- Okay, so, once again,
I'm delighted to have
been invited to McMaster
and have the opportunity to speak to you.
I think, once again, like
previous talks I've given,
I see a number of quite
familiar faces, actually.
I'm not only thankful to Henry
for the remarkably kind introduction,
but the talk I'm going to give today
owes immeasurable
intellectual debt to his work
and his tireless commitment
to the importance of education
and critical pedagogue.
Can you actually hear me okay at the back?
But, before I begin, I'd
like to turn your attention,
for a moment, to this
picture on this slide.
Now, some of you might
recognize this scene
from Columbia University in New York
as part of the violent protests
that swept across many countries in 1968.
Now, I'm not in any way interested in
covering these acts of resistance
with some pure revolutionary dust
as if all resistance that follows
is some poor approximation.
I'm sure we've all encountered academics
that keep going on about the
almost mystical spirit of 1968
and how they were part of some
authentic revolutionary movement
that younger generations
simply cannot match.
Such is often, actually,
as this image shows,
a white male bourgeois conceit.
What I am interested in is the
subjective legacies of this moment
and what it means for
power and politics today
in the field of education,
especially in the university.
There is no doubt that some
important intellectual developments
start to emerge during this period.
Not least the vitality added to
postcolonialism, feminism, postmodernism,
and their critiques of the nation state.
Indeed, I don't think
it's too controversial
to date what is now commonly termed
the crisis of subjectivity
back to this moment,
as foundational and reductionist
conceptions of the self
were disrupted and radically challenged.
But there was another
revolutionary intellectual movement
that also was germinating at the time.
A movement that would
appropriate the discourses
on anti-foundationalism and
the crisis of subjectivity
and logically invert its implications.
I am, of course, referring here
to the neoliberal revolution
and the way the notion
the crisis of subjectivity
is transformed into the
active and positive production
of what I have called in
my work subjective crisis.
By this I mean how a new
global regime for power
and political rule starts to emerge.
That, as Zygmunt Bauman
wonderfully writes about,
forces a separation in the
spheres of power and politics.
And, premised upon the logic
of free market fundamentalism,
ontologically naturalizes crisis
in a way that is upheld
within university sectors
by formidable schools
of intellectual thought.
In this regard, what appears to be
the crisis of subjectivity at this period
is not incidental.
It actually becomes part
of the strategic design.
So, why is this important?
Well, first, in the
context of this talk today,
it reaffirms that the university
has a considered history
of resistance and struggle,
which is not alien to
its intellectual fabric.
And, perhaps, we need
to keep that in mind.
And, secondly, we also need to be mindful
about what we actually mean by the term
resistance and political transformation.
Sometimes what emerges can appropriate
the critical vocabulary to rework systems
of domination and exploitation
in far more devastating ways.
So, let's begin with a number of
important points of clarification.
At least my own
understanding of a few terms.
About what we actually
mean by the key terms which
featured in the title of
the talk which I gave.
Namely, the university,
education, and resistance.
Such terms are no doubt
very familiar to us
and part of the everyday
political lexicon.
But what do we actually
mean by these terms,
especially when we bring them
together in conversation?
Now, to my mind, these terms,
university, education, and resistance,
are inextricably bound
together to the extent,
at least from the perspective
of the university,
that the removal of one
denigrates the others.
So, let's begin with the term university.
We might, of course, broach the question
by simply pointing to various
institutional settlements
and arrangements.
That is to say that the university is
a particular site on the map
where people attend in the
hope of gaining new knowledge
and bettering their lives
and so on and so forth.
Thankfully, many of you have
somewhat followed this logic today
and managed to find yourself in this room.
But the question I want
to ask is why are we here?
Or, to add a bit more
urgency to the question,
why are we here now dealing precisely with
the types of questions we are
trying to deal with today?
Now, when I was invited to give this talk,
I was struck by the timely
and yet almost timeless
nature of the question
resisting the university.
What is it about the current
historical conjunction,
a term which Henry just previously used,
which forces us to raise the question
resisting the university?
And how might we connect this
to a history of critical thinking.
What I am gesturing towards you
is a conception of the university
which is far greater
and much more important
than any institutional
arrangement or settlement.
It is to deal with the university
in terms of what I want to
call an ecology of thought,
which I will return back to in a moment.
Now, the idea that the pursuit
of intellectual inquiry
is all about asking the
right types of questions
at a particular moment in time
is not, of course, in any way new.
We actually find it
appearing, quite literally,
central to Raphael's
famous 1509 masterpiece,
which some people believe actually
embodies the spirit of the Renaissance,
The School of Athens, which
features in the Vatican.
