Thinking and teaching beyond the terror of capitalist reason

Abstract

The contemporary landscape of dread in living and teaching demands a creative and experimental form of investigation that can trace the affective contours of the present and uncover the obscure openings for an oppositional imagination. In a series of interlinked excurses, this essay articulates a poetic probing of the nexus of slow fascism and capitalist realism in the contemporary United States, as this is lived in the waking dreams of pedagogy and imaginative praxis. Looking beyond familiar analyses, this project exposes the terror of loss that motivates the punishments visited upon school and society by elites and points to the spectral presence of justice, which lives with us as persistent horizon even as it is persistently refused by power. Interleaved with these unravelings of the texture of experience as domination, this project gestures toward a thinking and teaching that is wise to capitalism’s recurrent fantasies. This pedagogy inverts the certainties that organize our senses of knowledge and curriculum, navigates the hidden topology of the real (beyond the reflexive affirmation in schools of what is), and proposes an unruly form of thought that moves out past the walls that sign the edge of the classroom and the edge of the truth. This project does not announce a settled approach but rather challenges the limits of the familiar at the level of our structures of feeling. We feel the terror of the given in the present, but we can also follow the seam of experience toward the point at which its impositions are attached—in spite of themselves—to the confounding/liberatory logic of the “impossible.”

Keywords:

• Capital
• philosophy
• power
• teaching

Notes

1 For a comprehensive account of this relationship across material and immaterial terrains, see the work of Dussel, especially his Philosophy of Liberation (1985).

2 See for instance Harding (2004) and hooks (2000).

3 For an explanation of this notion, see Freire (1998, p. 62).

4 Even in spite of itself; see Simpson (2017.  pp. 170-172).

5 See Butler’s analysis of the politics of vulnerability in Precarious Life (2004).

6 Harney and Moten (2013) and Lewis (2012) aim in different ways to follow this line of flight toward a refigured notion of the commons. By contrast, the pedagogical itinerary I outline here seeks the material and spiritual fragments of an unrecuperated pre-commons, located in analectical relationship to the center and the given (Dussel, 1985), as the ground of revolutionary faith and praxis.

7 For the notion of the “stub,” see Gibson (2015).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Noah De Lissovoy

Noah De Lissovoy is Professor of Cultural Studies in Education at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on critical and emancipatory approaches to pedagogy, curriculum, and cultural studies. He is particularly interested in problems posed for educators by globalization, the intersecting effects of race, class and capital in schools and society, developing the theoretical resources for social movements, and extending and rethinking the traditions of critical pedagogy and philosophy. He is the author of Capitalism, Pedagogy, and the Politics of Being (Bloomsbury), Education and Emancipation in the Neoliberal Era (Palgrave), Power, Crisis, and Education for Liberation (Palgrave), co-author (with Means and Saltman) of Toward a New Common School Movement (Routledge), and the editor of Marxisms and Education (Routledge). His work has also appeared in many journals and edited collections.