses to capitalism, can we think of an education that, as Édouard Glissant might state, asserts the right to opacity?14 Such a pedagogy would demand a different kind of taste:  a taste for what is painful, formless, but also radically open to what expands beyond the horizon of communicative capitalism.

Teaching the sublime excess of communicative capitalism Before drawing out a sublime pedagogy from Lyotard, I want to return to some themes raised in the introduction to show how such a pedagogy emerges from within his critique of liberal democracy. The point here is not only to provide crucial context for such a pedagogy but also to show that Lyotard helps us gain a deeper appreciation of the interdependent aesthetic commitments that bind capitalism and democracy to the beautiful. In this sense, Lyotard helps

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enrich Dean’s critique of communicative capitalism—in particular, a critique of its aesthetic logic—and also helps articulate a pedagogical practice of (un)communicative communism. Across his body of work, Lyotard makes frequent mention of “the system.” While many have interpreted him as an apolitical pragmatist with no interest in any particular system, Lyotard indeed writes of the system. Specifically, in a collection of fables published in the early 1990s, Lyotard defines the system in at least two ways: “liberal, imperialist capitalism” and “liberal democratic.”15 His critique of democracy is not that it is adaptable or that it accommodates (lots of) opposition but that it demands endless publicity and expression. Liberal democracy, in other words, cannot tolerate the excess of the sublime, and so it forces us again and again to participate in deliberation, dialogue, and communication. Democracy, on this reading, can tolerate dissent, but it cannot tolerate dissent that is not made public, that is not expressed, that is held in abeyance. Here we can appreciate the deep kinship between this political logic and capitalism, for both compel us to actualize everything, to enter absolutely everything we can into the circuits of communication and exchange. Perhaps we could summarize this in the form of a simple mandate: “Be what you produce!” Production can be read in terms of economic imperatives to translate one’s labor power into surplus value, in terms of a political imperative to speak your mind, and in terms of an aesthetic imperative to communicate one’s judgment of taste. In fact, Lyotard writes that the system “is but the extension to language of the same routine of exchange:  interlocution, interactiveness, transparency, and debate, words are exchanged for words as use value is exchanged for use value.”16 Glissant makes a similar point. He argues that within current forms of Western democracy, difference is heralded as an inherent political good, yet such differences—when they enter into communicative circuits—reinforce the normative value of transparency and accessibility. Thus the call for interlocution, interactivity, and so forth are ways to enclose difference within a form: the form of a beautiful community where everyone can speak, be heard, and find a place within a discourse. Such enclosing is also, for Glissant, a form of appropriation that, indeed, denies that there is really any true difference, any true otherness that can elude Lyotard’s system. In opposition to this position, Glissant and Lyotard propose the affirmation of an irreducible opacity and thus a solidarity that emerges from within a space that is not supported by communicative recognition. What ultimately resists democracy and communicative capitalism is what the party organizes: our collective opacity. Here, Lyotard’s aesthetic ruminations

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and pedagogical provocations provide important resources for communist theorizing. Lyotard turns to the aesthetic because it is here that the silent secret takes up residence against the demands of the system. To respect this, however, we have to approach aesthetics carefully, for works of art are “born elsewhere, far from all communicational transparency.” Having been born as such, they bear a “resistance and opacity [that] must be respected . . . even when one is trying to make commentary on them.”17 This holds not for any particular medium and, in fact, for Lyotard, philosophy itself represents a sublime resistance to liberal democracy and capitalism. In a series of lectures that Lyotard delivered to first-year students at Sorbonne University in the fall of 1964, he asks:  Why philosophize? By asking why philosophize, and not what is philosophy, Lyotard foregrounds the disruption inherent in philosophy, which is an act and not a discipline or thing. Whereas to ask what philosophy is would be to pin it down, proceeding on the assumption that philosophy is a particular thing, to ask why philosophize “bears within itself the annihilation of what it is questioning.”18 In this sense, philosophy, like the sublime itself, is not bound by a question of form. If it were, it would become something beautiful. Rather, philosophy is immeasurable (always appearing where and when it is not wanted) and dynamic (always exceeding any attempt to bridle its powers of critical reflection and creative speculation). For everything philosophy demonstrates or reveals, it hides something, renders something else obscure or oblique. We philosophize because we desire, because our lives are ruled by “the yes and no”: “Even when we are at the heart of things, of ourselves, of others, of time or of speech, their reverse side is constantly present to us.”19 Desire names the hinge that constantly swings back and forth between unity and separation. It exists in a supersensible gap. In short, philosophy is not about communication. On this reading, philosophy—though spoken—interrupts communicative circuits precisely by annihilating itself in its very articulation. Thus, we have yet another pedagogical approach to the rafters, to the singular zero that unravels and undoes the subject. Lyotard specifically addresses the teaching of philosophy in a letter to Hugo Vermeren, which was published as part of a collection initially titled The Postmodern Explained to Children. While this title may convey contempt for the “postmodern debate,” it is actually quite sincere and serious. Childhood is an important theme that recurs throughout Lyotard’s opus. Childhood names the state in which the human is also inhuman, is not yet integrated into the established community of speakers and knowers. The child is not completely reducible to the system and therefore not beholden to the rule of communicative

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dominance, resting somewhere between the Real and the symbolic. Whereas the adult knows, has mastered language and the world, the child has no such pretenses. The child knows things for which it does not have words, knows that there is more to know, is never quite satisfied with the answers received, and will not hesitate to interrupt anything with relentless questioning. This child is not the figure of innocence but rather a motor of frustration, a constant agitator. There is no concern in childhood for efficiency, rationality, or performativity. The child does not really want to know: it wants to want to know, or it desires desire. It should be clear, then, that childhood is not at all a stage in a linear development of the human, just as the postmodern is not something that comes after the modern. Childhood is like philosophy, or at least how philosophy should be. Not grounded in rationality or striving toward systematizing the world, philosophy is an act of asking, of listening, of interrupting and letting oneself be interrupted. In this sense, philosophy is fundamentally an aesthetic experience instead of an epistemological one—one summarized in the experience of the child. “Childhood,” he writes to Vermeren, “is the monster of philosophers. It is also their accomplice. Childhood tells them that the mind is not given. But that it is possible.”20 Childhood is monstrous in its embrace of excess and its rejection of the quest for concrete knowledge. That it is a monster and an accomplice to the philosopher means that it is not a state within a successive path of development, being neither the progenitor nor the offspring of the philosopher: “It is what, in the midst of man, throws him off course . . . it is the possibility or risk of being adrift. We always begin in the middle.”21 That one must begin in the middle means that there are no prerequisites or foundational understandings necessary for the course of philosophy. There is no teleology leading from child to adult. There is always a monstrous, opaque, and thus immeasurable gap that opens within such systems, and this is where we find philosophy. Consider the act of reading, through which we learn that “reading is never finished, that you can only commence, and that you have not read what you have read. Reading is an exercise in listening.”22 Philosophical reading presupposes that there is always something else there, something that will resist articulation, communication, and transparent recognition. In this way, philosophy as an act of listening does not entail achieving understanding at all; rather, it entails forgetting, but a particular type of forgetting, which Lyotard, drawing on psychoanalysis, calls anamnesis. In the clinic, anamnesis is a practice wherein the analysand engages in free-play association, and from this, the analyst picks up on recurring signifiers and themes. This is usually done when helping the

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analysand work through a repressed event. Through anamnesis the patient is taken hold of by the unknown, thereby allowing themselves to be guided by the unpresentable. Lyotard’s pedagogy, at its base, entails teaching one to be open to alterity, to be seized and held by the monstrous childhood of thought. The characteristics that Lyotard ascribes to such an educational process include “patience, anamnesis, and recommencement” (105) and “anamnesis, discomposure, and elaboration” (107). We see, then, a contradictory movement of discovery, articulation, and loss, with all phases of the educational process happening simultaneously.

(Un)communicative communist aesthetic pedagogy If there is an aesthetic unconscious for Lyotard’s pedagogy, it is a sublime unconscious. In the face of the monstrousness of the sublime, he posits a form of philosophical education that speaks the ineffable within the effable, the uncommunicative within the communicative without thereby reducing this excess to yet another consumable signifier. Whereas the beautiful acts of democratic communicative capitalism always call for recognition through inclusive dialogue and debate, the sublime acts of philosophical education call for misrecognition, interruption, and forgetting. One focuses on the circulation of opinions while the other turns inward to look at the very aporias of thinking itself, to the silences and gaps. Because this aesthetic turn might be overwhelming if not painful (as Kant might argue), Lyotard emphasizes the need for a pedagogical form of patience with what is hidden, what withdraws, what remains unsaid in the said. Thus patience emerges as a powerful political and pedagogical virtue for continually returning to the unformed surplus at the heart of all reading and thinking. Without such patience, students might very well foreclose on the gap and thus reinsert themselves back into the circulation of democratic communicative capitalism. Lyotard’s writing takes place within democratic communicative capitalism while pushing us toward the possibility of (un)communicative communism. It breaks asunder the relation between democracy’s call to equality and capitalist circulation, thus offering up a sublime breach of contract between politics and profit. Whereas one privileges the agreeable, the good, and the beautiful within an aesthetic community, the other privileges what withdraws, what refuses to be said, what remains in opacity. Philosophy as a sublime pedagogical act returns us to the potentiality of thinking (its very preconditions) and thus forms

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a community that lacks transparency or self-identity yet nevertheless stands in solidarity. If we patiently listen, this philosophical education can return us to what is most precious and precarious:  the freedom to be opaque, childlike monsters. (Un)communicative communist pedagogy is what the party mobilizes to interrupt the order of things and imbibe a sublime gap in the present order. The gap covers the world in an opaque cloak that is not meant to be lifted by the all-knowing teacher or the progressive facilitator; rather, it is the possibility of imagining and enacting alternative social arrangements. It is, however, important to pay attention to how the opaque is engaged, just as it is crucial to decipher what kind of monsters we need to be. To provide an illustration of the kind of aesthetic pedagogy we are after here, we want to call on the narrative of Hosea Hudson. Hudson was a Black sharecropper from Georgia who joined the Communist Party USA in 1931. Having never attended school, Hudson got his education in the party. As he puts it, “The Party learnt me a whole lot.”23 Hudson illuminates an aesthetic communist pedagogy that operates through the party’s newspaper that focused on the Black nation, the Liberator. By 1932 Hudson was living in Birmingham, Alabama, participating in party meetings weekly, meetings in which they would study and discuss the newspaper. Here is Hudson reflecting on the Liberator study groups that his unit—which was composed of six people—would undertake: We would read this paper and this would give us great courage. We had classes, reading these articles and the editorials in the Liberator. We’d compare, we’d talk about the right of self-determination. We discussed the question of if we established a government, what role we comrades would play, then about the relationship of the white, of the poor white, of the farmers, etc., in this area. If you had a government in the South—they’d give you the right of self-determination in the Black Belt—you got whites there. What would you do with the whites? We say the whites will be recognized on the basis of their percentage, represented on all bodies and all committees. But the Negroes at all times would be in the majority. All parties would be elected. We were talking about electing people to committees. Our position was that on committees, if you had a committee, the majority of that committee would be Negro. But you’d also have representatives in all committees by all factions, not exclusive Negro, see.24

Here we find Hudson and the five other comrades in his unit, gathered in someone’s house, deep in the Jim Crow south, a racist, apartheid dictatorship enforced by military and paramilitary alike. As Harry Haywood, another Black

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communist, writes about his time visiting with Hudson in Birmingham, “Racism was all-pervasive and blatant. One could feel it in the atmosphere. Birmingham was a mean town, a place where the police periodically shot down Black people.”25 Under the constant threat of arrest by the police or murder by the police or the Ku Klux Klan, they would gather to discuss this newspaper. The Liberator was not only an explication tool or device. Hudson never says that they valued it because it explained everything, although he does value the party because of its ability to explain the world. Yet the exploitation, degradation, and violence in the south could never be communicated or made fully transparent. The value of the paper he chooses to highlight is the courage it communicated, the sublime feeling it generated, the hope that, through philosophical speculation, a new freedom could be forged that exceeded the excesses of capitalism. The overwhelming disconnect between life as it was and life as it could be was not a deficiency to be overcome and explained away but a sublime force that allowed for educational philosophy to take place, one that could birth a communist praxis. No mere academic exercise, the point was (and is) to mobilize the opacity of the gap between what is and what could be pedagogically as part of a communist project for revolutionary transformation. The stunning chasm between the material conditions of life and the political program imagined was not closed down, was not publicly articulated, and thus did not enter into the circuits of exchange (to become yet another liberal reformist policy). It was precisely this opaque chasm that animated the monstrous momentum of a radical educational philosophy beyond measure. This is not a call for generalized or universal opacity or a refusal of articulation and explication. Capital, after all, as an inherently expansive project demands surplus and excess, and when limits to that surplus and excess are reached, all manner of destructive crises pave the way for new growth. Similarly, opacity is not inherently antagonistic to capital. Our opacity could be completely irrelevant to the expansive reproduction of capitalism, or we might even conceive of it being commodified in some way. It is for precisely these reasons that we are constructing an (un)communicative communist pedagogy, an aesthetic education of, in, and for the communist party. Sublime courage was not generated by the mere engagement of collectively reading something; it was generated by philosophizing the collective content created by the party from within the party form. This also means that this pedagogy, like all iterations offered in this book, is proposed not as a comprehensive platform but as a kind of educational model for opening and mobilizing the possible (as what confronts those who struggle against exploitation, yet nevertheless exceeds communication).