Which remains, I would argue,
one of the most iconic
representations of thought
still to dominate the Western imaginary
in the humanist tradition.
What's important to note here
is the two figures in the
middle of the composition.
Plato on the left, who is pointing to
the heavenly metaphysical stars,
and Aristotle, the student on the right,
who is gesturing downwards
as he sees the true pursuit
of intellectual inquiry
being more concerned with earthly affairs.
Simply put, they are debating
what is the right question to ask at this
particular historical conjunction.
Now, sentimental liberal humanists
often contrast this Athenian scene
and its capacity for reason
and seemingly peaceful debate
to the violence of neighboring Sparta.
And yet, as the critically trained eye
would no doubt observe,
this scene also features
a great deal of structural violence,
which is hidden in plain sight from us,
especially in terms of its
racial, gendered, and
class-based divisions.
Nevertheless, the idea
that intellectual inquiry
is all about what Michel Foucault
calls the courage to truth,
which he dates back to this period
through his concept of parrhesia,
remains, I would argue,
something worth fighting for.
It is certainly in marked contrast
to another vision of the university,
wonderfully captured here in
the artwork of Isaac Cordal
in an installation which
he has titled The School,
in which education is shown in the most
medicated and controlled ways
to resemble a neo-liberal factory.
Now, turning to the question of education,
I would certainly like to see myself
as part of a broader
school of critical thinking
which subscribes to the notion
that education is always a
form of political intervention.
One of the most evident
places to start with this
is with the following
powerful quote by Paulo Freire
as he writes, "The more
radical the person is,
the more fully he or she
enters into a reality so that,
knowing it better, he
or she can transform it.
This individual is not afraid to confront,
to listen, to see the world unveiled.
This person is not
afraid to meet the people
or to enter into a dialogue with them.
This person does not
consider himself or herself
the proprietor of
history or of all people,
or the liberator of the oppressed;
but he or she does commit
himself or herself,
within history, to fight on their side."
Education, as Paulo understands,
too easily subjects.
It is often framed through
the hierarchy of subjects.
And is all about creating spheres
of knowledge and power integral to
the production of
different ways of living.
In this regard, education is all about
the active production of
political subjectivities
and of authenticating and,
indeed, disqualifying,
through what is not taught,
the particular meaning and value
of a politically qualified life.
Education, in short, is never
value-neutral or objective.
Whatever the subject that's being taught,
education at whatever level
or stage of development
always makes demands upon the political.
Just as the political is always inscribed
into its ontological and
epistemological presuppositions.
Now, in order to bring Paulo's
work up to date on this
and to emphasize the
real political stakes,
I could do no better than point you
in the direction of Henry's
books The University in Chains
and his more recent The Violence
of Organized Forgetting,
which I will return to
a bit later in my talk.
So, where does this leave us in terms
of thinking about resistance?
And, indeed, what do we
actually mean by the term?
It is fair to say, especially on the Left,
that there is very little agreement
in terms of the question of resistance.
One person's resistance might look like
another person's compromise.
I take my own particular
start point on this subject
with Foucault's conception of power,
which shows resistance
is an integral element
to any power relationship.
Or, as Hannah Arendt would have argued,
if you have no capacity to resist,
hence there is no power
relationship to speak of,
what remains is pure unmediated violence.
Resistance, in short,
as Foucault understands,
is crucial to any viable
notion of empowerment.
There is no power without resistance.
We might, however, even
take this a stage further
and connect it to Gilles
Deleuze's provocative claim that
"The final word on power is
that resistance comes first."
In his attempt to break out of
some dogmatic dialectical thinking,
what Deleuze is actually
suggesting with this claim
is that resistance shouldn't be confused
with some negation of the world.
Resistance isn't negative.
It is the order of
hierarchy to negate life
and to suffocate the world.
Hence, for Deleuze, that
which already affirms life
is forced, through modes of incorporation
into dogmatic orthodoxies,
to become resistive
on account of the fact
that regimes of power
recognize that a true autonomous
existence is dangerous.
So, what does this mean when
thinking about resisting the university?
Well, to put it another way,
how much would you
reimagine the university,
what the university
actually is politically,
from the affirmative and creative
perspective of resistance?
What, if by making micropolitical
claims upon the university
through this notion of resistance,
we might also, as neoliberals
do time and time again,
invert the logic to imagine a shift
away from the university of crisis
to the university of resistance.
I am drawing you to the
distinction Foucault draws
between the milieu and the apparatus.
