Hi all,

Reposting the readings for my workshop here, as well as a short summary/introduction to the texts. Please let me know if you have any questions.

Hi everyone–

Looking at the other workshops that have been posted here, I fear I may have had the wrong approach to this assignment. I’m plugging in what I wrote anyways, with the caveat that if people have questions or would like more straightforward summaries of the readings, I’m happy to work on that. Apologies that I wrote so much, but hopefully the word count is offset by the readings, which are pretty short!

The Value of Silence, David EngDownload
Idols in the Archive, Manan AhmedDownload
Ghostly Matters, Avery GordonDownload

The three texts I would like to focus on during my workshop approach themes of ghostliness, memory, and silence from different disciplinary vantage points. Manan Ahmed is a historian of South Asia at Columbia University, Avery Gordon a sociologist at UCSB, and David Eng a professor of English at Brown University. Even as these scholars work within discrete fields, however, they also move outside and beyond rigid methodological divides; they marshal theories and techniques from psychoanalysis, epistemology, critical race theory, literary theory, political science, and even memoir. This range produces in each text a unique sense of density but also slipperiness, as if the authors, despite leveraging a plethora of tactics, face subject matters that evade immediate access or epistemological transparency; to quote Gordon quoting Barthes, interdisciplinary work creates “new object[s] that belong to no one” (7).

The objects of these texts “belong to no one” in that they evade the territorial claim of any single discipline; they also “belong to no one” because these studies—which approach silences, ghosts, losses, lacunae—necessarily circle the intangible, and navigate the complex territories of public inheritance and collective memory. This is perhaps most evident in Ahmed’s case, in which a source of knowledge—the archive—is presented as a public yet tightly regulated space that the individual can only enter as a nervous interloper. Ahmed may gain access to the archive, but not as a privileged historian who might excavate and interpret its offerings. Instead, a quick scan of the archive’s “topo-nomology” merely permits Ahmed to catalogue (and, under the watchful eye of his chaperone, photograph) the surfaces of that which he knows he cannot know further. 

What ethical obligations arise out of knowledge production around bodies and histories that are always moving out of our line of sight, out of our range of hearing? What should we do when we, as knowing subjects, nevertheless feel intimate, personal, and political connections to these bodies and histories that do not belong strictly to us? Ahmed, who is of Kashmiri heritage, describes the archive as marked by Partition- and colonial-era histories of interreligious persecution. He notes a possible collection between the archive, its neighborhood, and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ in the text), a Sunni supremacist organization; he understandably begins to feel wary when archive officials ask him why he’s “looking for Hindus in Uch” (10). There runs a throughline between the archive’s function as a Pakistani State repository for errant, “sinful” objects, and Kashmir’s historical oppression as a community that refuses “the triumphalism of the Muslim League” (16). In pairing these larger questions of state power and nationalist violence with an earlier portrait of family life, Ahmed suggests that he is drawn to such fraught and contested spaces for more than purely academic reasons. Yet a personal connection does not always equate to a sense of ownership or access: even the stories of Ahmed’s own grandmother’s constitute “a dark archive” that he cannot share (10). As he writes, “they were not my secrets” (10). 

There are multiple modes of silencing at work in Ahmed’s telling: the silence imposed by the State, which controls and withdraws the conditions and objects of knowledge; and the self-silencing of the scholar, who feels an obligation to turn away from “half-private, half-public conjurations” that rest on an “unstable” onto-epistemological limit (11). Ahmed’s invocation of “conjuration” aptly registers the spectral quality of knowledge production around traumas that are publicly situated but also privately processed. The “unstable limit” that his scholarship traverses makes it difficult to discern who is speaking, through which socio-political mechanisms such speech is mediated, and even what, ultimately, these disembodied voices are expressing. The children who play around the archive say they hear “all kinds” of noises, and Ahmed’s account hints that not all of these are intelligible (16).