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Unlike Kant’s judgment of the agreeable, Hudson and his comrades’ concern was not with mere personal preferences. Indeed, their project was universal in scope. And unlike a judgment of the good, it was not based on a clear concept/ blueprint of an imagined communism to come. For them, the concept of the good did not merely exist in waiting but was a good-yet-to-come and thus remained to be articulated. And unlike a judgment of the beautiful, the sublimity of their suffering was not foreclosed for spontaneous accord. Rather, the unbridled horror of capitalist racism in the south gave way to a reflection on the equally immeasurable power of reason to posit a communist alternative. Thus the patience to think through the pain of sublime horror alchemically transformed into a revolutionary courage: a courage forged from within an opaque fissure of desire for an equality that was (and is) irreducible to democratic communicative capitalism. Hudson’s challenge is thus an educational challenge that still speaks to us today: how to foster an (un)communicative and thus militantly communist aesthetic education of possibilities.

Notes 1 David F. Labaree, Someone Has to Fail: The Zero-Sum Game of Public Schooling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 4. 2 Jodi Dean, Crowds and Party (New York: Verso, 2016), 90. 3 Ibid., 90–91. 4 Derek R. Ford, “Butler Goes to Work: A Political Economy of the Subject,” borderlands e-journal 12, no. 1 (2013): 1–19. 5 Lee Edelman, “Learning Nothing: Bad Education,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 28, no. 1 (2017): 124–173. 6 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000): 206. 7 Ibid., 5: 208. 8 Ibid., 5: 210. 9 Ibid., 5: 213–214. 10 Ibid., 5: 213. 11 Ibid., 5: 214. 12 Ibid., 5: 249. 13 Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Joseph Chytry, The Aesthetic State: A Quest in Modern German Thought (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1989); Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982).

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14 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). 15 Jean-François Lyotard, Postmodern Fables, trans. G. V. D. Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 199, 89. 16 Ibid., 209. 17 Ibid., 207. 18 Jean-François Lyotard, Why Philosophize? trans. A. Brown (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013), 18. 19 Ibid., 26. 20 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence 1982–1985, trans. D. Barry, B. Maher, J. Pefanis, V. Spate, and M. Thomas (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988/1992), 100. 21 Ibid., 101. 22 Ibid. 23 Nell Irvin Painter, The Narrative of Hosea Hudson: The Life and Times of a Black Radical (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 78. Thanks to Jodi Dean for bringing this book to my attention a few years ago. 24 Ibid., 102. 25 Harry Haywood, Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist (Chicago: Liberator, 1978), 396.

6

Magical Bookkeepers

In response to the stultification of (academic) marxism, Andy Merrifeld says we need to rattle it up, breathe new life into it, transgress from within. We need to make marxism, in a word, magical. The magic that he has in mind is not that of the Las Vegas magician peddling illusions with high-tech gadgets and carefully choreographed and rehearsed scripts, but that of the magical realist. For magical realism, fiction and reality, history and myth, cut across and through each other, reveal things about the other. We access and construct truth through language and imaginings, while we envision and fantasize through our material reality. “Magic is concrete: its arena is real life. Magic is an imaginary representation of one’s real conditions of life.”1 Engaging magic is a deeply materialist affair, one that reveals the materialism of literally everything, for the supernatural can’t exist without the natural. Magic is labor and creation. It doesn’t just happen. Merrifield’s argument is that, while marxism shouldn’t abandon critique, it needs to start imagining and dreaming. In seeking to provoke, Merrifield takes it a bit too far. Although he begins his book with the idea that magical marxism has to exist in “comradely opposition” to scientific marxism—the marxism of laws and tendencies—he quickly abandons this position. The history of the actually existing socialist movement is thrown out the window along with mass politics. Instead, we have to carry out small, autonomous actions, as if we could somehow defeat—or even threaten— global capital and its powerful states with communes, community gardens, and issue-based micropolitics. At one point Merrifield even suggests that we embrace the joblessness and precariousness of economic crisis and recognize it as a blessing in disguise, one that allows us to break free of the law of value and the imposition of work through the commodity-form. Sometimes I think that Merrifield crosses over from magical marxism into maniacal marxism.2 Nevertheless, we would do well to take his provocation seriously, while avoiding the idealist drift occasioned by an abandonment of history. In this

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last chapter, I want to contribute to both of these tasks, demonstrating that this double-movement presents us with not a political, economic, or social problem, but with a pedagogical one. I  do this first by turning to the three volumes of Marx’s Capital, strategically and selectively searching these texts for references to communism. What I demonstrate is that Marx figures communism in different ways and with seemingly antagonistic emphases. Whereas volume one focuses on freedom and decision, volume two prioritizes management, centralism, and planning, while volume three synthesizes and extends these two different intensities. At heart then, Marx poses communism as a pedagogical problem, as a quandary that demands the intervention of magical educational thinking. Next, I  examine the question of the future, of what comes after—or what is other to—capitalism (or, if you wish, neoliberalism). I do so by asserting an astonishingly overlooked fact:  we have already been postcapitalist. We need to reclaim the history of the international struggle of the dispossessed, exploited, and oppressed, a struggle in whose legacy we have no choice but to operate; a myriad of struggles that constitute resistance today. Here I  concentrate specifically on the first workers’ formation, the Soviet Union, which not only established socialist relations of production, but was also fundamental to the wave of socialist and national liberation struggles that freed much of the global south from the shackles of colonialism. Our history and our present, I  hold, have to be the real stuff of our magical studying, learning, experimenting, and doing. Critical education has failed at each of these junctures, and it is my hope that this chapter can serve not just as a corrective, but more as something that invigorates and provokes. As such, I conclude by offering the Party for Socialism and Liberation as an example of magical marxist educators, calling on their imaginative party program. The party program is not a testament of critique that brings like minds together, but a collective dreaming that brings like spirits together. This movement from critique to imagination makes the present not just seem detestable, but actually feel foreign, thereby instituting the affective disjointedness that is key to political struggle. Most critically, the general organizing apparatus of the party program and the concrete example of a party program attest to the ongoing history of such political struggle.

The communist pedagogy of Capital Marx demonstrates clearly, if not unconsciously, the movement from critique to imagination and the insoluble linkage between the two. Indeed, this is one way

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in which to understand Louis Althusser’s reading of Marx, which separates out Marx’s science from his philosophy (or, in other words, his magic). Althusser poses that there is a necessary lag between science and philosophy. This lag is a general law and so is not specific to marxism: “Great philosophical revolutions are always preceded and ‘borne along’ by the great scientific revolutions ‘active’ in them, but long theoretical labour and long historical maturing are required before they can acquire an explicit and adequate form.”3 Marx’s first discovery was historical materialism, the science of history, or social formations: the idea not that class struggle existed, but that it was the motor force of history. Only later could Marx attend to the theoretical work of elaborating the concepts and frameworks necessary to understand, imagine, and intervene in the world. Marx’s contribution to philosophy, as Althusser insists, is “a new practice of philosophy. Marxism is not a (new) philosophy of praxis, but a (new) practice of philosophy.”4 This lag between science and philosophy poses not only a temporal problem, but also a political one. As Tyson Lewis puts it, “Because philosophy is always belated, pre-existing ideologies come to fill the vacuum opened by the discovery of a new object of inquiry, leading to confusions rather than clarifications of the object.”5 Marx lived this divide and couldn’t determine the contours of this lag, and Althusser’s project was therefore to perform this labor. As is well known, this is what leads Althusser to locate an epistemological break between the “young” and the “mature” Marx, between the Marx of Hegel and the Marx of Marx. As such, marxist philosophy is to be found in Capital. This is the work in which Marx’s real magic comes out, when Marx imagines how the communist future can come out of the actual capitalist present. I  would even argue that Capital is a deeply utopian text, one rooted not in hope but in the practical political struggle. While Althusser posits a young Marx against a mature one, I want to assert that the young Marx not only inhabits, but finds its clearest and highest expression, in the mature Marx. It is not because of the appearance of animal spirits and species being in the text, but because of its dynamic thought experiments and its revolutionary optimism.6 In the three volumes of Capital, Marx figures communism in diverse and discrete ways. The communism of Capital, then, is haunted by the problematic of utopic imagination, and I  claim that it presents us with a pedagogical problem:  how to navigate and hold in tension these various and, at times, contradictory, demands that the communist project places on us. This is a similar claim to the one that Lewis makes based on his readings of Althusser and Fredric Jameson. Lewis here submits, “Education is not simply a practice subservient to philosophy . . . but is rather a general practice that supersedes

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all other practices.”7 Marxist pedagogy, on this reading, “becomes a noted point for re-imagining the relation between cold and warm streams of Marxism.”8 Lewis, in other words, posits marxist pedagogy as a magical endeavor of voyaging across the constellations between science and philosophy. I  want to take the pedagogy that Lewis forges out of Althusser’s philosophy and Jameson’s aesthetics and apply it to Capital itself. What follows is thus not a systematic reading of Capital but a scattered reading, one that is meant to highlight the pedagogical problematic that Marx unconsciously lays out for us. Marx’s first volume of Capital focuses on the production process. This is undoubtedly the most well-read volume, and with good reason. It’s a meticulously argued and brilliantly written book, filled with jabs and jokes, painstaking explication and revolutionary fervor. Not coincidentally, it is also the only volume that Marx was able to complete during his lifetime (Engels later cobbled together volumes two and three). Marx asks us to imagine with him a communist future early on in the book, during the last section of the first chapter. This is the section on commodity fetishism where we learn about the ideological effects of commodity production, the ways in which what are really relations between people come to be understood and experienced as relations between things. When I do my weekly grocery shopping, the commodities that confront me in the store appear to me as things—as objects with prices—when they are also, at their heart, social products of particular forms of labor, relations that encompass workers, bosses, unions, CEOs, politics and immigration officials, and so on. So too, when I reach for my wallet and my credit card, I feel I am exchanging a thing, but in actuality I am enacting and taking a position within this web of social relations. (Thus, while many critics of neoliberalism pat themselves on the back for critiquing individualism, it was Marx who, in 1867, first told us about capitalism’s individuating effects.)9 Marx then asks us to imagine an alternative situation, a communist situation of production and distribution. “Let us now picture to ourselves,” he writes as if fantasizing, “a community of free individuals, carrying on their work with the means of production in common, in which the labour-power of all the different individuals is consciously applied as the combined labour-power of the community.”10 In this picture everything is a social product, not an individual one:  “One portion serves as fresh means of production and remains social. But another portion is consumed by the members as means of subsistence. A  distribution of this portion amongst them is consequently necessary.” This association of free individuals laboring freely determines this distribution. The social relations of production are clearly visible and intelligible in this picture,

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as compared to the capitalist picture in which they are fetishized, hidden, misdirected. How we make this picture a reality is something that Marx addresses in the penultimate chapter of the first volume. As the accumulation of capital progresses, the story goes, so too does human misery and drudgery, And with this too grows the revolt of the working-class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialization of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. Thus integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.11

