Socratic Enunciations: Renegade Speech, Counterfeit Enlightenment

AN ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS OF

Bhisma Mago for the degree of Master of Arts in English presented on June 10, 2019.

Title: Socratic Enunciations: Renegade Speech, Counterfeit Enlightenment.

Abstract approved: ______Elizabeth Sheehan

In this two-article thesis, I argue that an opposition to Eurocentrism may be articulated without ethnic or identarian determinisms but through a critical engagement with the categories of ethics and truth in a global frame. I build upon the work of Frantz Fanon and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to accomplish a search for ethico-political subjectivities in the midst of deterministic and coercive discourses.

In Article 1, I examine recent theories that have been formulated in response to postcolonialism. In rejecting identity as a matrix of resistance, I take pause to account for the specific burden of race and racialization in the west. I conclude by demonstrating that disavowal of determined identities may become a foundation to construct a counter-hegemonic global community.

In Article 2, I attempt to theorize a solution for the high cost of ethico- political subjectivity by suggesting that classrooms may become sites where ethical self-articulation may be fruitfully practiced in a community. By closely looking at

Lauren Cantet’s film The Class, I argue for the primacy of autonomy and intellectual freedom in enabling the emergence of ethico-political subjectivities.

Socratic Enunciations: Renegade Speech, Counterfeit Enlightenment

by Bhisma Mago

A THESIS

submitted to

Oregon State University

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

Presented June 10, 2019 Commencement June 2019

Master of Arts thesis of Bhisma Mago presented on June 10, 2019

APPROVED:

Major Professor, representing English

Director of the School of Writing, Literature, and Film

Dean of the Graduate School

I understand that my thesis will become part of the permanent collection of Oregon State University libraries. My signature below authorizes release of my thesis to any reader upon request.

Bhisma Mago, Author

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This thesis is the result of the many conversations that I've had with the people sitting in this room today.

I'd like to begin by thanking my advisor Elizabeth Sheehan, for her patience and careful guidance through what became an iterative thesis writing process.

I want to thank Evan Gottlieb whose initial feedback during the prospectus meeting proved to be extremely valuable; the questions he raised helped me to reformulate the stakes of my work.

I want to thank both Richmond Barbour and Yuji Hiratsuka for stepping into my committee on relatively short notice.

I am extremely grateful for the friends I've made during this program. Much of what concerns this work was born in our private conversations. I am thankful for your brilliance but mostly for your willingness to listen to me endlessly complain.

Specifically, Austin, for being a remarkable friend, never unwilling to have a 3am conversation. Brooke, for reminding me that the world indeed is batshit crazy and that our radical imagination is never quite radical enough. Jade, for our conversations on faith, the cosmos, mysticism. I have appreciated by-passing all the doom and gloom with hope. Finally, Kalli, who has endured the past few months with me as I worked on this project. Thank you for binge watching spy shows, driving me for late night hot chocolate, and for reminding me that graduating is indeed a good idea.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

1 Introduction...………………………...………………………………………………………..1

A Seat in the Abandoned Theater...……………………………………………………...7

Overview………………………....……………………………………………………...11

2 After Postcolonialism: A Mad Man in No Man’s Land……………………………...... 14

Ethical Subjects in Racist Societies……………………….……………….……...……..21

The High Cost…………………………………………………………….….……….….23

3 The Pedagogical Imperative…………...…………………….…………….…………………..28

Critique and Affect………………………….……………….…………………………..29

The Problem of the Head-Heart Binary…………………………………….……….…...32

Teaching Voltaire to “Ethnic” Kids……….……….……………...……………………..35

Maybe Your Books Are Shit…………………………………………….……………….40

4 Coda ……………………….………………….…………………………………………….....43

Works Cited ……………………….………………….…………………………………………44

Introduction

“it is much easier to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought.” —Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism

The awareness that we live in a Eurocentric world posits ethical and epistemological burdens. Many theories that seek to account for present day globalization recognize these burdens. However, to actually overcome Eurocentrism, we must first note the empirical givenness of the world, what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls, its “contemporaneity” (2). That is, the first step toward abolishing Eurocentric frameworks is to disrupt and dismantle the opacity of Europe. Colonial discourse depends upon this opacity, a counterfactual belief that western traditions have developed and announced themselves independently from the forces of the globe.