As with Ahmed, multiple forms of silence are at work in David Eng’s study of national discourse and processes of mourning after 9/11. Eng describes the organic silence that follows a shock of trauma as a potentially generative “moment before … loss is expropriated into its symbolic meaning” (86). But there is another silencing mechanism, resonant with Ahmed’s sketch, in which American society’s legitimation of certain strains of public discourse suppress “alternative narratives of community and belonging,” as well as the absence/presence of “certain deprivileged losses” (90). Eng shows us how silence can sound a lot like patriotic noise, just as, in Gordon, the invisible or marginalized are paradoxically made even less discernible in a culture governed by hypervisibility.

For the purposes of discussion, I would like to flag a few strategies that are set forth by these writers as possible responses to the erasures that racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and capitalism enact within people’s lives. Eng suggests we return neglected or marginalized losses “to the sphere of the social and to social activism,” in a move that combines “mourning and militancy” (89). By refusing to let go of that which has been erased, while also directing the attachment to that loss outwards, we can help “another story, another history” emerge in opposition to sanctioned narratives (94). Meanwhile, Gordon suggests that scholarship begins with “the marginal, with what we normally exclude or banish,” even as these “inarticulate experiences” necessarily call forth a position of scholarly humility and vulnerability (24). The ghost as a “social figure” forces us to acknowledge that systems like capitalism or State terror—systems that need to be apprehended analytically for their internal power relations to be understood—are nevertheless also experienced in “partial, coded, symptomatic, contradictory, [and] ambiguous” ways, many of which remain difficult to understand (24). Haunting is mediation, but a vexed mediation that demonstrates how individuals, due to the complexity of social life, can never be easily relayed back to or collapsed with the larger institutions and structures that enfold them.

Lastly, I want to point to the affective dimension of much of this work. If it’s true that, as Gordon maintains, scholarly encounters with ghosts transform the scholar too, it is perhaps pertinent to ask whether studies of the subject matter under discussion potentially reproduce feelings of despair, pessimism, remorse, or even (perhaps most pertinently) guilt. What are we to make of the emotional or affective costs that such work imposes on scholars, and how can we avoid the risk of allowing histories of haunting to congeal into their own rigid narratives?  It is perhaps significant that Ahmed, unlike the other two scholars in these readings, ends his account on a more ambivalent note. Rather than declaring a dedication to a subversive epistemological project or a triumphalist pursuit of occluded histories, Ahmed chooses to foreground a smaller, more enigmatic moment with his chaperone: “We returned to the chai, which had cooled down considerably, and started slurping it again” (16).

Some questions to consider:

Eng titles his essay “The Value of Silence”—what do you feel is the value of silence in relation to research, study, and history?

How does interdisciplinarity (or other negotiations with/within the structures of academe) conjure new objects of inquiry into view?

What ethical obligations do we have in work that approaches ghostliness, spectrality, and silence?

As I was doing the readings I was trying to pay attention to my immediate feelings and emotional responses to the texts, and I noticed that I felt particularly stressed out while I was reading the chapter from How to Build a Life on academic guilt. I don’t think this is the fault of the author, who approached the topic with generosity, thoughtfulness and an admirable commitment to honesty. Rather, I sense that there’s a point, under late-capitalism or neoliberal austerity, in which conversations about mental health inevitably begin to feel exhausting because a necessary and foundational solution to many of those problems—structural change—is so difficult to achieve. For that reason, both mental health issues and discourse around mental health issues often make me feel tired and stuck in a repetitive loop; sometimes, I even get sick of strategies for addressing mental health, though I know that they’re well-intentioned and often very helpful. This might be because burnout can sometimes be so total that even a proposed solution (gentle as it may be) feels like a chore, like one more thing to add to the list of behavioral habits/changes that one must adopt in order to keep functioning within this very dysfunctional system.