Here we see Marx at his best, his most furious and his most poetic. Marx makes us feel the negation of the negation, the possibility of revolutionary transformation. The development of capital lays the foundations for communist revolution. The fetishism of the commodity is torn apart by its very own logic as the price tags in the grocery store no longer mystify the social nature of production. Through force, that “midwife” of transformation, the expropriators are expropriated and we are free to labor collectively, to decide what to produce, how to produce it, and how to apportion and distribute it. In the first volume of Capital, we get a communism that emphasizes freedom of association and deliberation, one that emphasizes social agency and the power of laborers for self-determination. This all stands, so I wish to suggest, in a slight opposition with the picture of communism that Marx paints in the second volume, which focuses on the circulation of capital. In this volume Marx explores the complicated and intensely contradictory process of circulating—and realizing—values within the capitalist mode of production. Whereas in the first volume communism was figured as a free association of collective laborers who seize negation to wage a war against the expropriators, in volume two communism is figured as a process that is carefully managed and diligently planned. For all of the coordination that capitalism demands, communism will require more. Take accounting, for example. When examining the costs of circulation for the capitalist, Marx says that bookkeeping “becomes ever more necessary the more the [production] process takes place on a social scale and loses its purely individual character; it is thus more necessary . . . in communal production than in capitalist [production].”12

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Later, regarding the turnover of capital—or the transformation from labor power into wages into market purchases for means of subsistence back into means of production and labor power—Marx observes that, under capitalism, this process is mediated through the money form. By contrast: If we were to consider a communist society in place of a capitalist one, then money capital would immediately be done away with, and so too the disguises that transactions acquire through it. The matter would be simply reduced to the fact that the society must reckon in advance how much labour, means of production and means of subsistence it can spend, without dislocation, on branches of industry which, like the building of railways . . . supply neither means of production nor means of subsistence, nor any kind of useful effect, for a long period, a year or more, though they certainly do withdraw labour, means of production and means of subsistence from the total annual product.13

In capitalist society, the turnover of variable capital and the production of means of production and means of subsistence are uncoordinated. Those projects that require a good outlay of capital and a long time for construction are either organized through the state or financed through loans (which is something Marx takes up in volume three). Communism allows these endeavors—like all production—to be planned. The fundamental difference with this planning is that it is done according to the needs of society and not the needs of the owning and ruling classes. This, as Marx notes, will have to be done without money, or at least money capital. Some particular form of the representation of value, however, will still have to operate, for this is how the workers’ society will “reckon” with the differing outlays of investment required for different projects. “With social[ist] production just as with capitalist production,” therefore, “workers in branches of industry with short working periods will withdraw products only for a short time without giving other products back in return,” while those “with long working periods will continue to withdraw products for a long time before they give anything back.”14 Workers producing means of communication and transportation, say, constructing a new network of solar energy apparatuses, will not produce a useful effect for some time, depending upon the scale of the project. During this time they will need to receive compensation for the value they are transforming and producing. Such a value distribution is in contrast with that operating in regard to workers producing goods that have a shorter turnover time. Marx’s proposal here is that “producers should . . . receive paper tokens permitting them to withdraw an amount corresponding to their labour time from the

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social consumption stocks.”15 These tokens, however, “are not money; they do not circulate.”16 These representations of value cannot be hoarded, bequeathed, invested in means of production, and so on. The tension between volumes one and two of Capital, then, is the tension between freedom and planning, autonomy and centralization, negation and affirmation. We see these tensions in volume three of Capital, too, as this volume focuses on “the process of capitalist production as a whole.” As a result, we have excurses into the centrality of double negation and expropriation coupled with emphases on planning and centralization. With the analysis of credit and finance capital, for example, Marx points to the immanence of the socialist mode of production within the capitalist mode of production. The development of the joint-stock company, which aggregates capital ownership and separates ownership of means of production and labor is, he says, “a necessary point of transition towards the transformation of capital back into the property of the producers.”17 This united movement of concentration and separation is even more radically posited: “This is the abolition of the capitalist mode of production within the capitalist mode of production itself, and hence a self-abolishing contradiction, which presents itself prima facie as a mere point of transition to a new form of production.”18 The capitalist mode of production immanently produces points of transition, gaps in valorization that we can seize as gateways and opportunities of transition, not as predetermined or causal inevitabilities. The agency of the proletarians—the exploited and the expropriated—organized through the communist party, has to carry this out through force. Under capitalism, these joint-stock companies, which act as the collective capital of the capitalist class, follow the rate of profit wherever it is highest, paying no regard to social need. This question of planning according to social needs, according to use value, raises an important problematic that Marx addressed in volume two: how to “reckon in advance” and how to apportion the product of value to the producers in a nonexploitative way? In the last part of volume three Marx poses this answer explicitly and unequivocally: Even after the capitalist mode of production has been abolished, though social production remains, the determination of value still prevails in the sense that the regulation of labour-time and the distribution of social labour among various production groups becomes more essential than ever, as well as the keeping of accounts on this.19

The revolution, the expropriation of the expropriators, may eradicate the circulation and function of money capital, but it will not in one fell swoop

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eliminate the determination of value. Keeping track of the production of goods— who is producing what and what resources are consumed in the production process—not only remains important, but increases in importance and, thus, so too does the role of the accountant or bookkeeper. Hence, a good deal of organization and planning—and the bureaucracy that inevitably comes with such requirements—will be necessary. Bookkeepers set us free. Yet it is not that freedom begins once all of the accounting has been taken care of. Instead, bookkeeping and freedom are heterogeneously blocked together, condensed into a contradictory unity that is always in movement and never quite resolved. Engels found the third volume in a state of great disrepair, a fact that he belabors in his preface. First, there were the personal difficulties—Engels’s trouble with eyesight and the time spent corresponding and meeting with the various socialist and workers’ movements. Then there were the problems of deciphering the manuscript, gaps in the writing, and the absence of a preplanned outline. As for Engels, the volume poses difficulties for the reader too. These difficulties, I contend, can be pedagogically reframed precisely as the tensions of the construction of communism. Marx couldn’t leave us a thoroughly workedout analysis of the entire process of capitalist valorization, nor could he detail the question of communist transformation or the outline of the communist society. Marx was writing before the working class held state power anywhere, and so his theories can’t be uncritically applied to the world after 1917. Moreover, Marx simply did not and could not address everything. This has left critical education in a bad spot, for not only has Marx been engaged very little in the field, but even those who have turned to Marx have elided this tension and absence, elevating what Marx said to a kind of dogma by which we should evaluate everything. There are many likely reasons for this elision. First, it may be the result of only engaging with volume one of Capital and with Marx’s other works on ideology and philosophy (those that Althusser assigned to the “young Marx”). Second, it may be because in this neoliberal era of ours it is bad practice to talk about centralization, planning, the state, power, or even victory. Of course, it only seems to be bad practice for the Left to do so, for the Right has unabashedly embraced each of these elements. The Right has captured and wielded state power. They have identified their enemies, named the conditions of allyship (they can’t have the word “comrade”), delineated clear programs, and struggled to win. They have generated disciplined organizations that steel themselves in concrete struggles. Third, the default position of the Western Left has tended to be the default position of the West:  actually existing socialism is bad; a repressive failure, a

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massive gulag. This position is repeated ad nauseam without any inquiry at all, or, at best, by resorting to ad hominem attacks. Malott provides several demonstrations of these attacks in the field of critical pedagogy, going so far as to argue that the entire field of critical pedagogy—as it was constructed by Henry Giroux, Donaldo Macedo, and Stanley Aronowitz—was founded as a break with the revolutionary tradition.20 But it persists even in the marxist educational literature. Mike Cole’s Marxism and Educational Theory, for example, makes several digs at the Soviet Union, and each dig is unaccompanied by any evidence.21 While the causes of this lacuna are surely important, I  am mostly interested in the effect that it has had on the field, and the ways in which it has left us stultified and unimaginative. Thus, much like Althusser, I find myself not bitter or nostalgic, “inquiring into our past solely for some light on our present which will then illuminate our future.”22

We have already been postcapitalist (read: socialist) While in the United States the veil of anti-communism is beginning to lift and the word “socialism” isn’t as dirty as it once was, the Left still has a lot of recuperating to do. The virulent campaign against communism in the United States is deep and multifaceted, and it has taken on many different forms. And it seems like we constantly forfeit one of our greatest assets in the struggle to recuperate communism: our own history. Instead of critically appreciating the history of the actually existing workers’ struggle and the social formations it has produced, we instead seek to separate ourselves from that legacy, to claim that they weren’t and aren’t really communists. We tell ourselves we are different, superior, more enlightened. This is an easy way of dealing with the propaganda that is delivered through our media and schools on a regular basis, for we can tell people, “Well, what your teachers were talking about wasn’t really socialism.” This is, however, just another form of American exceptionalism: Left American exceptionalism. Meanwhile, the US Left hasn’t accomplished anything compared to what socialist and nationalist revolutions elsewhere have. I’m sure all these struggles wait for our latest critiques with bated breath . . .. The idea that we need to imagine a future beyond and after capitalism needs to be buttressed with an indisputable but neglected insight:  we have already been beyond and after capitalism. Of course, the questions of framing and scale come into play here, for the entirety of the globe has never been postcapitalist. Nevertheless, significant portions of the globe have, at one point or another,

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wrested themselves free from the domination of capital and imperialism, liberating use value and waging war against exchange value. This process has been messy, violent, uneven, littered with mistakes and errors. It has, in other words, been real. As Gilles Deleuze put it so well in an interview with his former student, Claire Parnet, toward the end of his life, “Who ever thought that a revolution would go well? Who? Who?”23 Or, as Mao Tse-tung famously formulated it, “A revolution is not a dinner party.”24 Rather than acknowledge and deal with this reality, rather than engage in careful, thoughtful, and partisan critiques of actually existing postcapitalist formations, critical education— and most of the Western Left, too—has joined in the bourgeoisie’s chorus of condemnation. The consensus, then, is:  there is no alternative! When critical education does pose an alternative, it is democracy; which is paradoxically posed as an alternative to democracy! The Left needs to reclaim our history. We need to relocate ourselves within the history of the actually existing struggle against dispossession, capitalism, and imperialism, a history that is first and foremost inspiring because it has demonstrated our success. We have moved beyond capitalism. We have shown that there is an alternative. We have expropriated the expropriators. And while we haven’t eliminated all vestiges of oppression, we have harnessed the power of society and state in that direction. To back this up, I  want to turn first to an impressive study of the Soviet Union by the sociologist Albert Szymanski. Unlike so many of us who grew up indoctrinated in anticommunism, free to criticize everything so long as we denounce it, Szymanski set out to investigate his indoctrination. As he writes in the book’s acknowledgments, “Accepting the anti-Soviet notions current amongst all those who grew up in the U.S. in the 1950s, it was natural for us to accept the analysis offered of the Soviet Union by the Chinese.”25 Following the official Sino-Soviet split in 1960, the Chinese communists launched a series of escalating polemics against the Soviet Union. While these polemics existed for some time, they previously examined specific policies of the Soviets. With the split, these polemics targeted the actual social system of the Soviet Union itself, describing it as “social-imperialist” and arguing that capitalism had been restored in the union. These polemics were popular with the US Left, which was beginning to reassemble after the devastation of the Communist Party USA by the McCarthyist witch hunts. Szymanski set out to scrutinize this claim, analyzing the role of profit, commodity markets and prices, labor markets, the distribution of rewards, the political structure and composition of the Communist Party, as well as Soviet economic and military relationships with

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the Eastern Bloc, the nonsocialist third world, and the socialist third world. Utilizing empirical data, Szymanski conclusively demonstrates that the Soviet Union was in fact a socialist society, that markets did not have their own logic, that labor power was not a commodity, that a central plan guided the economy, and that there was no exploiting class. While I can’t perform a comprehensive and detailed summary of Szymanski’s findings here, I would like to cover just a few points that prove Szymanki’s conclusion, which I have grouped around labor markets and political rule. First, the question of labor markets. Labor in the Soviet Union was not treated as a commodity. While it was distributed through markets, these markets were not autonomous but were guided by a central plan. Stated differently, wages served the function of allocating workers to particular tasks, motivating performance, and distributing consumption goods. Workers could be fired from their jobs, but for limited reasons and with many avenues for recourse, and they could only be fired directly by a manager if the factory and local trade union committees agreed upon the termination. Further, for all workers who were dismissed, “only about 40  percent . . . took more than 10  days to find a comparable job.”26 Moreover, while wage disparities existed, they were relatively minor. To take the most extreme example, “The top Soviet managers (the leading officials of the economic ministries) average only three to four times as much as skilled workers.”27 Additionally, wages were equalizing in the Soviet Union in the 1970s: “The spread between the highest and lowest paid groups was 2.12 times [in 1973], while in 1965 it had been 3.20 times.”28 Anti-parasite laws meant that collecting rents and purchasing labor power were crimes. Second, the question of political rule. Labor in the Soviet Union was the ruling class. There are numerous ways by which the ruling class asserts power: through the initial revolution, elections, decision-making bodies, membership in the ruling party, and so on. The bourgeoisie in imperialist countries point to the astronomically high approval ratings for successful candidates in socialist or independent countries as evidence of electoral fraud. Yet the final vote in the Soviet Union was actually the last step in a long process with widespread input and debate. Candidates were vetted at the grassroots level, being first “nominated at meetings of workers and members of mass organizations after sounding out their opinions and evaluations of the candidates by local election committees and Communist Party members. Anyone at a meeting has the right to propose or oppose a candidate.”29 Moreover, during the final election in the local committees, if a majority voted no for a candidate, then another candidate must be nominated. This was, thus, not a rubber-stamping process. For example,

