Kritik Toolbox Supplement – bfhhr general
at: focus on oppression at home
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- Perm is key—reform and radicalism are compatible
at: focus on oppression at homeGlobalization has invalidated localism—the “out there/back here” dichotomy is false—our aff is an opportunity cost to their analysis, but not the other way aroundRuiz and Minguez 1 Prof. Dr Pedro Ortega Ruiz, Facultad de Educacio´ n, Campus de Espinardo, Universidad de Murcia, “Global Inequality and the Need for Compassion: issues in moral and political education” Journal of Moral Education, Vol. 30, No. 2, 2001 In addition to the reality of the dominant presence of instrumental reason in modern society, another closely linked phenomenon is shaping life at the level of the individual and society, individuals and peoples. We refer to the phenomenon of the increasing globalisation of ways of life in our complex societies which derive as much from the new forms of production as from the influence of science and technology upon life and social organisation (Waters, 1995). This explains the problems we find in guaranteeing a base of social solidarity in a general sense and the provision of forms of identity sufficiently strong for the social agents. It is difficult to represent the society in which we live in a unified manner. As individuals we belong to diverse communities, at times mutually contradictory. It is difficult to escape the need of having to choose between diverse forms of identity and belonging (Bafircena, 1997). The phenomenon of globalisation has invalidated the autistic, localist-focused procedures for highlighting and resolving problems because the great part of our social life is determined by global processes; that is to say, in those processes in which the influence of cultures, political economies, media and national frontiers are all weakened. The emergence of globalisation has made it possible to overcome the concept of nation states, giving way to another, wider reality: humanity, world citizenship or human family to foster the birth of new areas of identity beyond that of the nation state (Luhmann, 1997). During the last few decades it could be thought that the relationships and obligations of the citizen started and finished in their local community, in their polis, or at most in their national community. Now, on the other hand, we are concerned by problems occurring far from our frontiers or the conventional established limits. We have become aware that we are immersed in problems of such magnitude (environmental pollution, poverty and marginalisation of a large part of the world’s population, ethnic–cultural conflicts, etc.) that we seriously question localist attempts and have thrown to the winds the recipes so long applied to solve our problems. A new concept of citizenship and the citizen has been imposed on us. Our polis has become too small. The diversity of cultures and national frontiers are no longer barriers to the recognition of our inter-dependency and implication in problems which we now must share. These features (primacy of instrumental reason and globalisation) cannot go unnoticed in our pedagogy. Youth cannot be educated according to out-dated localist schemes already undermined by the real situation; nor offer educational models which place the learners in the position of open-mouthed spectators at what happens around them, distanced from the social reality which is supposedly impossible to change, governed by the implacable laws of market forces. To educate, as we understand it, is above all a praxis orientated towards enabling the learners to “read” and interpret reality and furthermore to take responsibility in the face of this reality. It is to help them grow in responsibility, to honour our obligations toward others. at: fugitivityTheir method of resistance is too ephemeral and can’t escape the academyLove 15—R. Jean Brownlee Term Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania (Heather, “Doing Being Deviant: Deviance Studies, Description, and the Queer Ordinary”, differences 2015 Volume 26, Number 1: 74-95, dml) Today, queer studies—prestigious but unevenly institutionalized—still signals absolute refusal or criticality—all anti- and no normativity. In their influential 2004 essay, “The University and the Undercommons” (and in the 2013 book that followed from it), Fred Moten and Stefano Harney rely on such an understanding of queer (as well as concepts borrowed from black studies, feminism, ethnic studies, and anticolonial thought). They call for betrayal, refusal, theft, and marronage as modes of resisting the iron grip of the academy, pointing to an uncharted, underground, and collective space they call the undercommons. “To enter this space,” they write, “is to inhabit the ruptural and enraptured disclosure of the commons that fugitive enlightenment enacts, the criminal, matricidal, queer, in the cistern, on the stroll of the stolen life, the life stolen by enlightenment and stolen back, where the commons give refuge, where the refuge gives commons” (103). Moten and Harney speculate whether the “thought of the outside” (105) is possible inside the university and suggest that if there is an outside, it is along the margins and at the bottom. Yet their imagination of that outside is indebted to the inside, in particular to the conception of deviance produced within sociology. Their account of the undercommons reads like a rap sheet, a list of the traditional topics of deviance studies: theft, homosexuality, prostitution, incarceration. Moten and Harney do not describe the undercommons, but rather ask their readers to join it, to participate in active revolt against professional and disciplinary protocols. To offer an objective account of the social position of radical academics would be to further business as usual in the academy; dwelling in the undercommons requires giving up on the usual protocols of description. Moten and Harney argue against the traditional role of the “critical academic” (105), which they see as just another turn of the professional screw, since work that opposes the academy does not challenge its basic structure or everyday operations. They argue that “to be a critical academic in the university is to be against the university, and to be against the university is always to recognize it and to be recognized by it, and to institute the negligence of the internal outside, that unassimilated underground, a negligence of it that is precisely, we must insist, the basis of the professions” (105). In contrast to the figure of the critical academic, they forward the image of the “subversive intellectual” who is “in but not of” the academy (101). Without dismissing the galvanizing effect of such a call to the undercommons, it is important to consider the limits of the refusal of objectification as a strategy. To be unlocatable, to be nowhere, to be in permanent