I think that’s why reading about the pervasiveness of academic guilt within the academy made me feel despair—in particular, Iacono Lobo’s admission that she kept working while she was in labor freaked me out and honestly made me feel a little panicked about the prospect of spending the next five to seven years around academics. I am at heart a rather lazy person, but I also enjoy reading and learning new things, which means that my pace of work and my attitudes about work will vary greatly depending on which environment I’m in. In other words, if I’m around a lot of people who feel academic guilt, it’s easy for me to get sucked into that ambient sentiment and start feeling it as well. And while I think Lobo is really good about countering the ideology of academic guilt, I couldn’t help but feel that the solution to this problem shouldn’t be a mindset shift: it should just be less work. And I don’t even mean work as in the paid labor of teaching (though I believe in strong boundaries and protections for the labor a university asks its workers to perform)—I mean academic coursework. I know it’s maybe taboo or absurd to suggest this, but what if faculty just assigned….less coursework for those completing PhD programs? Why do we normalize 1000-2000 pages of reading a week? This is mostly a rhetorical question because I know what the answers will be (rigor, training, pursuit of knowledge, etc), and part of me agrees with the answers. But another part of me feels like it doesn’t have to be this way. We can do less work while still doing meaningful work; we have our whole lives to read and write!

Something else that struck me from the readings was the discussion in “Self-Care as Professionalization” about faculty modeling healthy self-care and work habits. In some ways I felt a knee-jerk skepticism to this point—mostly because I feel it would be hard for me to see a faculty member’s lifestyle and habits as replicable for my own personal context, since a faculty member occupies such a different relationship to job and professional security (assuming we’re talking about tenured faculty). But I do think it’s ultimately a very useful suggestion, and that one thing faculty members can better model for us is a refusal to romanticize the academy and academic work. We know that sometimes academic work gets framed by academics as an automatic virtue or even a moral good, and that can obfuscate the fact that academic work is also a profession. I think this slippage is easy because many of us do feel that reading and writing are noble pursuits and fulfilling ways to spend time. It’s very difficult to not have a moralizing strain of discourse present in even the most forgiving and anti-work discourses about academia. For example, even if we don’t valorize work or perfectionism, we might still valorize qualities like “enthusiasm,” “passion,” and “inquisitiveness” within the academy. These are all personal traits that we assign to good scholars, and that PhD admissions teams will look for even if they’re not paying attention to more traditional “metrics” of skill, like GPA.

But what if, sometimes, we don’t feel enthusiastic or passionate about the work we’re doing? What if we view academia as a job, not a pursuit or an interest? I don’t think this kind of thing is ever cut and dry; I think people fluctuate and move in and out of feeling passionate about their work and their research. But it’s true that particularly now, during a time of pandemic, we might be finding it hard to feel stimulated by things. I know I right now occasionally struggle to sustain interest in anything, and would much rather pursue a simple pleasure like eating or watching TV (the kind of “lateral agency” pleasures that Lauren Berlant describes in “Slow Death,” her amazing chapter on eating and food in Cruel Optimism) rather than an intellectual interest, even though I know the latter has the potential to be more fulfilling in the long run. It’s often this impulse, rather than a perception of my own competence or skill, that occasionally makes me feel like an imposter within academia, where everyone is assumed to be bright and curious (other times, I do feel extremely enthusiastic about the work I’m doing; and then there are times outside of that when I don’t feel enthusiastic but I do feel grateful, if that makes sense). I’m going to stop here because now I’m rambling, but I’d be curious to see if anyone has thoughts on this or has ever felt similarly.

I really appreciated how Helen Sword demystified academic writing by incorporating other voices and perspectives; it felt like we were hearing from a wide range of academics who were coming from varying professional positions, disciplines, and countries (I found the insight from scholars in the sciences particularly interesting!). The book managed to be descriptive rather than strictly prescriptive, while still emphasizing that good writing relies on concrete habits and attitudes.

The section on “Writing for Others” really had me thinking about how we can reconcile academic work with social community during a time of pandemic. I miss the days of going to a cafe with a friend and working for hours on our separate assignments, pausing to chat or take a walk or smoke outside. That kind of activity seems so impossible now, and to be honest the thought of translating it to Zoom remains unappealing to me. So much of our social lives and our academic lives has already converged on Zoom and on screens—I don’t want yet another virtual obligation or structure! It feels like these days, even as the social realm remains important—in fact, has become more important—I’m actually turning to it as a respite from writing rather than a co-constitutive element of it. When writing I phone or visit with a friend and take that time as an opportunity to be resolutely unproductive. This produces a lot of catharsis and emotional relief, but also now that I’m more or less doing school full-time, I miss the feeling of working and thinking with others for extended bouts of time outside the format of a seminar.