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“in 1965, 208 candidates for local Soviets were rejected by the voters at the final stage of the election process.”30 Beyond the electoral process, governmental agencies were always held accountable to workers. The media played an important role in this, as each mass media outlet had letter departments that filed and forwarded letters to government agencies:  “By law any agency against whom a complaint or suggestion is directed must respond within 15  days and the sender must be notified of the results.”31 These complaints resulted in a range of actions, including criminal prosecutions. Within the workplace, workers also had many mechanisms to voice their demands and to hold authorities to account through general meetings in which managers “submit themselves to questioning from the floor . . . according to one pro-U.S. business observer ‘everyone and everything’ is fair game for the workers.”32 The Soviet Union was a socialist social formation. This does not mean that it was a paradise. The working class held state power and they produced according to a plan, which in turn was guided by the production of use values, not exchange values. Not only that, but they continually defended their social system from imperialist aggression, and provided considerable and indispensable aid to other revolutionary and progressive–nationalist revolutions and states. It is remarkable, then, that the Soviets continue to bear the brunt of so much “critique” from the Western Left, especially when this history has crucial hopeful lessons for our present struggles, and not only the “class” struggle (which is far from just one unitary struggle).

Popular education and the fight against racism in the USSR Harry Haywood was recruited into the Communist Party USA in the early 1920s, and was soon sent to the Soviet Union, first to study at KUTVA (the University of the Toilers in the East named for Stalin) and later at the Lenin School. During his time in the Soviet Union, Haywood participated in the Sixth Congress of the Communist International, witnessed the debates between Trotsky and Stalin, and played a pivotal role in theorizing the Black Belt Thesis, the theory that Black people in the United States constituted an oppressed nation. Haywood, a Black man originally from South Omaha, Nebraska, spent several years in the Soviet Union. In his autobiography, Black Bolshevik, he notes that during his stay he personally encountered only one instance of racist hostility. While on a streetcar one evening to visit a friend, a drunken passenger stepped aboard and said

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“something ‘about Black devils in our country.’ ”33 In response, “a group of outraged Russian passengers thereupon seized him and ordered the motorman to stop the car. It was a citizen’s arrest, the first I had ever witnessed. ‘How dare you, you scum, insult people who are the guests of our country!’ ”34 Haywood goes on to describe how a spontaneous meeting assembled to debate the event. Some wanted to excuse the passenger’s behavior. They blamed it on his drinking. Ultimately, however, they decided to take him to the militia station and to press charges. The driver proceeded to take everyone to the station, where he spent the night in jail. Haywood said he “was to see many of this kind of ‘meeting’ during my stay in Russia.”35 In 1930, Haywood’s last year in the Soviet Union, an incident took place in Stalingrad that, he recalls, “forcibly brought home to me the contrast between the socialist world which I was leaving and the racist world which I was about to re-enter.”36 Unlike the capitalist world, which was in the throes of the Great Depression, the Soviet Union was suffering from a labor shortage. As a result, US workers were flocking to the Soviet Union for jobs. Several hundred white technicians were brought to work in a tractor factory in Stalingrad, and they had their own restaurants and shops in the area surrounding the factory, forming something of a small colony. One day, Robert Robertson, a Jamaican native and US citizen, joined the colony. He was brought over from Detroit to train workers in tool grinding. His first morning there, he entered the American dining room for breakfast and was accosted, beaten up, and thrown out of the restaurant by two white US workers. I’ll let Haywood take it from here: This attempt to transplant American racism to Soviet soil was met with outrage. It was made a political issue of high order by the Soviet trade unions and Party organizations. Factory meetings were called throughout the Soviet Union which denounced this crime and expressed the outrage of Soviet workers . . . The slogan of the day became, “American technique yes! American prejudice no!” It was given the widest publicity; the culprits were arrested immediately, not for assault and battery but for white chauvinism, a social crime and therefore far more serious . . . A mass public trial, with delegations sent from factories all over the country, was held. The white technicians were sentenced to two years imprisonment which was commuted to deportation to the United States.37

Robertson remained in the Soviet Union, where he eventually gained citizenship. These two examples document the seriousness with which the Soviet Union— its people and its state—took racism. When racist incidents occurred, they were not explained away or swept under the rug. Instead, they were put in the spotlight, becoming the subject of dialogue, deliberation, and justice. The state

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apparatus was wielded to snuff out racism and national chauvinism, and the masses were mobilized—the masses self-mobilized—to address racism head-on. They give educators a perfect example of what popular education is. Imagine what they would have done to a George Zimmerman! When one tries to reclaim our history—to state the truth, that we have succeeded—the bourgeois leftists say, “Yes, but what about the gulags?” There are several responses to this, the first of which is: Yes, what about the gulags? The state is, at base, a repressive apparatus, and so the mere existence of a gulag—or of political prisoners—isn’t any revelation and shouldn’t be a critique. Second, and more importantly, an appropriate response is to inquire into the nature and extent, that is, the actual character, of the gulags. As Malott has written in his analysis of the work of Michael Parenti: “Having gained access to previously secret Soviet police and prison records, Parenti notes that the total number of people executed between 1921 and 1953 in Soviet Union prisons was around seven hundred thousand, many of which were for punishable crimes, including Nazi collaborators and traitors who facilitated imperialist invaders until their final expulsion in 1921.”38 This is not the place to rehearse or weigh in on the vast body of literature on repression in the Soviet Union.39 But the gulag rhetorical attack doesn’t trade in facts but rather in general, assumed anti-communist sentiments. The communist rhetorical rejoinder has to both bring the facts back into the picture and remind that no social system has ever been perfect, and that these imperfections—and yes, possibly even crimes—in no way delegitimate or somehow negate the accomplishments of these social systems. Moreover, while objective investigations are necessary to establish the actual facts so that we can, in turn, absorb our objective lessons from these mistakes or crimes, on the other hand we have to also move on from this history. Indeed, there has been an unfortunate tendency lately on part of the US Left to uncritically celebrate the Soviet Union and lionize individual leaders and, in particular, Stalin, which is not only theoretically incorrect but also tactically debilitating. In other words, while we have to combat the Right and Left attacks on communism with facts, we also have to assert a new register of argumentation and advocacy.

The magic of communist pedagogy The tremendous accomplishments of our class should be points of pride. Our resistances should stand as testaments to our will, and our errors and crimes should serve as lessons we must never forget. Taken together, they should be the

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raw materials of our magical acts and our magical thinking. All socialist societies have to engage in the precarious and contingent act of constructing a new set of social relations. The contradictory assemblage of freedom and repression, agency and determination, and autonomy and management can’t be determined in advance or from outside. Critical education hasn’t engaged these concrete contradictions as they have played out in history. Not only does this distort our location within history, but by avoiding these contradictions we actually deprive the international proletarian struggle of our expertise:  pedagogy. For these contradictions have been debated almost exclusively as technical, political, economic, and social questions. There is no doubt that they are of these natures. Yet they are also, and at their heart, pedagogical questions. They are questions of breaking points, of ruptures, of reproductions, and of reassemblings. This is precisely what the discipline of education is: the study of how we disorient and reorient ourselves, of learning and studying what is and imagining what can be, and experimenting with our history and our limits. By way of concluding, then, I  want to turn our attention to the magical thinking of the Party for Socialism and Liberation. As a Marxist–Leninist Party in the United States, the PSL was founded in 2004. As hopeful revolutionaries, the small cadre of communist organizers who formed the party recognized that it might appear to be an odd time to start a new communist organization, given that communism was at its lowest ebb perhaps ever. Yet, as students of Marx, they knew that a new economic crisis was coming. They knew that we have to organize before the revolutionary moment occurs. Yet they also knew, and continue to embody, that analysis and critique aren’t sufficient, that they alone can’t give life to the revolutionary struggle. They recognize that we need to dream up alternatives. As such, when they had grown, solidified, and established themselves as the leading, most active, and most diverse communist formation within the United States, they wrote and published a book, Socialism and Liberation in the United States: What We Are Fighting for. The first part of this short, accessible book is the program of the PSL, a program that is always under revision, but that represents an outline of what a socialist government in the United States would look like. It provides an example of and material for magical marxist education. In closing, here are some excerpts: The primary function of the new government shall be planning and administering the economy in the interests of working and poor people . . . Participation and representation in the new government shall be guaranteed through democratically organized workplace, neighborhood and social committees . . .

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There shall be no distinction between the legislative and executive functions of government . . . There shall be primary government institutions created guaranteeing representation of all nationalities inside the United States . . . The current legal and criminal justice system . . . shall be replaced by a new justice system based on the democratic organization of the working class and its right to defend its class interest on the basis of solidarity and unity . . .. The defense of the revolutionary government shall be organized on the basis of the armed, organized working class. All foreign military bases shall be closed immediately . . . All occupations, military interventions and military proxy wars, agreements and alliances carried out by the previous imperialist government shall be ended immediately . . . The exploitation of labor for private profit shall be prohibited . . . Citizenship rights shall be granted to every person living in the United States . . . The new government shall provide decent housing for every person in the United States. No person shall pay more than 10 percent of their income on housing costs . . . The new government shall recognize that the wellbeing of the environment is essential for the future development of the economy and society, indeed for all workers and oppressed people . . . Penal institutions shall be organized on the principle of social education and rehabilitation . . .. The new government shall recognize the inviolable right of all oppressed nations to self-determination with regard to their means of gaining and maintaining liberation. In the United States, this includes the right of self-determination for African American, Native, Puerto Rican and other Latino national minorities, the Hawai’ian nation, Asian, Pacific Islander, Arab and other oppressed peoples who have experienced oppression as a whole people under capitalism . . . The new government shall institute a program of reparations for the African American community . . . All U.S.  colonies shall be granted independence, including Puerto Rico, Samoa, Guam, the Virgin Islands and the Mariana Islands. The new government shall honor all treaty obligations with Native nations, and shall provide restitution for land and resources stolen by the capitalist U.S. government . . .. All U.S.  workers shall have the right to speak the language of their own choosing. All government services and education shall be provided with multilingual provisions. Sexism and other forms of male chauvinism and oppression of women shall be eliminated as an immediate task, recognizing that this goal will not be achieved automatically or by decree . . . There shall be a sustained public education campaign promoting the goals of multinational working-class unity and international solidarity, the advancement of women’s rights, the promotion of respect for sexual orientation and gender expression, as well as exposing the evils of racism, sexism, anti-LGBT bigotry, xenophobia and national chauvinism. Affirmative action measures shall be instituted wherever needed to eliminate the effects of historical discrimination in education, employment, promotion, housing and other areas.40

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While the PSL understands the logics of capital accumulation and the contradictions therein, they don’t belabor to document every crime of capitalism because they know that revolution needs more than critique, much more. Through critique we can find like minds, but through imagination we find like spirits. We become comrades not by denouncing the present, but by collectively dreaming of the future. In so doing, we gain a critical distance from the present. Whereas critique makes the present seem detestable, imagination makes the present feel foreign, producing an affective disjointedness and sense of possibility that is key to any political struggle. This is why the political program has such a prominent place in communist history. The Black Panther Party (another Marxist–Leninist formation) had their Ten-Point-Program, and Huey Newton attributed the endurance of the party to this uniting program. “The only reason that the Party is still in existence at this time,” he wrote in 1971 after the defection of Eldridge Cleaver, “the only reason we have been able to survive the repression of the Party and the murder of some of our most advanced comrades, is because of the Ten-Point-Program—our survival program.”41 This program was based on practical needs and it was formulated, he says, by “dreamers” who “were armed with an ideology that provided a systematic method of analysis of how best to meet those needs.”42 This affective disjointedness, however, has to be organized, and it is on this key point that Merrifield slips from magical to maniacal by his subscription to the “Imaginary Party.” This imaginary party doesn’t overthrow capitalism, but takes leave of it spontaneously. We don’t have to assert our power, we have to vacate the places of power; “There’s presumably no one left to assume dictatorship,” as he says.43 Merrifield thus, in the end, refuses to deal with the tension of communism and the necessary question of struggle, contributing to the Left’s inability to adequately confront the problems (capital and its state) that we face. In conclusion, then, I want to suggest that the Left has retreated from the question of power and politics precisely because it has not acknowledged the communist project as a pedagogical one:  how to chart and navigate the heterotopic constellation of transition.