Simply put by Foucault, the milieu points
to a broad environmental frame,
which is open to the infinitely possible.
Whereas the apparatus
seeks to control the milieu
by policing the borders,
imposing forms of regulation
to control the conduct of conduct
and to domesticate thought.
In regards to our
problematic, the university,
the milieu is the potential we might read
as being an ecology of thought.
Whereas the apparatus is the management
of a controlled regime of
knowledge, power, and truth.
And, let's be clear,
neoliberalism is an apparatus
which seeks to control
knowledge, power, and truth.
So, why is this important?
Well, if we see the university
initially from the perspective
of power in its ideal form
as an apparatus for the
promotion of regulated thinking,
then invariably the concept of resistance
is viewed negatively.
However, if we understand
the university in its primacy
to be this ecology of thought,
which Foucault points towards,
which always exceeds the boundaries
of institutional and regulatory control,
then the milieu in which it operates
should, by definition,
prioritize critical agency.
Resiting the university, in other words,
is not obstructive.
It should be central to
the university's mission.
Insomuch as resisting the university
means to stay principled to the value
of critical education and the idea
that the world might be
transformed for the better.
It also means to resurrect the idea
that a central mission of the university
should be to hold power to account.
Now, again inspired by Henry's work,
I want to begin by
moving on to argue that,
in order for us to steer the
university in this direction,
to broaden our conception
of the university
as an open ecology of thought,
we are required to gain tangible purchase
on the logics of neoliberal power
as a pedagogical force.
With this in mind, I'd like
to now turn for a moment,
if you bear with me, to
the system of education
in the United Kingdom.
Not in terms of its
particularities as such,
but more regarding some of
the more important insights
it provides on the neoliberalization
of education more broadly.
So that we might get a
better picture of what
we're actually up against.
And, to do this, I thought it'd be worth
talking very briefly
about my own experiences
in the education system
and how neoliberalism
might be better understood.
To give you some background, I grew up
in the heartlands of the working class
mining valley communities of South Wales.
This is actually a picture of the town
in which I grew up in.
During the pinnacle of its production,
these valleys quite literally
powered British industrialization
and were integral to both
the great war efforts.
The Welsh valleys at one point led
global coal production in its outputs.
Needles to say, it was a place
that was integral to the formation
of what is now misguidedly
termed the British Labour Party
and was heavily unionized.
However, growing up as I did
during Margaret Thatcher's Britain
exposed the underclasses in such areas
to the raw realities of power politics.
The pace of change and introducing to
every aspect of the social system
was such that the term revolution
seemed both appropriate
and denigrated in the very same moment.
Thatcher, following the example
already set by General Pinochet in Chile,
found ideological solace in
the works of Milton Friedman
and Friedrich von Hayek
to set in place the first comprehensive
neoliberal assault on the
United Kingdom social state
and its educational system.
She found a particular
ally with this mission,
of course, in Ronald Reagan,
who, in equal measure, used
the economic stagnation
of the previous decade to instigate
widespread social reforms beyond anybody's
sense of acceptable mandate.
Such change invariably demanded
a market-savvy authoritarianism.
No coincidence, then,
that Thatcher voiced her
support and admiration for
many belligerent dictators.
Most notably the Apartheid
regime in South Africa,
openly calling Nelson Mandela a terrorist
while overseeing the sales of arms
to suppress popular
uprisings across the world.
The Iron Lady, as some
affectionately called her,
ruled with an iron fist.
She also exposed most fully
the fundamental deceit writ
large that neoliberalism
and democratic principles
are mutually exclusive.
Democracy, in fact, proved to be
an unnecessary impediment
or critical destruction
to the real business of political rule.
Thatcher's Britain was consciously brutal
and violent by strategic design
and evidenced most fully,
Rosa Luxemburg's insists,
that genuine capitalist change
needed the most uncompromising forms
of political intervention if
it was to truly take hold.
There was nothing
natural about the embrace
of free market fundamentalism.
Not in any way incidental,
Thatcherism is also dominated
by a series of ongoing
events and political crises,
which profoundly shapened
the complex political
consciousness of the nation,
complemented in sophisticated ways
the domestic changes to
all aspects of social life.
The Falklands War set in
the tone for the regime,
which reverted time and time again
to a war paradigm to crush all forms
of internal and external opposition.
You'll note this very famous picture
of Thatcher taken during
the Falklands War.
The irony of the Welsh three feathers
actually emblazoned on the tank
as if the war was fought for
the working class
communities of South Wales.