Inspired by Joseph and Alessandra, I took the digital BASE test (results below); predictably, my least developed angle was the emotional one. I’ll confess that I don’t necessarily approach academic writing as an artistic craft. Or, to put it in a maybe better way, I have fewer hang-ups about academic writing than I do about the writing I do for non-academic publications (criticism, essays, etc). The latter I regard as far more personal and expressive of my particular stylistic or aesthetic sensibilities. Meanwhile, I tend to view academic assignments as jobs to get done—I of course care about them and want them to be as good as possible, but they’re not these intense, potentially damning reflections of myself the same way that my other writing is. I also think that this other (non-academic) writing is more bound up with my professional and financial stability, so my relationship to it is necessarily more fraught. For that reason, I don’t necessarily feel joyous about my academic writing, but I also don’t feel super distressed or angsty—compared to non-academic writing, the highs aren’t as high but the lows are thankfully not as low either.

Though Sword’s discussion of a daily writing practice was intimidating, it’s something I now want to try. Lately I’ve become too ritualized of a writer, to the point where if conditions aren’t perfect I feel like writing becomes impossible. I think I need to move beyond this kind of precious relationship, so I appreciated Sword’s approach to the artisanal/behavioral aspects of writing, which renders the act less sacrosanct and almost more like a daily chore.

Hi everyone–

Looking at the other workshops that have been posted here, I fear I may have had the wrong approach to this assignment. I’m plugging in what I wrote anyways, with the caveat that if people have questions or would like more straightforward summaries of the readings, I’m happy to work on that. Apologies that I wrote so much, but hopefully the word count is offset by the readings, which are pretty short!

The three texts I would like to focus on during my workshop approach themes of ghostliness, memory, and silence from different disciplinary vantage points. Manan Ahmed is a historian of South Asia at Columbia University, Avery Gordon a sociologist at UCSB, and David Eng a professor of English at Brown University. Even as these scholars work within discrete fields, however, they also move outside and beyond rigid methodological divides; they marshal theories and techniques from psychoanalysis, epistemology, critical race theory, literary theory, political science, and even memoir. This range produces in each text a unique sense of density but also slipperiness, as if the authors, despite leveraging a plethora of tactics, face subject matters that evade immediate access or epistemological transparency; to quote Gordon quoting Barthes, interdisciplinary work creates “new object[s] that belong to no one” (7).

The objects of these texts “belong to no one” in that they evade the territorial claim of any single discipline; they also “belong to no one” because these studies—which approach silences, ghosts, losses, lacunae—necessarily circle the intangible, and navigate the complex territories of public inheritance and collective memory. This is perhaps most evident in Ahmed’s case, in which a source of knowledge—the archive—is presented as a public yet tightly regulated space that the individual can only enter as a nervous interloper. Ahmed may gain access to the archive, but not as a privileged historian who might excavate and interpret its offerings. Instead, a quick scan of the archive’s “topo-nomology” merely permits Ahmed to catalogue (and, under the watchful eye of his chaperone, photograph) the surfaces of that which he knows he cannot know further. 

What ethical obligations arise out of knowledge production around bodies and histories that are always moving out of our line of sight, out of our range of hearing? What should we do when we, as knowing subjects, nevertheless feel intimate, personal, and political connections to these bodies and histories that do not belong strictly to us? Ahmed, who is of Kashmiri heritage, describes the archive as marked by Partition- and colonial-era histories of interreligious persecution. He notes a possible collection between the archive, its neighborhood, and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ in the text), a Sunni supremacist organization; he understandably begins to feel wary when archive officials ask him why he’s “looking for Hindus in Uch” (10). There runs a throughline between the archive’s function as a Pakistani State repository for errant, “sinful” objects, and Kashmir’s historical oppression as a community that refuses “the triumphalism of the Muslim League” (16). In pairing these larger questions of state power and nationalist violence with an earlier portrait of family life, Ahmed suggests that he is drawn to such fraught and contested spaces for more than purely academic reasons. Yet a personal connection does not always equate to a sense of ownership or access: even the stories of Ahmed’s own grandmother’s constitute “a dark archive” that he cannot share (10). As he writes, “they were not my secrets” (10). 