Many benevolent theories of globalization re-inscribe this counterfactual point by situating their analysis as if it were a crime scene. According to these theories, European traditions, canons, and ideas occupy the site of oppression that must be overcome through the centering of other traditions, canons, and ideas. In such an imagination, the globe is rearranged into polycentric factions, some villainous, other innocent. Not only is this vision factually erroneous, it is in fact also surreptitiously Eurocentric. According to these theories, the category of universalism, truth, and the human are European legacies that need to be dismantled. However, by apparently neutralizing these categories and giving way to ethnic and cultural identifications, the European subject reemerges as the only subject who may avail the possibilities of disavowal. Frantz Fanon pointed out in Black Skin, White Masks that it is through the “renunciation” (206) of cultural categories that one approaches the possibility of human community. But if this renunciation is

pragmatically permitted exclusively to the European subject, the Others of Europe becomes reduced to their cultural identity. Of course, in many examples, these cultural identities were formulated by the European colonial project as a displacement of European fears and desires. To become determined according to the rules of these cultural categories is to become subservient to a surreptitious and present Eurocentrism.

This thesis seeks to undo such a surreptitious Eurocentrism by reclaiming the category of ethical subjectivity that is free to trespass cultural determinisms and investigate any philosophical value or claim. Bluntly then, this thesis argues against intellectual colonialism and for discursive freedom. Through the two articles, I situate and analyze ethical subjects who refuse identarian determinisms, instead choosing to articulate a vision of their individuality, their right to intellectual labor, their commitment to grieve the cultural other, etc. These choices have high political stakes and so I use the descriptor ethico-political to name this subject.

I derive the foundations for the formulation of ethico-political subjectivity through a

Fanon-Spivak trajectory of thought. Fanon, perhaps more than any other thinker, understood the desperate fatalisms that mark the lives of colonial subjects. By resolutely rejecting Negritude,1

Fanon embarks upon the formulation of ethico-political subjectivity. In “Can the Subaltern

Speak,” Spivak famously asserts that “the subaltern cannot speak” (93) and that romanticizing subaltern epistemologies and politics reveal a subject who is “monolithic” and “mute” (66). In her later work, Spivak begins to clearly develop an ethico-political theory of the subject by announcing a framework of an aesthetic education. Here, she asserts the importance of approaching European ideas through “affirmative sabotage” (4) and of grasping the “vanishing

1 Negritude refers to the Francophone intellectual and artistic movement that celebrates Black culture and identity. At times, Fanon had an ambivalent relationship with negritude. For the bulk of time, he fiercely disavowed it as a compromised and limiting movement.

outlines” (2) of globalization. These foundations help me witness ethico-political subjects who renounce and disavow determined identities.

Eurocentric determinisms lead to two modes of examining the world. One may simply be unapologetically Eurocentric; this mode is easier to recognize and overcome. However, a surreptitious Eurocentrism at times passes under the descriptor postcolonialism. Here, one may choose to examine the works of scholars like Fanon and Spivak but only through the presuppositions and concerns of the western subject. Deeply nuanced theoreticians are quickly romanticized and tokenized which in effect renders them “monolithic” and “mute.” The presumption here remains that because categories like universalism and truth must be exclusively European that postcolonial scholars must reject these categories uncritically. This leads to presumptuous reading practices that situate postcolonial scholars as exclusively reacting to European thought.

I am not suggesting that my conception of the ethico-political subject exactly matches

Fanon’s and Spivak’s formulation. My point is that postcolonial thought does not need to be monolithic, in its claims or stakes. This is implicit in my formulation of the ethico-political subject. As I traverse the various theoretical currents in the two articles, I rely on Fanon and

Spivak regularly. In my second article, I primarily invoke the Marxist rhetorician James Berlin to define an ideal pedagogical community. Though Berlin is not a postcolonial scholar, his ideas about ideology critique and pedagogical practice are sites of commonality.