Notes 1 Andy Merrifield, Magical Marxism: Subversive Politics and the Imagination (London: Pluto Press, 2011), 21. 2 His latest book unfortunately confirms this. See Andy Merrifield, The Amateur: The Pleasures of Doing What You Love (New York: Verso, 2017).

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3 Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. B. Brewster (New York: Verso, 1965/2005), 14. 4 Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. B. Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 42. 5 Tyson E. Lewis, “The Pedagogical Unconscious: Rethinking Marxist Pedagogy through Louis Althusser and Fredric Jameson,” in Cultural Studies, Education, and Youth: Beyond Schools, ed. B. Frymer, M. Carlin, and J. Broughton (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2011), 258. 6 It’s worthwhile mentioning that the historical context of Althusser’s thesis is important. Althusser is writing after Kruschev’s “secret speech” and the advent of “peaceful co-existence,” which marked a rightward shift in the world communist movement and was justified through a kind of humanism. Because he was in a party that was in the orbit of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, his theoretical antihumanism was mobilized as an attack on this trajectory. It makes little sense for us today to graft it onto our present circumstances. 7 Ibid., 269. 8 Ibid. 9 I develop this argument in my article “Butler Goes to Work: A Political Economy of the Subject.” borderlands e-journal 12, no. 1 (2013): 1–19. 10 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Vol. 1), trans. S. Moore and E. Aveling (New York: International Publishers, 1867/1967), 82–83. 11 Ibid., 715. 12 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Vol. 2), trans. D. Fernbach (New York: Penguin Books and New Left Review, 1885/1992), 212. 13 Ibid., 390. 14 Ibid., 434. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Vol. 3), trans. D. Fernbach (New York: Penguin Books and New Left Review, 1894/1981), 568. 18 Ibid., 569. 19 Ibid., 991, my emphasis. 20 Curry S. Malott, History and Education: Engaging the Global Class War (New York: Peter Lang, 2016). 21 Mike Cole even criticizes the Soviet Union for creating “socialism in one country,” as if the Soviet Union is to be blamed for the absence of workers’ revolutions in the West! See his Marxism and Educational Theory: Origins and Issues (New York: Routledge, 2008), 131. 22 Althusser, For Marx, 22. 23 Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Gilles Deleuze from A–Z, trans. C. J. Stvaile (2011) [film]. Cambridge: Semiotext(e).

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24 Mao Tse-tung, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1966), 11. 25 Albert Szymanski, Is the Red Flag Flying? The Political Economy of the Soviet Union (London: Zed Books, 1979), 1. 26 Ibid., 50. 27 Ibid., 52. 28 Ibid., 63. 29 Ibid., 81. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., 85. 32 Ibid., 55. 33 Harry Haywood, Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist (Chicago: Liberator, 1978), 170. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., 339. 37 Ibid., 340. 38 Malott, History and Education, 94. 39 Interestingly, a recent Business Insider article by James Harris surveyed recent research on the purges of the Stalin era, concluding that they were done out of fear of counterrevolution and not out of the aspirations for a dictatorship of personality. See James Harris (2016), “New Research Reveals Misconceptions about Joseph Stalin and His ‘Great Purge,’ ” Business Insider July 30. Available online: www. businessinsider.com/new-research-reveals-misconceptions-about-joseph-stalinand-his-great-purge-2016-7 (accessed December 22, 2017). 40 Party for Socialism and Liberation (2015), “Program of the Party for Socialism and Liberation,” Liberation School, July 10. Available online: http://liberationschool.org/ program-of-the-party-for-socialism-and-liberation/ (accessed December 22, 2017). 41 Huey P. Newton, The Huey P. Newton Reader, ed. D. Hilliard and D. Weise (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002), 201. 42 Ibid., 202. 43 Merrifield, Magical Marxism, 61.

Conclusion: A Pro-Test Protest

Lenin is often presented as a dominating figure, a control freak of sorts. It’s even rumored that, as he traveled by train from Germany back to Russia in April 1917, he divided the train into several sections and monitored the movements of the passengers between the sections. But the opposite is the case. Lenin embraced the spontaneity and unpredictability of struggle. This opacity, this uncertainty was the source of his insight, which brought much needed clarity, yes, but which was always open to radical transformation. Such is historical materialism. Such is the cause behind the radical shift in slogans on July 4 of that year that we discussed in Chapter 2. Lenin was open to that which was not, and the power of the slogan materialized precisely out of this openness. And, of course, at no point did Lenin celebrate openness as a good in itself. “Openness for what class, what group?” he undoubtedly would have asked. In this way, Lenin understood the overdetermination of and the contradictions between pedagogy and politics. There was one educational concept that he called on again and again to bridge this heterogeneity: the test. In his speech before the Eleventh Congress of the Russian Communist Party in 1922, Lenin identifies the New Economic Policy (NEP) (inaugurated at the Tenth Congress one year earlier) as the main question. The NEP, introduced after a deadly three years of civil war and in the middle of a grave economic crisis, unleashed capitalist reforms (and hence, exploitation) to stimulate production. This was acknowledged as a retreat, and the idea was that the party would be able to manage the retreat, and eventually pivot back (which they did in 1928). What’s most interesting about this particular speech is how prominently the logic of the test figures. First, Lenin announces that “the New Economic Policy is important for us primarily as a means of testing whether we are really establishing a link with the peasant economy.”1 There is another “test through competition between state and capitalist enterprises” that are managed by state institutions. The state institutions of control are characterized as a test, but Lenin also refers “to the

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test from the point of view of the entire economy.”2 The party has launched a grand experiment and is relinquishing control to the test, which will ultimately be evaluated by an entire class (the peasants) and a rather abstract entity (the entire economy). Lenin urges his comrades to embrace the test. “We need a real test,” he says, “not the kind the Central Control Commission makes when it censures somebody . . . we want a real test from the viewpoint of the national economy.”3 It all comes down to this test: “Either we pass this test in competition with private capital, or we fail completely.”4 The tests that Lenin refers to do not have scores—the results are given only as pass/fail. He doesn’t speak about getting high marks, of doing well, but of passing. The tests establish a baseline and they are outside the party’s control. They are not graded by an external subject who knows, and for these reasons they can’t really be measured; there’s no scale other than survival. The capitalists organize production for private profit and they have been doing so for centuries. The socialists organize production along different lines and they are doing so for the first time, in direct competition with the capitalists, and under imperialist blockades and interventions. It’s hard to think of a more radical openness than of the Bolshevik Party being open to the restoration of capitalism just three short years after their capture of state power, than their openness to failing the test of survival. Today testing has a bad rap. We associate it with those deadening high-stakes standardized forms that we bubble in, those sheets that abstract information from the world and students from their subjectivity. But the test is a constituent feature of political struggle, and a necessary educational praxis that defines any period of crisis, including our own “post-truth” era. As the standardized test indicates, not all tests are created equal or serve the same function. Avital Ronell argues that there are two “sides” to testing, which are really two kinds of testing. The first “stands its ground, standardized, and equipped with irrefutable results. So it claims and so it stands.”5 This is the test that lords over the present in order to guard what already is. It is the test that divides potentiality from actualization and whose function is to protect the dominant saturation of history. It is the test of reproductive futurism and the order of the symbolic. It is the test of the learning society, of the quantifiable, of the beautiful, of the orthodox. It is the test that keeps us locked in the networks of democratic communicative capitalism. This is, of course, not the test Lenin compels his comrades to embrace. The test Lenin has in mind is of another order: it’s a “test that crashes against walls, collapses certitudes, and lives by failure—lives by dying or, at least by destroying.”6 This test doesn’t correspond to an existing truth in order to protect

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the current order of things and allocate the tested subject to its proper place within that order. Rather, it’s a test that stands at the threshold of the present and the new, and invites us to establish a new order of things, new truths. And so, in his embrace of the test, Lenin is doing more than asking that the party maintain its economic course. He is pushing for a new educational logic for the revolutionary society, one that doesn’t correspond to what exists but establishes what exists. This is a queer, ironic test that undoes identity and shocks singularity, a stupid test of the sublime, of the magical, a test that asserts the impossibility of saturating history. This is what Lenin means when he says, “we need a real test”:  he means a test that, through actualization, returns us to our infinite potentiality. It’s the test that the crowd poses to the party, the test for which we collectively sinthomostudy. It’s the test that Eckman faces as he moves from the rafters into the city. This book has, then, been a pro-test protest of sorts. Each of the pedagogical concepts articulated is oriented toward the sublime, opaque force of the test that defies measurability, but which will determine whether they pass or fail.

Notes 1 V. I. Lenin, “Eleventh Congress of the R. C. P. (B.),” in Lenin: Collected Works (Vol. 33: August 1921–March 1923), trans. D. Skvirsky and G. Hanna (Moscow : Progress Publishers, 1980), 267. 2 Ibid., 272. 3 Ibid., 273. 4 Ibid., 277. 5 Avital Ronell, The Test Drive (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 18. 6 Ibid.

Appendix: History, Space, and Ideology We are living through an interesting period in which dominant and conventional political wisdom is almost irrelevant. The predictions of pundits hold little water, new social forces and state actors are gaining significance and momentum, and, according to a 2017 Pentagon study, the US-led international order established after World War II is in serious crisis. While we have to account for the political impetus of the report (the Pentagon’s ceaseless quest for infinitely more funding), the yearlong study, which included input from a variety of agencies within the Department of Defense and US Army, gives an interesting glimpse into the psyche and world outlook of US imperialism. The Pentagon defines our current moment as one of “post-US primacy”: While the United States remains a global political, economic, and military giant, it no longer enjoys an unassailable position versus state competitors. Further, it remains buffeted by a range of metastasizing violent or disruptive nonstate challengers, and it is under stress—as are all states—from the dispersion and diffusion of effective resistance and the varied forces of disintegrating or fracturing political authority. In brief, the status quo that was hatched and nurtured by U.S.  strategists after World War II and has for decades been the principal “beat” for DoD is not merely fraying but may, in fact, be collapsing. Consequently, the United States’ role in and approach to the world may be fundamentally changing as well.1

The report builds on one published the year prior, titled “Outplayed: Regaining Strategic Initiative in the Gray Zone,” which identified three main sources whose interaction defines the current moment:2 status quo, revisionist, and rejectionist. Status quo forces are those that support US interests—its allies and client states. Revisionist forces accept the status quo in general, but want a better seat at the negotiating table. China and Russia are examples of revisionists, who aren’t upset at the global power structure, but rather at the distribution of power within that structure. The rejectionists are “largely destroyers not builders.”3 These forces, “nonstate, sub-state, and transnational entities and movements” reject the international order and the revisionist’s efforts to reconfigure it.4 They thrive on the erosion of national state