revolt: Moten and Harney describe the path that queer inquiry laid out for itself. Objectification—recognition, description, critique—can be a way to reinforce the status quo, but it is also a way of acknowledging one’s institutional position and the real differences between inside and outside. Even the most subversive intellectuals in the academy are “on the stroll” in a metaphorical but not a material sense. The fate of those who came “under false pretenses, with bad documents, out of love” (101), if they survive, is to become “superordinates” in Becker’s sense. Whose side are we on? Can we hold onto the critical and polemical energy of queer studies as well as its radical experiments in style and thought while acknowledging our implication in systems of power, management, and control? Will a more explicit avowal of disciplinary affiliations and methods snuff out the utopian energies of a field that sees itself as a radical outsider in the university? To date, both the political and the methodological antinormativity of queer studies have made it difficult to address our implication in the violence of knowledge production, pedagogy, and social inequality. Such violence is inevitable, and critical histories of the disciplines—and the production of knowledge about social deviance—are essential. Undertaking such work, however, will not allow escape into a radically different relation to our objects because we are (as Moten and Harney also argue) part of that history—we are its contemporary instantiation. To imagine a social world in which those relations are transformed—in what Moten and Harney refer to as the “prophetic organization” (102)—may be crucial for the achievement of social justice, but to deny our own implication in existing structures is also a form of violence. Perm is key—reform and radicalism are compatibleBoston 16—Ph.D. candidate in Africana Studies, Brown University (Amanda, “Black Study, Black Struggle”, https://bostonreview.net/forum/black-study-black-struggle/amanda-boston-amanda-boston-response-robin-kelley, dml) The undercommons is alive and well from UCLA to Brown and beyond, as students and faculty work in community to trouble the constraints of the political, social, gendered, racial, and economic orders. But the undercommons is not wholly separate from the university. Its “undisciplined assembly” is shaped by the resources that the university provides, as well as by the exploitative practices that make those resources available. As we engage in critical knowledge production that is not limited to university- and state-sanctioned curricula, we should not lose sight of the work that must also be done to envision and create a different kind of university. Kelley identifies what he sees as contradictory impulses between reform and revolution. I would suggest, instead, that there is a need for a sustained coalition between self-identified radical and reformist contingents of student activists, and that this is analogous to the complex relationship between the undercommons and the university that it rejects. The conventional rigid dichotomy between reform and revolution has been detrimental to progressive and radical movements alike. It has stunted alliances that could engender durable social transformation while meeting people’s needs through concrete action—for example, alliances between students, faculty, and campus workers, who are less likely to have the ear of university administrators. Reform is not a panacea for the problems facing universities. Similarly, radical solutions sought while in the university, no matter how subversive the space from which one speaks, are likely to be only partially effective. Therefore it is necessary and desirable for students to direct their energies toward both reformist and revolutionary kinds of action. History has shown that many revolutions began with reformist agendas. The multifaceted nature of black struggles in particular requires the exhaustion of all strategies, radical and reformist. The Mississippi Freedom Schools that Kelley highlights as an antecedent to the undercommons were no different. Not only did activists engage in the radical work of cultivating a liberative political consciousness and new social identities in rural black communities, they did so with the goal of cultivating indigenous leadership and enabling disenfranchised black people to participate in—and then transform—American democracy. Reformist activities have also led to the eventual radicalization of many individuals. As one prominent example, decades of reformist work ushered Martin Luther King, Jr., into a radical, vocal criticism of American empire. What would a merger of reformist and radical elements in the ongoing black and allied student movements look like? It would include a call for reform that does not stifle more radical demands, and which does not consider incremental change in campus culture an end in itself, but rather a step in the long process of transformative struggle. Moreover, it would agree that this struggle is not confined by campus walls or to only faculty and student concerns. At the same time, it would seek a brand of radicalism that does not unequivocally reject incremental change because it falls short of revolution. It would move beyond the public performance of trauma, grief, and outrage—admittedly instrumental to gaining national attention—to now focus attention on students’ generative demands and their relationships to broader struggles against disenfranchisement and exploitation. It would require students to not lose sight of the privileges a college or graduate education affords, even as they fight their marginalization within universities. Critically, this collaborative effort would prioritize building networks of activism that outlast students’ tenures at their universities. Such networks should facilitate not only issue-based activism, but also the often slow, unglamorous work of training leaders and organizers, and guaranteeing continuity of knowledge about resources and past successes and failures. The durability of these networks would necessitate the inclusion of faculty and staff, whose longer-term stakes in the university make them key players in the creation and retention of movement memory, as well as uniquely capable of anchoring long-term transformation. This repurposing of the university and its resources toward revolutionary aims would not hinge on a specific, unpredictable historical moment of collective effervescence. Rather, it would enable a more sustainable model of activism that is capable of bringing justice and reform in the here and now, without sacrificing the durable goals and liberative potential of the radical imagination. Directory: rest -> wikis -> openev -> spaces -> 2017 -> pages -> Michigan7 -> attachments pages -> Utnif topicality 2017 Download 1.09 Mb. Share with your friends:
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