This work begins with the assumption that the world is not postcolonial. It could be demonstrated that the conceptual frames of postcolonial thought have depended upon an errant foundation, one that dramatically divides the world’s topography (temporal, spatial) through the

rubric of European colonial history.2 If one of the chief consequences of European colonial conquest was the reconstitution and calcification of the epistemic frames that allowed for a systematic study of the orient, postcolonial thought proves the pervasive reach of this rearrangement. In responding to epistemic violence,3 much of postcolonial thought still relies upon a vision of the world that is undone and redone to make this violence possible. There are stark exceptions to this characterization and several significant texts that abide in the loose constellation of postcolonial thought traverse the tensions and self-contradictions of the postcolonial project. Yet, as Stuart Hall reminds us, “the institution is danger” (91), and his warning about the concurrence of institutional acceptance and intellectual decay applies to postcolonial studies.

If postcolonial thought does not provide an adequate or even a reliable account of the contemporary world, one must look toward scholarship that arises as a function of postcolonialism’s critique. The most influential text in this arena is Michael Hardt and Antonio

Negri’s monograph Empire. The text describes what Hardt and Negri see as a monumental shift from colonial exploitation to the hegemony of global neoliberalism. While this mode of critique correctly diagnoses postcolonialism’s ills, it re-inscribes the erroneous epistemic topography of

Eurocentric thinking. Here is an explication from the preface:

The passage to Empire emerges from the twilight of modern sovereignty. In contrast to imperialism, Empire establishes no territorial center of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. It is a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers. Empire manages hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges through

2 While academic postcolonialism has been critiqued from many vantages (Marxist, Feminist, etc), the mode of critique I will highlight seeks to undo a Eurocentric topographical division, one that re-inscribes the opacity of Europe. Such opacity has always been congruent with the colonial imagination. 3 I borrow this phrase from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present

modulating networks of command. The distinct national colors of the imperialist map of the world have merged and blended in the imperial global rainbow. (xii-xiii) Hardt and Negri pointedly attack some of the logics of academic postcolonialism by demonstrating that the global configuration of empire incorporates hybridity, fluidity, and the allure of dwelling in a third space, that which Homi Bhabha celebrates by invoking a Freudian allusion when he describes the “beyond” of cultural codes as an “exploratory, restless movement” or “au-dela—here and there, on all sides, fort/da, hither and thither, back and forth”

(2). They establish this critique on the hypothesis that sovereignty has fundamentally transitioned, thereby implying that logics of plurality, hybridity, where once revolutionary, are now swallowed up by a new form of sovereignty. They begin by crediting Michel Foucault for preparing “the terrain for such an investigation” (22). If this transition hypothesis is correct, then the only legible critique of academic postcolonialism is that it no longer applies, and they explicate this by stating that postcolonial thought is “a very productive tool for rereading history, but it is entirely insufficient for theorizing contemporary global power” (146).

While Hardt and Negri’s diagnosis is well demonstrated, the historical explanation of a

Foucauldian passage of sovereignty remains hypothetical and never accounted for. Gayatri

Chakravorty Spivak has pointed out that “the failure of decolonization begins a day after negotiated independence.”4 So sovereignty does morph with a sleight of hand and the crown is replaced by dispersed symbolism. Yet, one cannot overstate the significance of this passage. The crown always functioned as a mirage under which lurked the logics of economic exploitation; this is not a radical or new discovery. 5 So, if Homi Bhabha’s faith in the rituals of cultural

4 Said in a recent interview with Memoirs en Jeu Revue. Youtube URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96XPyUFv2kM&t=920s 5 Hardt and Negri’s transition hypothesis ignores the possibility that neoliberal governance is a continuation of colonial sovereignty. A recent book that accounts for the primarily economic foundation of the British Raj in the

contestations and dialogical negotiation is misplaced due to a fundamentally oppressive economic apparatus, one that hides behind the apparent benevolence of cultural heterogeneity, then his theoretical models could not be honestly applied to structures of colonial oppression. To assume that they can be applied thus is to rely upon a negative proof. The symbology of colonial exploitation was certainly geographically mediated and it could be argued that the symbology of neoliberal exploitation is less situated in one location. Yet, beyond this symbological transition, one that is aptly explained by theories of neocolonialism,6 what other transition can we convincingly account for? But if we presume that colonial dynamics were ostentatiously different from neoliberal ones, then a study of present-day globalization will birth the transition hypothesis. What gets lost in this misplaced debate is the recognition that wealth continues to be transferred from the so-called third world to the United States and its European allies.