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authority. Interestingly, the 2017 report adds a fourth category: revolutionary. Revolutionary forces are those that seek to abolish the US-led international order and establish a new one that operates for and on their own terms. “Iran and North Korea,” the report reads, “may be seen as the best current examples of revolutionary forces in action.”5 US policy, the Pentagon mourns, is an artifact of a bygone era when the United States was the uncontested world power. New conditions of what they call “permanent conflict” call for new orientations. The Pentagon’s desire is clear: they want a new era of uncontested world domination. It seems that they aren’t the only ones, and that this represents a new liberal consensus. Much of the liberal outrage at Trump is over his ignorance of, disrespect of, or hostility toward traditional US allies and outfits. The liberal media was up in arms when Trump questioned the relevancy and usefulness of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It’s the same with the neo-McCarthyite anti-Russian witch hunt. That Trump would even make the gesture of peace toward a revisionist state (Russia) is seen as a threat to the continuing dominance of US imperialism. Trump’s error is his inability to successfully navigate in a “post-primacy” world. And, at the time of this writing, it seems that relations with Russia are considerably worse now than when Obama left office. What does the “post-primacy” moment offer the global Left? For one, it presents us a different philosophical enemy. The Left constantly has to forefront hope in the face of nihilism. We have so many potential comrades, workers and poor people, who know that the system is broken (or, more accurately, that it is working exactly as it was designed: in an oppressive and exploitative manner) but don’t see any hope. It makes more sense to just grind it out day by day than to, say, join a revolutionary organization and make even more work for oneself. Yet today it seems our philosophical enemy is recalibration, or perhaps, centrism. Instead of making the case for hope over the backdrop of suffocating poverty and repression, we are making the case for hope in waters that are searching for the shores of normalcy. This is what the Russiagate scandal in the United States is all about. Brian Becker has equated Russiagate to Watergate when, as he says, “the progressive sector of society was reduced to the status of spectators watching the sanctimonious, corrupted, reactionary, elite politicians of both parties rant and rave about Nixon’s wrongdoings. Liberals could sit at home and cheer on as pro-imperialist and racist politicians (aka “elected officials”) united to topple the hated Nixon.”6 Indeed, as Russiagate gained steam, the mass movement based in the streets subsided. The universally hated tax bill passed without any significant street actions in November–December 2017, which seems all the more troubling

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when we compare it with the mass spontaneous airport protests against Trump’s Muslim ban not even a year earlier. It’s now sprawling out beyond the Trump regime and into the progressive movement, targeting all manner of progressive forces like Black radicals, First Nations movements, and even Jill Stein of the Green Party.7 The overbearing poverty and struggle hasn’t changed, but the affective coordinates in which hope operates have. The way that we historically approach the contemporary status of hope, the story we tell about how the coordinates of hope have been constituted as such, however, will significantly determine the force such hope can bear on the present. In other words, how we understand the emergence of US primacy and, really, how we understand the history of the twentieth century, will bear on our political pedagogies in unmitigated fashion. What I’m after in this appendix, then, is how we might understand the history of our political hopeful offerings. I don’t want to present one correct narrative, exactly, even though I  am tempted to do that. What I want to do instead is to pose two contrasting narratives, told by different figures, and encapsulating a dialectic of different orientations and desires.

Dialectic geographies: The American century Neil Smith presents the twentieth century as a contradictory era of both a spaceless and a heavily spatialized globalization, as a period both beyond and without geography.8 Different sides in this contradiction propelled and repelled the rise of US hegemony in different moments, but both sides worked together in a fundamental way to make the US imperial project possible. Smith refers to the twentieth century as the “American Century,” a phrase coined by magazine publisher Henry Luce in a famous 1941 Life editorial. Here, Luce made a case for US entry into World War II, arguing that the United States was destined to be the greatest and most important nation, but the people and government hadn’t taken up the call. The American century had both arrived and had yet to come into being. An equivocal article in many ways, it nonetheless linked US power explicitly to space: “Tyrannies may require a large amount of living space. But Freedom requires and will require far greater living space than Tyranny. Peace cannot endure unless it prevails over a very large part of the world.”9 While the geographical intonation is explicit, Luce presents space as abstract, as somehow spaceless.

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Luce situates his argument in the debate between “isolationism” and “internationalism,” as if the United States had ever pursued a policy of nonexpansion. Smith dates the American Century to May 1898, when George Dewey’s USS Olympia entered the Philippine’s water, defeating his Spanish counterparts and beginning the brutal war against the country. As the story goes, when President William McKinley got the news, he couldn’t find the country on a map. This marked the first phase of the American Century, the serious entry of the United States into colonial arrangements, which was both a break from and a continuation of the historic nexus between the United States and geographical extension. The country was, of course, founded as a colonial project. The manifest destiny of the British settlers was the “open frontier,” which was opened only by merciless force, and had to, so long as capital thrived, keep getting further away. Smith notes that the national and international are bound together in a dialectic:  “Successful national enclosure provokes international ambition,” so despite “their apparent opposition, nationalism and internationalism are two sides of the same coin.”10 The border bears a necessary relationship between what is within and what is beyond. The motor of phase one was therefore the overaccumulation of capital. As the augmentation of value, capital is an inherently expansive social relation, as “the need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe,” as Marx and Engels put it in the Manifesto of the Communist Party.11 Once the national frontier is saturated, out the bourgeoisie goes (more precisely, out their armies go). However, it isn’t only the need to sell products, or absorb surplus value, that drives the bourgeoisie outward, but the need to produce surplus value too. It is for this reason that Marx ended the first volume of Capital with the chapter on colonization. In the context of the American Century, other national bourgeoisies had already captured much of the globe. While US capital was going global, the global space for capital was closing, so US expansion brought it into conflict with both the colonized and the other colonial powers. Enter World War I. The incident that justified US entry into the war was a German attack on ships carrying some of this exported surplus.12 Yet former colonial relations didn’t match up with republican ideology, which marked this first phase with “the distinct historical and geographical stamp of the contradiction between a world beyond geography, as Wilson dreamed of, and one in which geography as entrenched as a ‘pivot of history.’ ”13 A difficult birth—in the second phase of the American Century, economic logics more formally supplanted political control of foreign lands, and

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ignorance played an especially important role. Luce’s presentation of spaceless space was no accident, Smith contends:  “By unabashedly announcing U.S.  victory in the grandest geographical conquest of all—global political– economic and cultural power—and simultaneously disavowing the relevance of global geography, he forged a selected wedding of isolationism with internationalism . . . that came to epitomize an American global vision in which foreign geography and foreign places were incidental to U.S. power.”14 US global conquest depended deeply on US geographical ignorance, which explains the agitational effectiveness of highlighting the distance of imperialist wars, from Korea to Vietnam (Why are we fighting halfway across the world? How did our freedoms get in Iraq?). It was through the global trade market that US imperial ambitions were primarily accomplished in this phase. Whereas in the first phase the colonial question concerned administration (who would govern what territory), in the second phase “it was a quest of how the colonial territories could be settled, developed, and brought into commercial intercourse with the United States.”15 Thus, the second phase of the American Century saw the United States ordering the world primarily through economic rather than territorial domination, presenting the globe in the abstracted form of the market. If the second phase was marked by a variety of struggles, there was nonetheless a kind of equilibrium reached between different powers and movements, Smith argues, the achievement of durable geographic borders. This durability proved finite with the third phase, in 1989, the phase in which “globalization” entered the popular lexicon. The story is familiar:  the Soviet Union collapses, history ends, and capital declares victory, new technologies make borders more permeable and the globe more easily traversable, capital in the United States can exploit labor anywhere in the world; the world is flattened. Smith doesn’t regurgitate this well-worn (and false) narrative, of course. He situates his book in the “zenith” of the third phase:  when US military forces planted their flag near Kandahar, Afghanistan, as part of the global war on terror. His book shows how the first two moments of the American Century help us understand our present, both the continuities and the differences. In particular, Smith shows that the geographical ignorance mourned in the third phase is not only rooted in American expansionism and hegemony, but also that this ignorance fundamentally facilitated the American Century. All the while, geographic concerns have been at the forefront of such expansionism, of course, and so geographic knowledge and expertise has been accumulating at one pole while geographic illiteracy has been accumulating at another.16

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Smith’s story is told through the lens of Isaiah Bowman, who indeed provides a privileged perspective on the fitful rise of US power. From his roots in rural Michigan (and job there as a school teacher), Bowman studied at Harvard and earned a PhD in geography at Yale, embarked on the last of the nineteenthcentury expeditions (which occurred in the early twentieth century), and had his hand in a number of decisions in the first two phases of the American Century. He was a chief specialist in the US delegation to the Paris Peace Conference that helped determine the shape of the post–World War I  world, and was a State Department advisor during World War II, working on refugee questions and participating in founding conferences of the United Nations. In this way, Bowman’s is a privileged perspective in that it represents the perspective of privilege, of those who were working in US departments and affiliated offices concocting plans for US supremacy, those who would tell soldiers where to fight, but would never fight themselves. While Smith takes some effort to cast a critical light through Bowman’s lens, he isn’t able to account for the real stakes in the American Century, the underside of US conquest, or the class character of the struggle in—or, better, for—the twentieth century.

Dispossessed geographies: Leila Khaled If Bowman represents the privileged perspective of privilege, Leila Khaled can give us the privileged perspective of the oppressed and excluded, of those who fought against US expansionism, and those who drew different lines—from quite different places—during the twentieth century. Whereas Bowman sat in the halls of US power with eyes toward extending the power of his government and class, Khaled has lived a life of exile with eyes and muscles working toward a return home, a return that is bound up with the ascension of power of another government and another class. Of Haifa, Palestine, the city in which she was born, Khaled remembers only the staircase in her house. She was forced to leave just after her fourth birthday in 1948, and has since only seen her hometown from the air. The year 1948 was one year after the UN held an illegal vote to partition Palestine (illegal because the Palestinians were not consulted), “giving” 55 percent of Palestine to a new state called Israel. Fighting broke out, as Palestinians understandably resisted the illegal seizures and as Zionists were hungry for even more territory. The year Khaled left Palestine was the year of the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” a year of slaughters, massacres, and ethnic cleansing. The Zionist strategy was to attack

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“quiet” Palestinian villages, where they would encounter no resistance, such as Deir Yassin, outside of Jerusalem, where in one day Zionist soldiers “wiped out” the entire population.17 Growing up in Sour, Lebanon, when Khaled heard stories about Palestine, she “imagined I was listening to a sad story that had happened somewhere else to someone else.” But an interaction in school, specifically an intervention by a teacher, changed that.18 Samirah was a young girl in Khaled’s class. Samirah was the first in class and Khaled was jealous of her. Khaled remembers insulting her and says she may have even hit her at one time. Samirah was a Palestinian who lived in a refugee camp. After a prolonged spat between Samirah and Khaled, Khaled’s teacher intervened: The teacher took me inside for a little talk; it was a talk I shall never forget. She explained to me that poor peasant children were just as bright as my family and friends. “Besides,” she added, “they are the true children of Palestine because they live on the land, and cultivate and harvest it. Virtue is a part of the people of the land . . . “Those peasants,” she continued, “did not leave Palestine willingly like the rich people who now live in villas in Cairo and Beirut. They were forced out to make room for the Zionist intruders, Leila, those are the people of Palestine. You must learn to love them, to be part of them, serve them.” The lesson taught, she called Samirah back into the room and told her to shake hands with me and to take me to her tent-home and to show me how she lived and her parents and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians lived. Samirah did.19

That same year, on the fifth anniversary of the founding of Israel, she marched at the head of a solidarity protest, and her political education began in earnest. Her education came through her membership in different revolutionary groups: the Arab Nationalist Movement, Fateh, and finally, the Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), of which she is still a member. When Khaled joined the PFLP, she wanted to fight in their underground military. Her contact Abu Nidal told her she first had to be educated, to which she quickly retorted, “Educated? I  am a teacher and I  know how to read and write and all that.” Nidal told her to be patient, that she would “have to study the ideology and strategy of the PFLP and work with the other comrades first.”20 While working as a teacher, Khaled formed and led a study group that met weekly, with Nidal guiding from the distance. In the PFLP, a Marxist–Leninist party, Khaled’s world outlook, which encapsulates an alternative view of the twentieth century, cemented. It is a world outlook approached through the prism of the struggle for an independent Palestine, a single state with equal