Government brutality in Northern Ireland
against the internal terror threat
was such that Amnesty International
openly described the regime as
one of the most tyrannical in the world.
The British Metropolitan
Police were openly recruited
into an ideological war as
labeled Thatcher's footsoldiers,
which waged outright violence
against the trade unions
and the working classes.
Now, this was not only witnessed in
the state-sanctioned violence
against coal mining communities,
such as those in South Wales.
More perniciously, it shaped all
social and class-based relations,
as recently exposed in the widespread
coverup of the Hillsborough
football disaster
that led to the tragic
loss of life of 96 victims.
This is tragically depicted here
in George Eisler's memorial
painting titled Hillsborough.
Such violence was a direct result
of political desimation of the underclass
whose value to society rapidly shifted
from pride in local community spirit
to a pathological burden upon the economy
and the social order of things.
Something which neoliberalism
does time and time again.
Reduces broader social
issues to pathologies.
It was perhaps somewhat fitting then
that Thatcher's tenure ended with
the political fallout
from the Poll Tax Riots
that brought levels of violence
to the capital streets,
which might have easily been
termed a political uprising.
Thatcher's Britain was shaped by
the contours of an ideological war.
Educational policy, as such,
was absolutely central
to the domestic assault.
Neoliberal reforms marched hand-in-hand
with the consolidation of power
made possible by the creation
of a national curriculum
that promoted a competition ethos
and tried to decimate any political
and cultural claims to autonomy.
This was complemented by
widespread institutional reforms
aimed at introducing
market-driven incentives
into educational policy.
Such reforms, it must be added,
set the foundation for
the crude league table
and the performance indicators,
which are so endemic to
educational policies today.
Now, growing up during this time
in the comprehensive state school system,
I guess taught me the pernicious nature
to the class-based dimensions
to British society.
Along, it must be said, with the value
and the importance of critical pedagogy.
Being on the receiving end
of what Michel Foucault
aptly terms the capillary ends of power,
this environment personally fostered
a healthy skepticism of
positivist ontologies
and so-called progressive logics
regarding educational policy.
Comprehensive education,
in short, as I remember it,
was shaped not by the question of
what I would like to study,
but by career advisors who
would come in every week
and ask me "What would you
like to do when you grow up?"
To which I always responded "Astronaut."
Which was always countered by
"Be realistic, son" response.
It's fair to say that I was actually
a late developer in school.
While subsequent Leftist
governments in the United Kingdom
brought a number of benefits
to educational policies,
not least encouraging students
from poorer backgrounds
to think that a university
education was possible,
there was no effective reversal
of this neoliberal approach.
The widely touted idea
of education for all
in fact developed alongside
the intensification
of performance measures,
which became all the more prominent
as the education system was
more and more framed in global terms.
Opening up the education system
to a world of opportunity
proved less about empowering
educational workers and students
than it was about ensuring
global competitiveness
and a marketable stand-in
for elite institutions.
All the while fueling the debt economy
by encouraging poor
classes to defer payment
for an increasingly private education,
many of which, some of them,
are simply incapable of
paying off to date.
Now, not in any way
incidental to our concerns,
the Tony Blair government was instrumental
in collapsing education
with a war paradigm.
As it began linking the former
with the causes of conflict and violence
in the global borderlands.
This image, incidentally, came from
a conservative election poster in 1997
devised by the Saatchi and
Saatchi advertising gallery.
Although it seemed remarkably prophetic
in terms of what Blair
subsequently became.
As the liberal wars on
terror gained momentum,
so educational policies back home
were increasingly tied to
terrorism preventative strategies,
which often conflated the
radical with the fundamental
to disastrous political effect.
Now, what's been experienced today
is a completion of this process.
As the entire educational sector
from the earliest primary
stages to the university
is facing a full-force
neoliberal transformation.
Albeit with a distinct catastrophic twist.
People are increasingly
rendered as consumers
while education workers become
increasingly disposable.
Such disposability is not incidental.
It reflects the crisis of the times.
Indeed, the so-called crisis of
the university sector in the UK
is not some natural or
inevitable development.
It's part of the strategic design.
One example of this has been the closure
of entire philosophy programs,
which signify the most visible shift
from reflective and critical thinking
to the embrace of a dumbed down approach
to the humanities education
that has no time for anything
beyond neutralizing and
political compromises
and deceit of pseudoscientific paradigms.
For Terry Eagleton, this represents
nothing short of the slow
death of the university.
As Eagleton writes, "According
to the British state,
all public funded academic research
must now regard itself as part of
the so-called knowledge economy,
with a measurable impact on society.