Disproving the transition hypothesis does not redeem institutional postcolonialism, especially given that in western academia, postcolonial thought is overrun by the politics of identity. Identarian logics, often formulated in the image of race relations in the west, render the nations of the world as ethnic categories. All historical complexity is exchanged for an immediate political formulation that, despite its benevolent concerns, suffers from American exceptionalism—an imperial left in the image of American imperialism, engaged in petty, domestic confrontation and ignorant of global reality. For those left outside the circuits of such

Indian subcontinent is Shashi Tharoor’s An Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India. Aijaz Ahmed’s In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures serves as a canonical critique of postcolonial thought from the vantage of Marxist criticism. A more recent Marxist analysis is Vivek Chibber’s Postcolonial Theory and the Spector of Capital. Though the Marxist analyses tend to crudely superimpose a “scientific” account of economic exploitation, and thereby ignore the immense economic complexities that frame colonialism, they nevertheless avoid a transition hypothesis. 6 For an account of neocolonial dynamics routed through American Imperialism in the post 9/11 era, refer to Arundhati Roy’s An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire.

politics, identity is seldom a positive act of resistance but often an enforced destiny. A depraved postcolonialism takes that which is enforced and celebrates it as a response to global and systemic exploitation. This recourse is bourgeois theater in the contact zones where economic exploitation is immaterial. In the sites where this exploitation is rampant, identity remains a double bind: a strategy of political proclamation but never a communal destiny. Frantz Fanon proclaimed, “I do not want to be the victim of the Ruse of a black world” (204) but was forced to find “the sky turn upon itself utterly and wholly” (119). This impossible choice has marked the life of individuals and communities continually from the age of colonialism to the present. And while we are all swallowed up by the excesses of neoliberal governance, we are not equitably affected, just like European bodies labored in the factories of the metropolis while genocide was routinely perpetrated in the colonies. Today, we continue to exist in an age of quiet genocides.

Academic postcolonialism does not help us read this history but it does proffer an alibi for inaction.

A Seat in the Abandoned Theater

In order to discern the continual burden of global exploitation, one needs to encounter subjectivities that are unconstrained by masked ethnocentrism. Achille Mbembe defines the kind of thinking that elicits such a subjectivity:

postcolonial thinking stresses humanity-in-the-making, the humanity that will emerge once the colonial figures of the inhuman and of racial difference have been swept away. This hope in the advent of a universal brotherly community is very close to Jewish thought – as projected by Ernst Bloch at least, or even Walter Benjamin – minus the politico-theological dimension.

Here, postcolonial signifies something other than the politics of identity, instead claiming a universal humanity to come. This reveals how descriptors like postcolonial are empty signifiers in our discourse; they mean very different things depending on who is using them. For Mbembe, race and racialization are burdens to be swept away through disparate cultural and intellectual acts. He credits such thinking with initiating “other questions and other forms of knowledge at the very heart of the academy.” So, a redeemed postcolonialism necessarily overcomes the calcificified epistemic frames produced during European colonization. It rejects the tendency to reframe all of human history from the vantage of colonial experience and it refuses to misread colonialism as the antithesis of present disorder. Thus, a redeemed postcolonial apparatus is not married to the institution, but it disrupts the epistemological determinisms that mark knowledge production in the university. I would suggest then this kind of thinking is rare. It would also be appropriate to call it ethical, in that it overcomes the constraints of its existence through the interrogation of the status quo and the refinement of idea. This practice of ethics claims cherished (non)-European abstractions like humanism, enlightenment, and justice as its object of study, not to easily accept or reject, but to construct. The ethical subject then is burdened by a strange authorship that the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish captures in his illuminating poem