There are multiple modes of silencing at work in Ahmed’s telling: the silence imposed by the State, which controls and withdraws the conditions and objects of knowledge; and the self-silencing of the scholar, who feels an obligation to turn away from “half-private, half-public conjurations” that rest on an “unstable” onto-epistemological limit (11). Ahmed’s invocation of “conjuration” aptly registers the spectral quality of knowledge production around traumas that are publicly situated but also privately processed. The “unstable limit” that his scholarship traverses makes it difficult to discern who is speaking, through which socio-political mechanisms such speech is mediated, and even what, ultimately, these disembodied voices are expressing. The children who play around the archive say they hear “all kinds” of noises, and Ahmed’s account hints that not all of these are intelligible (16).

As with Ahmed, multiple forms of silence are at work in David Eng’s study of national discourse and processes of mourning after 9/11. Eng describes the organic silence that follows a shock of trauma as a potentially generative “moment before … loss is expropriated into its symbolic meaning” (86). But there is another silencing mechanism, resonant with Ahmed’s sketch, in which American society’s legitimation of certain strains of public discourse suppress “alternative narratives of community and belonging,” as well as the absence/presence of “certain deprivileged losses” (90). Eng shows us how silence can sound a lot like patriotic noise, just as, in Gordon, the invisible or marginalized are paradoxically made even less discernible in a culture governed by hypervisibility.

For the purposes of discussion, I would like to flag a few strategies that are set forth by these writers as possible responses to the erasures that racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and capitalism enact within people’s lives. Eng suggests we return neglected or marginalized losses “to the sphere of the social and to social activism,” in a move that combines “mourning and militancy” (89). By refusing to let go of that which has been erased, while also directing the attachment to that loss outwards, we can help “another story, another history” emerge in opposition to sanctioned narratives (94). Meanwhile, Gordon suggests that scholarship begins with “the marginal, with what we normally exclude or banish,” even as these “inarticulate experiences” necessarily call forth a position of scholarly humility and vulnerability (24). The ghost as a “social figure” forces us to acknowledge that systems like capitalism or State terror—systems that need to be apprehended analytically for their internal power relations to be understood—are nevertheless also experienced in “partial, coded, symptomatic, contradictory, [and] ambiguous” ways, many of which remain difficult to understand (24). Haunting is mediation, but a vexed mediation that demonstrates how individuals, due to the complexity of social life, can never be easily relayed back to or collapsed with the larger institutions and structures that enfold them.

Lastly, I want to point to the affective dimension of much of this work. If it’s true that, as Gordon maintains, scholarly encounters with ghosts transform the scholar too, it is perhaps pertinent to ask whether studies of the subject matter under discussion potentially reproduce feelings of despair, pessimism, remorse, or even (perhaps most pertinently) guilt. What are we to make of the emotional or affective costs that such work imposes on scholars, and how can we avoid the risk of allowing histories of haunting to congeal into their own rigid narratives?  It is perhaps significant that Ahmed, unlike the other two scholars in these readings, ends his account on a more ambivalent note. Rather than declaring a dedication to a subversive epistemological project or a triumphalist pursuit of occluded histories, Ahmed chooses to foreground a smaller, more enigmatic moment with his chaperone: “We returned to the chai, which had cooled down considerably, and started slurping it again” (16).