Such impact is rather easier to gauge
for aeronautical engineers
than ancient historians.
Pharmacists are likely
to do better in this game
than phenomenologists.
Subjects that do not attract
lucrative research grants
from private industry,
or that are unlikely to pull
in large numbers of students,
are plunged into a
state of chronic crisis.
Academic merit is equated with
how much money you can raise,
while an educated student is redefined
as an employable one."
Linking this to Henry's work,
what we can, however, see is that the UK
is not in any way unique here.
But part of a global transformation
in the nature of education.
Increasingly tied to instrumental purposes
and measurable paradigms,
many institutions of higher
education across the world
are now committed almost exclusively
to economic growth,
instrumental rationality,
and the deprived task
of preparing students
strictly for the work force.
Such modes of education do
not foster in their primacy
a sense of organized responsibility
and a shared collective ethos
central to any viable notion of democracy.
Nor do they promote the idea that
an essential function of the university
is to hold power to account
and that producing critical minds
is enough impact in itself.
As David Harvey insists, the
academy has been subjected
to neoliberal disciplinary apparatus
of various kinds while it's
also becoming a place where
neoliberal ideas are being spread.
The impact upon faculty is very evident.
If you work in the UK today,
and I'm sure it's the same elsewhere,
it seems like often you operate
in a state of permanent
crisis and emergency.
Awaiting the next research rankings,
income generation counts,
national student assessment indicators,
which only adds to a
sense of vulnerability
and insecurity many faculty feel
in certain academic disciplines.
Now, we're all, of course,
subject to increased metrication
and surveillance of multiple
performance measures,
which are firm in positivist ontologies,
for some are demoralizing at best.
And for others can be
psychologically devastating at worst.
Now, I'm not in any way
trying to suggest to you
that this is a uniform experience.
It can often depend on which
department, faculty, or school
in which you happen to operate.
Thankfully, I have the privilege
of working in a school which still fights
to retain the integrity of the academic
to which I recognize is
a distinct privilege.
But I have also worked in a department
where I have witnessed the
most toxic conditions take hold
as a result of this shift
towards performance measures.
Now, one of the areas that I
think there's been a notable,
if undercritiqued, change
here to academic life
is the major restructuring
in the logics of time.
It should become quite clear to us that,
in order to understand power,
we need to have an understanding of time.
Criticality doesn't simply
fall from the skies.
It demands an apprenticeship that requires
time and dedication.
Nobody has understood this
better than Paul Virilio
who shows how the political
is often decimated
the more we increase the speed of flows.
As an academic working today,
it's almost impossible to state
when you're at work and when you are not.
Now, we might, of course, say that
such is the life of an academic.
But when this becomes bureaucratic,
then we enter into a new
terrain of thought management.
I often wonder whether many
of the critical thinkers
that we hold on a pedestal would even
gain meaningful employment
in such conditions.
I can only imagine Immanuel Kant
going to an interview and saying
"I have this great idea
for the critique of reason.
Unfortunately, nobody's going
to read it for 200 years."
Or Karl Marx saying to a research director
or an interviewing panel that
he's currently working on the critique
of the inner workings of capitalism,
but it might take him
20 years to finish it.
And I wouldn't even know
where to begin with Nieztsche.
But my real point here, of course,
is that the position of the academic today
is not only deeply vulnerable,
it is precarious as a
matter of strategic choice.
Because the university is
a university of crisis,
which is part of a broader
system of knowledge production
which authenticates the logic
that things are fundamentally
insecure by design.
Moving on, academics
have shown for some time
the devastating consequences
of neoliberalism.
And my own encounters with this
started in the fields of
international political economy
and critical development studies,
which took seriously everyday questions
of insecurity, vulnerability,
and precariousness.
Post-9/11, we have slowly
begun to understand
that ours is an age of catastrophe.
From terror to weather
and everything in between,
we are reminded on a daily basis
of the multiple dangers
that threaten to engulf
our societies at any given moment.
Indeed, if we believe the science,
we might already be walking
amongst the ruins of the future.
There is always another
catastrophic event on the horizon.
Neoliberalism, however,
is not a static phenomenon
and has adapted to these conditions.
Indeed, while we might be able to write
that neoliberalism has been
politically catastrophic,
it has also adapted to
the age of catastrophe
in which we live and
profits from it accordingly.
Something which Naomi Klein
has called disaster capitalism.
Even the most stalwart
neoliberal economist
now asks that we all accept a more austere
and tempered imaginary.
Relegating the dream of unending growth
and unlimited human
potential to a bygone era.