“I have a Seat in the Abandoned Theater.” Darwish’s verse foreshadows the burdens of ethical subjectivity that I map in this work. This ethical subjectivity is more accurately understood as ethico-political, for the same reasons that Feminist intellectuals have underscored the relationship between the personal and the political. Thus, such a subjectivity resists any definition of ethics as occupied with apolitical morality or with individual flourishing.7 On the

7 Though this work does not explicitly situate itself against contemporary moral theories, such an orientation is nevertheless implicitly produced. Many of the major figures in American moral philosophy assume the centrality of individual flourishing as an impetus to ethical theorizing. For details, refer to Lisa Tessman’s Burdened Virtues,

other hand, the ethico-political subject is born out of an utmost political imagination that strenuously labors for a better world. Here are the first few lines from Darwish’s poem:

I have a seat in the abandoned theater in Beirut. I might forget, and I might recall the final act without longing...not because of anything other than the play was not written skillfully... Darwish’s speaker describes spectatorship as the subjective experience that marks life for certain subjects today. To have a seat in an abandoned theater is to look upon a predetermined scene enacted on the periphery of the world stage. This experience of spectatorship is already somewhat negated by the impulse of authorship, as the speaker promises to forget or recall the final scene without longing, and thereby prevent himself from becoming reduced to his function in the theater. He declares that the “play was not written/ skillfully” and pronounces judgement upon a predetermined reality. His refusal to be a good audience has consequence and he describes the scene for us:

Chaos as in the war days of those in despair, and an autobiography of the spectator’s impulse. The actors were tearing up their scripts and searching for the author among us, we the witnesses sitting in our seats As chaos unfolds, despair ensues on the stage. The spectator’s impulse guides this like autobiography. The actors are no longer able to perform the script, instead searching for a different author. The true author? We begin to notice here the birth of ethical subjectivity, for the

Annette C. Baier’s Moral Prejudices, and Joan Tronto’s Moral Boundaries. Philosophers like Christine Korsgaard and Peter Singer, who situate their theorizing out of deontological and biological frames respectively, also remain carefully apolitical. For details, refer to Korsgaard’s The Sources of Normativity and Singer’s The Expanding Circle. Judith Butler remains a notable exception.

end of the law is the beginning of the subject.8 Therefore, to tear up a script meant to determine one's action is to take control of the play. Spectators morph into witnesses, but the transformation is alienating as the speaker describes “witnesses/ sitting in our seats.” The ethical choice now is between witness and spectacle. The speaker goes on:

I tell my neighbor the artist: Don’t draw your weapon, and wait, unless you’re the author! —No Then he asks me: And you are you the author? —No The speaker prevents his neighbor the artist from the burden of action. This burden cannot be initiated without the responsibility of authorship. His neighbor, refusing to take on the responsibility, frames a question and a statement at once: “And you are” he declares before the syntax of the sentence becomes interrogative, “are you the author?” The speaker too refuses this burden.

So we sit scared. I say: Be a neutral hero to escape from an obvious fate He says: No hero dies revered in the second scene. I will wait for the rest. Maybe I would revise one of the acts. And maybe I would mend what the iron has done to my brothers So I say: It is you then? He responds: You and I are two masked authors and two masked witnesses In the absence of authors, the speaker says, “Be a neutral hero,” an odd juxtaposition. The possibility of spectatorship has vanished, and the stage has crumbled into the audience. From within the play, neutrality becomes an escape. But the artist has an odd response, “No hero dies

8 I hastily employ this Biblical metaphor, referring to the end of external precepts, and thereby the initiation of subjective and inter-subjective moral theorizing. For an illuminating account of this metaphor and its implications on ethics, read Alain Badiou’s Saint Paul: The Foundations of Universalism.