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rights for all people. There was a “value” in the imperialist conquest of Palestine, she writes, which “is that it forced some of us to re-examine the foundation of our society on our own.” This reexamination uncovered “rotten, traditional, unprogressive” foundations. “Our defeat was indeed our salvation, our means of regeneration and renewal. Now the issue is not restoration, but the construction of a new socialist republic encompassing the entire Arab world.”21 Moving from the state of Palestine to the “entire Arab world,” the project identifies a fault line that Smith can only vaguely approach: the class struggle as it is mitigated through the aspirations of oppressed nations. Here we should turn to one of Lenin’s key theoretical and practical contributions, one thing that we might say made the twentieth century possible: the linking of class and national oppression through an analysis of—and struggle against— imperialism. Lenin’s textual contribution here, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, lays out five broad points to define the age of imperialism.22 (1) Concentration of production and capital has reached the level of monopolies, which are economically decisive. (2) Bank and industrial capital have merged to create a financial oligarchy. (3) The export of capital, and not simply commodities, is primary. (4) International capitalist groups have formed. (5) The biggest capitalist countries have divided the entirety of the globe. Lenin articulated his theses as a polemic against other theories in the marxist movement, theories like Karl Kautsky’s, which held that imperialism was nothing more than a policy that capitalist countries could avoid, and that there might be a newer phase of imperialism, when finance capital was united, that would result in peace under capitalism. By insisting that imperialism was a stage of capitalism, Lenin’s theses proved that war was inevitable so long as the capitalist mode of production ruled. Just as importantly, however, Lenin demonstrated the interconnection between ideology and political-economy once more, arguing that monopoly profits extracted from the colonies were used to “bribe” labor leaders, the “labor aristocracy,” not only in direct ways (like higher wages), but also in indirect ways (like being allowed to function openly and without repression). On the flipside, Lenin held that it was the duty of workers in the imperialist nations to fight unequivocally for the right of oppressed nations to selfdetermination. While communists fight for a world without borders, it would be idealistic to fight for that immediately and, more to the point here, chauvinistic to fight for that without the voluntary agreement of oppressed nations, which

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required the freedom of oppressed nations. It is for these reasons that the Bolsheviks made public all of the Tsar’s secret treaties and renounced all of Russia’s territories after the October Revolution. A cardinal component of the communist response to the national–colonial question is that proletarians in imperialist countries must support movements for independence in oppressed nations, even if those movements are not of a proletarian or socialist character, even if we don’t like their leadership. Even if the national bourgeoisie is leading the movement, it must be supported. As imperialism depends on the export of capital—and the extraction of capital (land, resources, and labor)—from the colonies, anti-colonial struggles and the struggle for socialism are organically and indissolubly linked.23 Those anti-colonial struggles, regardless of their leadership, are still a blow to the imperialist system, and will mark a progressive step toward a borderless world. There is indeed a dialectic between the national and international, as Smith identified. But the way this dialectic develops depends on certain contingencies, including the status of the nation: is it oppressed or oppressing? Certainly, nationalism in the United States will bear a different relationship to internationalism than the nationalism in Palestine. Along these lines, Khaled’s national outlook on the twentieth century expressed a different internationalism than Bowman’s. The struggle for the right to national borders and to determine the political, social, and economic ways of relating within those borders is tied up with a project of proletarian internationalism. For this struggle, unity between different factions and classes is necessary, so the PFLP doesn’t betray it’s marxist principles when it joins the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Khaled continued her duties studying ideology and theory, fundraising for the party, and teaching, until she was ordered to Jordan for military training, and then to Rome for her first operation, the hijacking of TWA flight 840 from Rome to Tel Aviv. It was on this August 28, 1969 flight that Khaled was finally able to see her homeland and home city again. There were no deaths or injuries as the flight entered Palestine and landed in Damascus. Khaled is careful to situate the action not as an act of revolutionary adventurism but as part of a collective plan executed “not with a view to crippling the enemy—because we lack the power to do so—but with a view to disseminating revolutionary propaganda, sowing terror in the heart of the enemy, mobilizing our masses, making our cause international, rallying the forces of progress on our side, and underscoring our grievances.”24 That it was part of a plan doesn’t mean that it was cold and calculating. Quite the contrary. Khaled recalls that it “was an assertion of my spurned humanity, a declaration of the humanity of the Palestinians. It was an act of protest against the West.”25 The hijacking of TWA 840 was a response to the

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hijacking of Palestine, embodying the geographical expertise and yearnings of the dispossessed and colonized. While the imposition of geographical ignorance on some sections of the US populous may have been possible, it certainly wasn’t for those victims contesting the Western-imposed order.

Class and borders in the twentieth century Both the structure and disposition of imperialism have changed over the course of the twentieth century. All systems fluctuate, and so too must all theory. Lenin’s five broad points are not a checklist to be run through in each and every case, as if it was a fixed dogma. To read Lenin as dogma is a particularly difficult thing to do, in fact, as each of his writings is deeply contextual, always situated in a specific polemic and responding to singular conjunctures in the struggle. The landscape of our world today is much different and, in fact, the October Revolution itself was an irreversible insurrection into the arrangement of global power. It was immediately met with condemnation from Britain and the United States. Winston Churchill famously called to “strangle the Bolshevik baby in its crib,” and an Allied intervention into the Soviet Union beginning in April 1918 sought to do just that.26 The threat of the Soviet alternative amplified at the end of World War II, which, interestingly, is exactly when the Pentagon says US primacy came about. In the ashes of World War II were found the former great imperialist powers— Germany, Britain, France, Spain, Italy, and Japan. Escaping the war unscathed, US industry set about rebuilding these countries, and the US government moved to rehabilitate its former enemies (like the military dictatorship of Japanese Emperor Hirohito). Not only was the US economy able to accelerate during this period, but the country also began reorganizing the imperialist global order under its umbrella, replacing Britain as the dominant imperial power. Central to this new order were the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and United Nations, and of course what we know now as the military industrial complex. Inter-imperialist war morphed into a period of inter-imperialist cooperation. No longer warring over colonial territories, and with a clear internal hierarchy established, the imperialist pole of the world united against a new foe, the proletarian pole, which constituted an alternative axle of international politics. No longer inter-imperialist war, the period that followed was a global class war. While the Soviet Union faced the brunt of the Nazi war machine, suffering by far the heaviest casualties (27 million), it emerged from the war with a momentous

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prestige, having repelled Nazi forces and liberated Estonia, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Albania, Austria, and half of Germany. They did so as a young revolutionary country that had developed over only two decades of struggle. Even though the Soviets repeatedly begged the United States to help them fight on the Western front for years, the United States only did so at the very end to counter the Soviet’s advance.27 Moreover, the communist parties throughout Western Europe, like in Italy and France, were popularly recognized as the real resistance. The communist specter was materializing, and quickly. That the socialist governments that came to power in the Eastern Bloc weren’t the products of grassroots organizing in no way blunts the radicality of this transformation. To be sure, it didn’t dampen the West’s hostility toward these governments, as they moved to abolish private property, nationalize the means of production, and launch campaigns to eradicate the remnants of fascism. And after decades of systematic repression and deadly violence, communist parties throughout Europe grew by leaps and bounds after the war.28 With the former colonial powers in disarray and regrouping, liberation movements in the colonized world accelerated. Indeed, we could characterize the period between 1945 and 1981 as a time not of US primacy or hegemony, but rather a time of victorious people’s liberation movements, with socialist, nationalist, and/or indigenous governments coming to power in Korea, Vietnam, China, Egypt, Cuba, Syria, Libya, Ethiopia, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Angola, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Guinea-Bissau, Algeria, Chile, and elsewhere. While each embodied particular characteristics and contradictions, they together represented a revolutionary shift in the world landscape, a second insurrection within the twentieth century’s ontological framework. A common language of world revolution reverberated across the globe, providing a means of articulation for all manner of struggles. Thus, while redirecting the TWA 840 flight to Damascus via Palestine, Khaled said to her passengers, “Our unit is called the Che Guevara Commando Unit because we abhor America’s assassination of Che and because we are a part of the Third World and the world revolution.”29 On this view, we need not romanticize the Soviet Union to recognize its role in pushing forward anti-colonial struggles, and we need not hold up each of these struggles and their political, social, and economic creations as perfect to acknowledge that they played a progressive historical role. In fact, this is another reason for privileging Khaled’s take on the century, for nothing highlights the internal contradictions and unities within the global class war quite like the Palestinian liberation struggle. The Soviet Union actually voted in favor of UN Resolution 181, which partitioned Palestine in 1947. This was based

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on an incorrect political calculation that, because of its role in liberating the concentration camps, Israel would be friendly to the USSR,30 and that Zionism would weaken the British Empire.31 The error was fairly quickly evident, and in 1953 the Soviet Union formally severed diplomatic relations with Israel and embarked on a “campaign against Zionism and its alleged links with western imperialist sabotage and espionage activities within the USSR,” a campaign that “soon spread to the rest of the Soviet Bloc.”32 The Soviet Union would then become a supporter of the Palestinian liberation struggle and many of its organizations, although this never cohered into a unity without contradictions. Complexities abounded, like Soviet support for the PLO and the Ethiopian Dergue as the PLO supported one of the Dergue’s enemies, the Eritrean Popular Liberation Front. Syria is another case in point. After commandeering TWA 840, Khaled and her partner landed the plane in Damascus, where she was taken into custody by the Syrian Arab Army and held from August 29 to October 11. (The Syrians said she was a “guest,” even though she was held in a prison for several days, before being moved to an apartment.) Khaled was clearly disgusted with the Syrian government for this imprisonment, and yet it occurred within a broader unity between the Syrian Arab Republic and the PLO. And in a 2013 speech, she stated her decisive support for the Syrian government in the current war against the country: “I am screaming with the top of my voice:  We stand by the Syrian Army and the people of Syria. We are confident in the people of Syria, who have taken us, Palestinians, under their wings and hosted us on their land for over sixty years. We are confident that they will prevail over this problem.”33 To fully appreciate Khaled’s stance, we need to push the historical narrative forward a bit more, but right now it’s worth underscoring its insistence on both external division and internal unity, and internal division and unity. Rather than a simplified or reductionist view of the twentieth century, then, the Leninist viewpoint accounts for generalizations and particularities, identities and differences, all the while drawing clear lines of inclusion and exclusion.

A fragile end? Rather than fighting to maintain their colonies and warring with each other over colonial possessions, the imperialists, after World War II, engaged in a life-and-death struggle to “contain” the struggle of the oppressed. Containment took different forms, from wars and bombing campaigns to the funding and/or

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formation of civil society groups to foment dissent. Different tactics were united in the same strategic orientation to overthrow any socialist or independent government, an objective that was largely achieved through the Sino-Soviet split, US–China alliance, and dissolution and overthrow of the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries in 1989–1991. With the major pole of opposition to imperialism out of the way, however, the material basis for the unity of the imperialist powers vanished. Having led the inter-imperialist bloc since 1945, the United States now sat at the head of a unipolar world. Its class enemies were mostly out of the way, and there was no imperialist rival that had any close parity with it. This is when the American Century really began. The 1992 Wolfowitz Doctrine, prepared by Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Paul Wolfowitz, is the first articulation of the American Century. The New York Times published the leaked document on March 7 of that year, and there was a subsequent rewriting to appease the public outcry at the naked expression of aspirations for unilateral control. The United States must prevent any rivals from emerging, declared the doctrine, which endorsed preemptive military action to stamp out any potential threat. Even with the rhetorical reworking for public consumption, it’s clear that the doctrine has guided US foreign policy since, as the United States has waged preemptive wars on Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, Sudan, Yugoslavia (Bosnia and Kosovo), Afghanistan, Iraq (again), Libya, and Syria, not to mention other more covert interventions in places like the Ukraine. If the previous period had been one of global revolution, then this period, from the perspective of the oppressed and dispossessed, was one of global counterrevolution.34 And yet this period, too, hasn’t been seamless in any way. Major challenges to the unipolar world have manifested across the globe. The second war on Iraq in 2003 was initially seen as an easy success, as the United States overthrew the nationalist Ba’athist government after only six months. But imperialist armies were met with determined grassroots insurgence that stymied any plans for the easy recolonization of Iraq. The same thing took place in Afghanistan. And the Syrian people have successfully resisted the US-funded war against their country for over six years now. The “pink tide” hit Latin America, the strongest challenge being the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, and new counter-blocs to US imperialism began emerging on the continent, and across the globe. Most notable here has been the Brazil–Russia– India–China–South Africa, or BRICS, grouping. BRICS has helped alleviate US imperialist pressure, most notably by lessening the effect of US-imposed sanctions, which has been a key tactic in US regime-change efforts. Sanctions