I am very appreciative of this week’s topic, as I think addressing academia’s investment in a purported “academic/non-academic divide” is a productive entry-point into understanding how academia, despite its claims to a certain disinterestedness or removal from the market, operates according to very real incentives of prestige and funding. For example—this exposes how naive I am—but prior to reading Rogers I had never made the connection between departments exclusively encouraging students to pursue academic jobs and departments’ outcomes in ranking lists (as well as, consequently, their funding and budgets). It was illuminating to watch Rogers demonstrate how something that on the surface may just look like snobbery or personal bias is actually produced by the structure of an academic department and its material and financial underpinnings. I also found her formulation of a “university worth fighting for” useful in a big-tent way, as it pushes us to do the constructive work of changing our institutions as well as the imaginative work of envisioning alternatives to present-day suffering. Even if Rogers’ suggestions are incremental, I also believe that reorienting PhD programs towards the public would entail a wholesale shift in not only how we conceptualize graduate education but how we define and assign value in the context of our professional lives. 

Like Alessandra and Sandra, however, I found that The Undercommons really influenced my reading of Rogers, just as it influenced my reading of Austerity Blues. (For some reason I wasn’t expecting Moten & Harney’s work to have such an enduring personal relevance for me, even though I found so much of it meaningful and beautiful to read!) In particular, I kept coming back to Moten & Harney’s critique of policy, and how that critique seems to bump up against some of the recommendations in Rogers’ text, perhaps in discomfiting ways. 

I find Rogers’ argument that the humanities should have a public impact to be, on the face of it, appealing. Of course we should be marshaling our expertise and our skills to address the wider world around us! Of course we should help and influence others for the better! At the same time, I was frustrated by how vaguely Rogers kept defining this concept of “impact.” She writes that it can take the form of starting “a thriving or profitable organization,” effecting a change in “local policy” or producing “a widely used website or resource” (103). She urges for a deep connection between “research material, communities, and contemporary issues” (62). But what do those terms mean, concretely, actually? To be a little harsh: it seems that the book consistently performs a rhetorical slippage wherein “impact” becomes conflated with an inherently desirable public good, or even—in cases where Rogers cites scholarship and the BLM movement—a radical politics. But I don’t feel like that slippage is earned, and I was somewhat frustrated by how rarely Rogers actually formulated the political stakes of what she was discussing. What does it look like for a doctoral degree-holder in the humanities to make an “impact”? We know it shouldn’t look like working for Palentir, or Google, or McKinsey, and yet those are impactful companies, in which many humanities grads already work. In some cases, these grads are taken on so that they can think through the “ethical implications” of these companies’ actions, yet they do so, crucially, in often defanged and powerless capacities, as part of a face-saving PR strategy. I’m not saying any of this to shame or criticize PhD grads who go on to work in tech or consulting. What I’m trying to get across is that working for those companies entails making an impact, and yet doing so would also affect “local communities” or “contemporary issues” in probably negative ways. Yet Rogers, in ny view, does not parse that type of distinction in a satisfying or thorough manner. 

Moten and Harney write that, “The student with interests can demand policies, can formulate policy, give herself credit, pursue bad debtors with good policy, sound policy, evidence-based policy … The student can start her own NGO, invite others to identify their interests, put them on the table, join the global conversation” (67). I think part of what Moten and Harney are doing is warning us to be wary of the pipeline that stretches between academic accreditation/expertise and the world of policy-making, a pipeline that so many university departments already feed. Interestingly, though, parts of this excerpt feel like they could have been lifted from Rogers’ book. Which makes me wonder: is it necessary that our jobs—because for many, these are always, ultimately, just jobs—have public impact? I am torn, because I do feel that people within educational institutions, especially public ones, have certain ethical obligations to their larger communities. At the same time, I wonder why we feel the need to position our professional work as socially and politically valuable in this manner. What about the hypothetical situation of an academic who only wants to publish esoteric research in peer-reviewed journals, but uses their free-time to do organizing work, help form a mutual aid collective, or organize an occupation of a government building? Perhaps one could make an argument that there’s a connection between being cloistered in an elite, academic sphere and acquiring class interests that are deradicalizing or inimical to caring for one’s community. But that’s not an argument I’m totally prepared to sign on to yet…

Maybe many of my doubts could have been easily assuaged if Rogers had been a bit more specific about the types of “contemporary issues” graduates should—or shouldn’t!—work around (interestingly, Austerity Blues does something like this in its introduction, when it argues that we need public education in order to produce well-educated generations who can ameliorate climate change). But that may also be asking Rogers to do too much—to push political ideologies onto a book that is ultimately trying to help people thrive through the tricky business of giving them advice and recommendations. I’m not sure. Either way, I’m looking forward to hearing other people’s thoughts tomorrow. 