Indeed, if wars and local crises overseas
continue to be used as an
opportunity for intervention,
for imposing neoliberal
regimes of political rule,
back home, the appropriation of discourses
of disaster and general insecurity
has profoundly shaped and
shifted the logic of capital
such that permanent austerity and anxiety
is increasingly, it seems, becoming the
dominant maxim for political rule.
Hence, of questions of sustainability
once emerged in zones of impoverishment
as a way to temper local claims
for political empowerment.
Contemporary neoliberalism seems to thrive
on the fact and the fear that
we might all be going south.
The implications are two-fold.
First, faced with a task of
managing the life chance divide
between the global north
and the global south,
we now see that liberal societies
are effectively bunkering down
and closing up the borders in the hope
of just simply holding on
to what gains they have.
The refugee crisis engulfing Europe
exposes this on a daily basis.
And, two, that the future is now a terrain
of endemic and unavoidable catastrophe
is almost a given in policy circles.
Dystopia, in other words, is no longer
the realm of science fiction,
as suggested, for instance,
by the increasingly urgent
recent climate change reports
warning that the integrity
of the planet's biosphere
is already collapsing.
It is the dominant imaginary
for neoliberal governance
and its narcissistic reasoning.
Something myself and Henry wrote
in the disposable futures
book on dystopian realism.
In such times, affirmative
critical thinking
actually becomes a burden.
As being able to question the fundamental
ontological and epistemological parameters
is tantamount to being at odds
with the dystopian logics of the time.
One could even go further and argue
that thinking, itself, in such conditions,
becomes dangerous.
Not only do uncertainty and precariousness
breed anxiety and insecurity,
they are repackaged as
being the only viable
way to envisage our political futures.
As I have written elsewhere,
no where is this more evident today
than in the doctrine of resilience,
which has become a defining
mode of subjectivity
for an age that has normalized catastrophe
and its promise of violence to come.
As many of you will no doubt appreciate,
resilience is originally conceived
in the fields of ecology, child welfare,
and sustainable development.
But has fast become the
new social morphology
for liberal societies.
Moving beyond narratives of victimhood,
which are now taken as a given,
it normalizes a survivalist ethos
for navigating the fragilities
all human systems face.
To thrive while bouncing back
from some inevitable form of trauma
we're all going to experience
at one point in our life.
Now, the resilient thinker
might say, of course,
"What's wrong with enabling human beings
to take responsibility
for their own security
so that they can better survive,
avoid death, evading violence,
and better managing
security along the way?"
That's why, of course,
resilience has generated
such a proliferation of popular literature
of self-help manuals that helped
in enabling people dealing from everything
from a terrorist attack...
So, you can actually buy a resilience book
on how to survive a terrorist attack.
The self-help guide to
al-Qaeda, so to speak.
But also on to everyday dangers,
such as extreme weather,
redundancy, and even divorce.
If nothing else, resilience
is certainly big business.
But, beneath this veneer of
concern, as I have argued,
lies a deeply nihilistic way of thinking.
It creates an image of the world
which is fully in tune with
the neoliberal way of
thinking of capitalism today
in which the future is
assumed as insecure by design.
Catastrophe is inevitable.
It's normal.
It's part of the everyday fabric.
Now, more than actually...
Of course, as I've tried pointing out...
Once we've started to deal
with this question of futurity,
I want to argue a way in
which we can maybe start
to gain some tangible purchase
on some of the emergent political dynamics
that we encounter today.
But even, of course, in terms of
when we're thinking about futurities
from this image of Camden, New Jersey.
This is actually an occupied
street of Camden, New Jersey.
And also, a semi-occupied
street in the Welsh valleys.
Shuttered landscapes are already
part of the present condition.
Now, this inevitability
of catastrophe, for me,
really foregrounds the political stakes.
Indeed, it brings me
to two urgent problems
which demand an international,
an intellectual response.
Namely, ISIS and The
Donald, as Henry called him.
ISIS, as I have argued
in a number of articles,
is the evident mimetic rival
in an age of dystopian realism.
They mimic the logic of neoliberalism
and its violent spectacles
to devastating effect.
Indeed, a defining feature of
the violence of the movement
is the conscious targeting
of youths by youths
who are recruited into its ranks.
If eliminating ISIS therefore means
eradicating the conditions
that created it,
we need to understand how it's part
of the dystopian realism
and how it makes demands on the future
represents a form of imagination warfare.
The forms of violence we witness today
are not only an attack on the present.
Such violence also points to an assault
on an imagined and hopeful future.