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deprive targeted countries of the resources necessary to continue functioning, prompting breakdowns and civil unrest. The 2017 coup in Brazil is precisely an attempt to roll back this tide. Especially after the tragic US war that overthrew the nationalist, social–democratic Jamahiriya government in Libya, Russia and China have started blocking US regime-change efforts in the UN Security Council. At the reactionary side of the spectrum, the loosening grip of US hegemony has empowered reactionary state and non-state actors aspiring for regional power, like Turkey and Daesh, and to some extent even Saudi Arabia (who, although still firmly a client-state of the United States, initiated their brutal war on Yemen without first consulting Washington). Many on the Left portray this fracturing as a new era of inter-imperialist conflict. This rests on a profound mischaracterization of the global situation, and often on a dogmatic reading of Lenin’s work. Reading Lenin’s five points as a checklist would mean that a great many states could today be characterized as imperialist. It’s much more useful to take as our starting point not Lenin’s world of 1917, but our world today, looking not at individual countries, but at the global makeup of the world, and each country’s position within that makeup. There is a dangerous tendency on the part of the Left, especially the academic Left, to label any country that uses its military or exports capital as “imperialist.” We are told that “Russian imperialism” is intervening in Syria, or that “Chinese imperialism” is intervening in Africa. Both of these characterizations are false. The reality is that many African nations, having been underdeveloped by the West for centuries, need foreign investment for development, and the terms offered by China are far different from those offered by the US pole through the IMF and WB, with African nations maintaining majority—and in many cases, ultimately total—ownership.35 Furthermore, China itself is still an underdeveloped country.36 Russia, meanwhile, is still dependent on oil exports. Not only does US capital still occupy the dominant position in the current world order, but the country’s military is also by far the most expansive and aggressive in the world. The term “imperialist” then should be used “to describe those states that are dominating and seeking to dominate that global system—not those who are trying to finally rise within it.”37 One mustn’t overstate the effect of these and other obstacles to the unipolar world, mustn’t be blinded by optimism and hope for a multipolar world. This is an objective appraisal from which to possibly build the political and pedagogical formulations in the preceding pages. The moment is not one of uncontested US hegemony, but neither is it one of ascendant revolutionary upsurge. The unipolar world, the American Century that began in 1989–1991 is fracturing, and in the

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spaces of these fractures, pushing these fractures open, are not only progressive alternatives, but deeply reactionary ones, too. The crackling of US unipolarity is taking place with heightening contradictions and instability within the US ruling class. It is in this global and domestic framework that we must situate our current struggle. It is certainly where the fascists, white supremacists, and liberals locate their struggle.

Notes 1 Nathan P. Freier, At Our Own Peril: DoD Risk Assessment in a Post-Primacy World (Carlisle Barracks: United States Army War College Press, 2017). 2 Nathan P. Freier, Outplayed: Regaining Strategic Initiative in the Gray Zone (Carlisle Barracks: United States Army War College Press, 2016). 3 Ibid., 20. 4 Freier et al., At Our Own Peril, 57. 5 Ibid. 6 Brian Becker (2017), “Trump and Nixon: A Lesson Not Learned by the U.S. Left,” Liberation News, May 12. Available online: https://www.liberationnews.org/trumpand-nixon-a-lesson-not-learned-by-the-u-s-left/ (accessed December 22, 2017). 7 For more, see my editorial, “US Sovereignty Must Not Be Defended: Critical Education against Russiagate,” Educational Philosophy and Theory, in press (2018): 1–4. Available online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2018.1427574 (accessed March 20, 2018). 8 Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (Berkeley : University of California Press, 2003). 9 Henry R. Luce, “The American Century,” Diplomatic History 23, no. 2 (1999): 168. 10 Smith, American Empire, 114. 11 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. R. Tucker (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1972), 476. 12 Smith, American Empire, 115. 13 Ibid., 16. 14 Ibid., 18. 15 Ibid., 301. 16 To be sure, Smith shows that the picture was more complicated, as immigration patterns, for example, certainly carried with them their own kinds of geographical knowledge and expertise. 17 Richard Becker, Palestine, Israel and the U.S. Empire (San Francisco: PSL Publications, 2009), 61.

146 18 19 20 21 22

23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

35

36

37

Appendix Leila Khaled, My People Shall Live (Toronto: NC Press, 1975), 34. Ibid., 35. Ibid., 113. Ibid., 41. Ben Becker (ed.), Imperialism in the 21st Century: Updating Lenin’s Theory a Century Later (San Francisco: Liberation Media, 2015). This includes the original text as well as four essays contextualizing it for our present moment. For a succinct explication of the question, see an early formulation in V. I. Lenin, “Theses on the National Question,” in Lenin Collected Works (Vol. 19: March– December 1913, trans. G. Hanna and R. Daglish (Moscow : Progress Publishers, 1980), 243–251; and a later formulation in Joseph Stalin, Marxism and the National Question (Honolulu, HI: University Press of the Pacific, 1935/2003), 88–98; 111–116. Khaled, My People Shall Live, 129. Ibid., 130. Jacques R. Pauwels, The Great Class War: 1914–1918 (Toronto: James Lorimer, 2016). Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939–1953 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006). See the chart from the May 1946 Voprosy Vneshnei Politiki in ibid., 251. Khaled, My People Shall Live, 146. Becker, Palestine, Israel and the U.S. Empire, 53. Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 606–607. Roberts, Stalin’s Wars, 341. Leila Khaled, “The Dynamics of Transformation in the Middle East,” trans. T. Goel, Liberation News, January 29, 2013. Brian Becker, “From Counterrevolution to Revival: Communism and the Primacy of the International Situation,” Liberation School, December 7, 2016. Available online: www.liberationschool.org/from-counterrevolution-to-revival-communismand-the-primacy-of-the-international-situation (accessed August 1, 2017). See Giles Mohan et al., Chinese Migrants and Africa’s Development: New Imperialism or Agents of Change? (London: Zed Books, 2014); Caneisha Mills, “Independent Development vs. Imperialist Domination,” Socialism and Liberation 5, no. 1 (2008): 43–48. For more on China, see Chapter 2 in Curry S. Malott and Derek R. Ford, Marx, Capital, and Education: Towards a Critical Pedagogy of Becoming (New York: Peter Lang, 2015). Becker, Imperialism in the 21st Century, 63.

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Index aesthetics communicative capitalism 97–8 courage 103–5 education 41–2, 91–2, 100–5 Kant 94–7 resistance 100 affect 8, 13, 14, 17, 28–9, 34, 36–7, 93, 108, 123, 133 Agamben, Giorgio 24, 43, 47, 68 Althusser, Louis 28–30, 52–3, 108–10, 114–15, 124 n.6 American Century 133–6, 143 Anti-racism 103–4, 118–20, 122 Black Panther Party 123 blindness 87 Bolshevik Revolution 12–13, 37–8, 52, 138–40 BRICS 133–4 child A Cure for Being Ordinary 32 Althusser 28 communist 35–6 Edleman 15, 58, 62–4, 66, 69, 71–2 Lyotard 100–2 Palestine 137 China 131, 141, 143–4 communism anti-racism 118–20 critical education 4 definition of 57–8 Lee Edelman 71–2 and pedagogy 108–15 the sublime 102–5 Communist Parties children in 36–7 Dean on 27–30, 34, 36–7, 93 freedom 110–11, 113–14, 121 opacity and 99, 104 planning 112–14 political programs 108, 121–3

as sphere 34–6 testing 127–9 as vanguard party 52 counter-interpellation 52–3 creativity 75–6, 82 critical education 4, 13, 18 n. 6, 91, 108, 114, 116, 121, 124 n. 21; see also zombie intellectualism Dean, Jodi death drive 70–2 democracy 7–9 Lecercle 52 the party 27–30, 34, 36–7, 93 secrets 8 debt 4, 15, 57–62, 67, 70, 72 defection 15, 47, 51, 54 democratic communicative capitalism 5–6, 8–9, 85, 97–8, 102, 105, 128 Eckman, Tim 15, 42–4, 48–52, 54, 88, 129 Edelman, Lee defense of 63–4 education 66–9, 93 No Future 58, 62–5, 66–7 Sex, or the unbearable 66–7 encounter 6, 16, 29–30, 33, 37, 61, 66–8, 76, 79–83, 85–7, 93 explosive confrontations 82, 85–8 fake news 1, 9 force 1, 10–11, 12, 15, 17, 27, 29, 36, 44, 50–1, 53–4, 58, 67, 69, 71, 88, 82, 104, 109, 111, 113, 129 future 4, 9, 45–7, 57–65, 69–70, 80, 108– 10, 115, 122–3 Glissant, Édouard 98, 99 habitat 79–80 hacking 31–2 Hardt and Negri see public intellectuals

156 Haywood, Harry 103–4, 118–20 history 3, 10–12, 15, 17, 28, 30, 34, 45–9, 51, 62, 69, 70, 78, 107–9, 115–18, 120–1, 123, 128–9 imagination 4–5, 17, 34, 57, 94, 96, 108–9, 123 imperialism 4, 6, 32, 36, 116, 131–2, 138–9, 144 implosion-explosion 78–80, 82 inclusion 7–8, 32, 58, 92–3, 98, 142 irony 24, 67–9, 93 Kant, Immanuel 92, 94–7, 102, 105 Khaled, Leila education 137 ideology 137–40 Syria 142

Index Malott, Curry 4, 115, 120 Marx, Karl colonization 134 communism 108, 110–15 force 11, 53–4 future 60–1 space 48, 78, 134 time 48–50 working class 79 Marxism imagination 4, 107 language 51–4 philosophy 109 space 78 memory 45–7, 61, 83 Merrifield, Andy 4, 81, 107, 123 Mitchell, Don 10–11, 79 Nakba 136–7

Labaree, David 91 labor aristocracy 138–9 language childhood 101 democracy and capitalism 99 learning 23 Marxist philosophy 51–4 potential 47 rights 122 learning society Backer and Lewis 60 Biesta 23–4 Lewis 24–6 Masschelein and Simons 22–3 Lecercle, Jean-Jacques 51–4 Lefebvre, Henri critique of 82–3, 85, 87 Right to the City 77–80 The Urban Revolution 80–3 Lenin 52, 127–9 Lewis, Tyson 24–9, 31–3, 41, 58–60, 109–10 Luce, Henry 133–5 Lyotard, Jean-Francois anamnesis 101–2 city 83–7 democracy 6, 8, 84, 98–9 domus 16, 83, 85, 86 philosophy 86, 100–3 postmodern 2, 8–9, 100–1 secret 6, 8, 84–6

Occupy Wall St. 22, 32, 32–3 opacity 16, 17, 68, 84, 92–3, 98–100, 102, 104, 127; see also Lyotard, Jean-Francois pedagogy and politics 3, 9–13, 14, 21–2, 31–3, 36–7, 54, 58, 69–72, 86, 88, 103–5, 108–10, 128–9 postmodern 1–2, 8 post-truth 1–2, 5, 7–10, 53–4, 98, 107, 120, 128–9 potentiality Agamben 24–5, 44–5 Dean 33 Lewis 28 Virno 45–9, 51 public intellectuals 3, 5, 10 Reed, John 12, 37 reproductive futurism 15, 58, 62–3, 67, 69, 128 Ronell, Avital 128–9 Russiagate 132 Sedgwick, Eve 4–5 sex 66 Sinthomostudying 57–8, 65–9, 71–2 slogans 52–4, 69, 119, 127 Freire’s misunderstanding 55 n.23 transitional 80

Index Sloterdijk, Peter 35 Smith, Neil 133–6, 138, 139 social media 7–8, 70, 84 Soviet Union 6, 12, 52, 108, 116–20, 135, 140–3 stupidity 61, 68, 76, 86–8, 129 subjectivity collective 28–30, 33, 50, 52, 128 futurity 61 language 51–3 learning 22, 24, 72 liberal ideology 11, 50, 86, 93 urbanism 79 zombie intellectualism 3 symbolic efficiency 8–9, 70–1 gap 58, 64–9, 93, 100–1 order 64, 128 Syria 10, 19 n.22, 31–2, 142–4 Szymanski, Albert 116–18 temporality designations 41 irony 68 labor 48–9 paranoia 5 potentiality 46–8

school 61 video 43 test 3, 11, 17, 24, 36, 127–9 unipolar imperialism decline 131–3, 143–5 emergence 142–3 urban centrality 80–1, 83, 86–8 city vs. 77–82 difference 79–81, 83, 84–6, 88 pedagogy 16, 75, 86, 88 planning 76–80, 88 rights 79–81, 83, 88 urban age thesis 76 video art 41–3, 50–1, 54 Virno, Paolo and Agamben 45, 47 déjà vu 45–8 Exodus 54 labor 49–50 Wolfowitz Doctrine 143 zombie intellectualism 3–5, 91, 107, 115

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