While reading Austerity Blues this week, I came across a tweet by a CUNY PhD student. It read: “fight for CUNY students without reproducing neoliberal upward mobility narratives challenge.” I thought this tweet was both stimulating and, well, challenging to think about in relation to Brier and Fabricant’s work. When we talk about education, especially higher education, we are inevitably sidling up to narratives of socio-economic mobility and success. As Brier and Fabricant note, these narratives are mutable and can be manipulated to justify neoliberal modes of governance; austerity politics under Obama, for example, hitched notions of socio-economic advancement to quantitative metrics like graduation rates, a policy move that in turn abetted the gutting of the actual education students were receiving. This is a pretty clear-cut example of a “bad” mobilization of upward mobility narratives in the context of higher education, but I think other instances can be more ambiguous. On pg. 114, for example, Brier and Fabricant describe how public divestment has led to “the evisceration of the prospects of a college degree and, in turn, the dimming hope of entrée to the American Dream.” They do not clarify what they mean by the American Dream, or if they think the American Dream is attainable ever or just under the right conditions. “The American Dream” is a loaded term that has occasionally been used to justify or mask over egregious political projects, and I’m pointing out its usage in Austerity Blues not as some sort of “Aha gotcha!” moment, but to highlight how difficult it is to extricate discussions of education from certain promises of economic success. And like Brier and Fabricant, I do think economic mobility—if we define mobility as moving people into financial security and out of precarity—is important in the context of education’s exacerbation of a widening class divide. I do feel it is important that students can graduate quickly to avoid accumulating debt, that they are equipped with the practical skills they need to fend for themselves in an unforgiving job market—that students can, in certain ways, instrumentalize the education they receive. This is an attitude I identify in myself and feel ambivalent about precisely because I don’t want to buy into and subject higher education to neoliberal mobility narratives or market imperatives. But my instinct is to say that we need to pay attention to mobility if only because the lack of it so often contributes to placing vulnerable people before what Denise Ferreira da Silva calls “the horizon of death.” This seems like a tension that can’t really be resolved, especially because divestment and austerity is happening in all aspects of people’s lives—in the hollowing out of the welfare state, in the conflation of hiring with qualifying for health insurance, etc. Education thus becomes, very urgently, the space where people can at least attempt to move beyond precarity and material harm. This unfortunately overshadows a discussion of what else education can be for; Brier and Fabricant highlight their model of “emancipatory education” in the epilogue, for example, but I felt that didn’t really get sustained attention in the book itself.

Reading this after The Undercommons was interesting because Moten & Harney diverge from Fabricant & Brier in so many ways, even though they’re identifying a similar set of problems. Indeed, I appreciated Fabricant & Brier’s very concrete attitude towards what needs to be done to fix the mess we’re in (though I will admit I felt somewhat ambivalent about the extended conversation on/endorsement of faculty governance in the section on CUNY Pathways—which faculty are included here? How does faculty governance hold itself accountable to incorporating student perspectives?). Fabricant & Brier’s invocation of the GI Bill, post-war education funding and California’s Master Plan seemed to suggest that public education had once “worked”—not perfectly, but in a way that might function as a blueprint for what we should be demanding for the future. That differs a lot from Moten & Harney’s idea that one needs to tear the whole system down. In connection to this I couldn’t help but think of the way public universities like UVA were made possible through slavery as well as (something I had only too recently learned) the fact that the lands passed down via the Morrill Act had been stolen and expropriated from around 250 Native American tribes and communities. I think a discussion of public education needs to also grapple with its foundations and unpayable debts (to use a term from The Undercommons), because doing so not only works to redress intergenerational harm but also fundamentally destabilizes the way we are commonly forced to view education as a phase of the market. Is it possible instead to see education as part of a government’s responsibility to its people, a “bequest from one generation to the next”?