Youths today are being connected
directly to the age of catastrophe.
Its multiple forms of endangerment,
the normalization of terror,
underproduction of catastrophic futures.
The state of war, as
such, cannot simply be
understood with reference to
some juxtaposed temporalities,
present horror, for instance,
is distinct from past horror
or anticipated horrors to come.
The violence of groups such as ISIS
needs to be understood in terms of
what it projects.
The attempt to colonize the imaginary.
To eradicate any vestiges
of the radical imagination,.
To steer history in a different
and alternative direction.
Which also brings me to the
problem of Donald Trump.
And, let's be clear, Trump is a problem.
Now, I was struck by this recent image
of an installation in New York
by an anonymous art collective.
Now, whilst there is a certain
cheap humor to this piece,
what everyone thinks of Trump,
the politics of mockery and body shaming
is particularly perturbing
about this piece.
It also distracts from the
true nakedness of Trump.
Which is the naked appeal
to power and violence.
Which perhaps we might think about
as being post-ideological.
He no longer even needs to justify
why he says what he says.
Like the Brexit campaign in the UK,
Trump plays directly to the
pedagogies of the visceral.
It's like he's simply
read William Reich's book
on the mass psychology of fascism.
He mobilizes the spectacle
to devastating effect.
He also makes a particular
play to the historic
in a way that actually depends upon
what Henry calls the violence
of organized forgetting.
And, as me and Henry were
discussing over lunch,
this violence of organized forgetting
no longer matters whether we can remember
what happened 50 years ago.
It's more about whether we remember
what Trump actually said last week
and can hold him to account for it.
And I wanna take this quote from Henry,
'cause I think this really
captures what we're up against.
He says "Unfortunately,
we live at a moment
in which ignorance appears to be
one of the defining features
of American political and cultural life.
Ignorance has become a
form of weaponized refusal
to acknowledge the violence of the past
and revels in a culture
of media spectacles
in which public concerns are translated
into private obsessions, consumerism,
and fatuous entertainment.
The warning signs from
history are all too clear.
Failure to learn from the past
has disastrous political consequences.
Such ignorance is not simply
about the absence of information.
It has its own political
and pedagogical categories
whose formative culture threatened both
critical agency and democracy itself."
Now, I'm sure, like many others,
I often look on in disbelief
at the spectacle of Trump
wondering how we've managed
to get to this point.
His appearance, as in this image,
seems both surreal, yet now all too real
to the politics of the everyday.
This image, of course, could quite easily
have featured some five years
ago in a Hollywood film,
which you might have thought
might have been too
far fetched at the time
were it not for the fact that
it's now part of the tragic and disturbing
dystopian fabric of modern politics.
But how are we to make sense
of the Trump phenomenon socially?
One thing seems clear.
He plays directly to those populations,
pedagogically speaking,
for whom voting for him
is no risk whatsoever.
Again, very similar to
the widespread support
for Brexit supporters in the UK
amongst Welsh working class communities.
And, if there's a lesson
when we think about
could Donald Trump win,
Brexit certainly is it.
But there's something more that Trump does
in terms of his pedagogical acumen.
In his appeal to greatness,
as this image shows,
not only is he making a claim
upon the politics of time,
he is also mobilizing
ontological vulnerability
to devastating effect.
He positions himself as the embodiment
of a resistive force to a world
of inevitable catastrophe and crisis.
A world he vows to make secure again.
This is not simply securitarian speak.
It is an ontological and
epistemological move,
a counter to the perceived
death of the Promethean man,
and a surety that comes with the ability
to be secure about oneself
and one's place in the world.
After all, making the nation great again
sounds pretty great, if
the community you live in
is dead on its knees.
But such greatness, this
longing for past times,
which was always an
illusion, as many of us know,
for the vast majority
of the world's citizens.
And, indeed, it's evidently
reactionary and dangerous.
We could, of course, take
Margaret Bourke-White's image
after the Kentucky Flood of
1937 called the American Way
to appreciate the realism
many critical theorists
have spent decades trying
to expose and challenge.
There's nothing great
about this American way.
Equally, in the United Kingdom,
around the same time this photo was taken,
there was devastating and endemic
poverty and starvation in
the mining communities of South Wales.
So, what the Brexit campaign
has imagined as being great was always
devastatingly poor and precarious.
Indeed, as Walter Benjamin has shown,
such greatness comes with great costs.
That is to say, if the idea of liberalism
for the past two decades has challenged
the political architectures of the world
as founded on the sanctity
of the nation state,
the appeal, once again, to the
mythical unity of the nation
to make ourselves great again
further represents what Benjamin
identified as being a naked appeal
to mythical forms of violence.