Hi all—posting with some of my reactions to this week’s venture into The Undercommons!

I had read excerpts of the book before, so I came in to the reading already familiar with Moten and Harney’s style. I think a lot can be said about the way rhythm and repetition are marshaled in the book’s prose—I found Harney’s own observations on the idea, on pg. 107, particularly fascinating—but first I want to focus more on some of the terms and concepts that the book revolves around. 

Moten and Harney seem somehow both unfussy and very careful about language. Unfussy in that they don’t appear to feel proprietary or overly-invested in their coinage (eg.: Moten on pg. 111 saying that if a term bothers a reader, they’re free to pick a different one) but careful in that M&H are so attentive to the precise distinctions between various concepts, as well as the inherent play and flexibility of language. Insight seems to come especially when terms are placed next to each other so that their connotations can be teased out, contrasted, and better understood. Even if the book is not forthright with definitions, for example, we receive a kind of indirect illumination into what governance is via its difference from policy (pg. 123); similarly, study is juxtaposed with learning (pg. 62); strategy with logistics (pg. 88), and touch with the double meaning of hold (pg. 98). This kind of detailed orientation to and parsing of meaning made me self-conscious about the precision of my own writing (as I was typing out the previous paragraph I began wondering: is “revolve around” really the best way to describe what The Undercommons does vis-a-vis its concepts?), but I’m trying to soldier on, because I think self-consciousness is not what M&H would want for a book that so frequently emphasizes play and openness.

Many parts of The Undercommons had an immediate relevancy to me. The discussion of debt as a form of never-ending—forgotten but not forgiven—mutuality reminded me of similar arguments in Debt by the anthropologist David Graeber, whose passing last week I was really saddened by. Though there are of course important differences between the two books (Debt is more a historical/anthropological analysis of political economy), the last line of Graeber’s work is as follows: “Just as no one has the right to tell us our true value, no one has the right to tell us what we truly owe.” I think M&H would agree with this sentiment, while adding that we continue to owe each other endlessly in the undercommons. 

Secondly, this notion of the undercommons as a fugitive space (or moment?) of gathering and study had a torqued resonance for me given that the pandemic has made physical modes of being-together so difficult. I haven’t watched the Youtube video of Moten and Harney speaking yet, so I’m not sure if they touch on this, but I’m wondering how the undercommons might appear to us in the socially-distanced university, when so much gathering is virtual and disembodied.

Lastly, I found Harney’s distinction between call and demand on pg. 134 so satisfying to read. Harney distinguishes between “demanding something despite authority” and calling for something that is already in process. He describes how during the London riots of 2011, rioters “didn’t demand anything. They just started. There was a call: come out and let’s just run the city for three days.” Reading this, I thought of the uprisings happening in the U.S. and the persistent anxiety conservatives and liberals alike have been displaying over the supposed lack of coherence in rioters and protesters’ demands. News about CHAZ in Seattle or Abolition Park in NYC was always accompanied by observers complaining, “But what do these people actually want?” It appears that at least at CHAZ and Abolition Park, where people were enacting new modes of sociality and solidarity, we were seeing the function of “the call” at work. 

There’s so much more to be said. I, for one, was feeling a lot of knee-jerk discomfort regarding the book’s aversion to a certain style of politics and institutional organizing. For example: the Italian Autonomia movement, which M&H seem to feel a kind of affinity for, has been criticized for having a very diffuse concept of resistance—some perceive Autonomia as a divestment from more institutional/organizational modes of challenging oppression, such as the union or worker’s party. I think this is maybe one of the more controversial aspects of the book that I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts on in Monday’s class.

Thanks, and looking forward to talking!