This is not a retreat back
into 20th century paradigms.
After all, such leaders
have absolutely no intention
of changing the logics of neoliberal rule
and reimposing a socialist state.
What it does, however,
point to, once again,
is a change in the nature of capitalism.
Indeed, in the UK, for instance,
a recent government minister noted that
whilst there would be new restrictions
on the free movement
of people post-Brexit,
this wouldn't apply to
high skilled workers,
such as bankers, which he
specifically mentioned.
So, bankers can still
enjoy the free movement
as opposed to others, 'cause
they are high skilled workers.
The increasing concentration of wealth
in the hands of a small
majority of people today
depends upon a global system
of architecture and containment.
But this can only be achieved,
as William Reich understood all too well,
by getting the masses to actively desire
those very conditions.
Its all about bunkering down
and a willingness to embrace
an incarcerated mindset.
Such is the force of this logic
that Spinoza's famous dictum
"Why do the masses embrace their servitude
as though it were their liberation?"
once again makes perfect sense.
So, how might we imagine better futures?
When thinking about that question today,
I am reminded once again about this quote
by that famous political
theorist Woody Allen.
As Woody Allen says, "More
than any time in history,
mankind faces a crossroads.
One path leads to despair
and utter hopelessness.
The other, to total extinction.
Let's pray we have the
wisdom to choose correctly."
Could there possibly
be a better description
to capture the choice the
American electorate faced today?
Thankfully, of course, history
is never a two-way street.
And the milieu of thought always contains
many more possibilities beyond
such binary distinctions.
But the point I really want to make
is that education has always been
about a struggle for the future.
Because, if we are talking about
the production of particular
political subjectivities,
then it's always premised on the basis
of what subjects are to come.
Or, to use Derider's terms,
what democracy is to come.
What kinds of subjects
are we going to invest in
and create in the future?
For let's not forget to be in the future
invariably means to contribute something
in the here and now.
In this regard, the future
is already embodied.
Even though its form is far from certain.
What is more, if we
take seriously the idea
that education is a fight for the future,
we can already see that the
battles over power and politics
and the way power operates
have a futurity to them.
That is why, as I mentioned,
it is important to see
politics as a struggle
for the control of time.
Now, as academics, as all
of us will appreciate,
we are continually forced to make choices,
sometimes against our better judgements.
The truth, of course, is
that there are no clear lines
to draw in the sand neatly separating
what is left and what is right anymore.
And yet, as Paulo Freire insisted,
one is invariably drawn into
an entire history of struggle
the moment critical ideas
are exposed as a force
and put into the public realm
to the disruption of orthodox thinking.
There is, however, a clear
warning from history.
Our intellectual allegiances
should be less concerned
with ideological dogmatism.
There is, after all, no more microfascist
or intellectually violent person
than the authenticating militant
whose self-imposed vanguardism
compels allegiance to the stupidity
of unquestioning loyalty
and political purity.
So, to conclude, let's
not lose sight, perhaps,
of the fact that critical ideas
are a matter of critical importance,
especially in the
historical current moment.
Public spheres, such as universities,
in which critical thought
ought to be nurtured
as part of an ecology of thinking,
provide the minimal conditions
for people to become worldly,
take hold of important social issues,
and alleviate human suffering
as a means of making more just societies.
Ideas are not simply empty gestures
that simply express
free-floating idealism.
Ideas provide a critical foundation
for assessing individual
and collective agency
and what it might mean to exercise
the courage to speak the truth to power.
They offer us the opportunity
to think and act otherwise,
tTo imagine alternative worlds,
to challenge common sense assumptions,
cross over into new lines of inquiry,
and take positions without standing still
or lamenting the
catastrophes of the world.
Foregrounding the value
of critical pedagogy
on the political function
of the university
as an ecology of thought
might then allow us
to challenge the imposition
of a corporatized dystopia
and the monstrous offsprings that
it continuously produces.
I'd like to end today with the words
of the Salvadorian poet
Roque Dalton as he says,
"Like you I
Love love, life, the sweet smell
Of things, the sky, blue
landscapes of January days.
And my blood boils up
And I laugh through eyes
That have known the buds of tears.
I believe the world is beautiful
And that poetry, like
bread, is for everyone.
And that my veins don't end in me
But in the unanimous blood
Of those who struggle for life,
Love,
Little things,
Landscape and bread.
The poetry of everyone."
Thank you for listening.
(applause)