revered in the second/ scene.” He shatters the speaker’s illusion and points out that inevitable death is no escape and never a path to heroism. And before he can announce his authorship, the artist plans revisions and interjections in the script. He plans to remain and to act. Is he the author then? They both are, and the difference between author, witness, and actor dissolves. The speaker responds:

I say: How is this my concern? I’m a spectator He says: No spectators at chasm’s door...and no one is neutral here. And you must choose your part in the end So I say: I’m missing the beginning, what’s the beginning? As the speaker resists his fate, the artist declares the end of spectatorship: “no one is neutral here.” The speaker finally retreats but asks, “what’s the beginning?” The question emerges out of the burden of authorship. How shall one continue a play if one doesn’t know the beginning? Yet, the answer comes before the question: “No spectators at chasm’s door,” and anyone who survives the chasm finds himself at the beginning. The poem ends with the silence of the beginning. The play begins upon the author’s recognition that he is writing it.

Overview

The two articles in the thesis are distinct in terms of their disciplinary stakes. However, they are united in their search for the ethico-political subject who emerges in disparate ways.

Article one, “After Postcolonialism: A Mad Man in No Man’s Land,” I frame the theoretical currents that have emerged in response to academic postcolonialism to suggest that they share in their DNA the same problems that mark insular postcolonial discourses. The two currents which I highlight are Cosmopolitanism and Decolonialism. In rejecting the latter, I take

pause to account for race and racialization as specific burdens that cannot be theorized away in the hope of universal subjectivity. I ask, is an ethical subjectivity that dreams of “the humanity that will emerge” possible in the violence of racialization? Audre Lorde becomes an exemplar who demonstrates that such a subjectivity is indeed a part of the Afro-American tradition, where the burdens of race and racialization are very acutely felt. I conclude by examining Toba Tek

Singh, a character dramatized in a short story written by Saadat Hasan Manto, in turn dramatized in Nandita Das’s biopic on Manto’s life to announce the high cost of refusing ethnic identification.

This recognition of a high cost leads me to my second article, “The Pedagogical

Imperative,” which frames the classroom as a potential site for such a subjectivity to emerge.

Among all the large institutions that mark life in global neoliberalism, the classroom remains a site that is exceptionally resistant to forsake its ideals and values. This is not a blanket statement of support for critical education, nor do I suffer from the naivete that would imagine most classroom as sites of intellectual or social liberation. Yet, among all other institutions, the classroom holds on to claims of egalitarian discourse, intellectual refinement, and social good.

These avowed though often ignored claims allow ethical subjects to emerge and resist the ruse of neoliberal determinisms in the class. I recognize that the classroom is often a site of the most atrocious displays of benevolent condescension and masked abuse. Therefore, I closely examine

Julie Lindquist’s theory on performing appropriate affects for working class students in order to expose the deployment of affect theory as a post-critical and deterministic tool. I end by examining Laurent Cantet 2008 French film The Class to establish the necessity of critique and para-critical affects in classrooms. In Cantet’s film, we notice subjects abandoned in the neoliberal theater of benevolent instruction in the suburban schools of Paris. However, the

students, often reduced to ethnic identifications, ceaselessly articulate a just and egalitarian vision of epistemological production. The pedagogical imperative here is performed by the students who take control of the script, and in turn of their lives.

Article 1

After Postcolonialism: A Mad Man in No-Man’s Land

The postcolonial project can be framed in two ways that will clarify its stakes in academic discourse. First, to speak from the vantage of the postcolony in response to Europe is to engage in radical critique. The deconstruction of logocentrism, at times assumed to be a peculiarly western formulation, serves to undermine cherished abstractions like humanism, the enlightenment, etc. Of course, the notion that logocentrism, and thereby the cherished abstractions that depend upon it are peculiarly western is a laughable idea. Yet, the critique of positivism9 as a European legacy is imbedded in postcolonial thinking. Second, postcolonialism imagines an alternative to the damages of the European colonial legacy. These alternatives may be universal or identarian, but in as much as they proffer a new pattern of life, they perform the positive function of postcolonial thinking. It is the former and critical function that is most pervasive in academic postcolonialism. For instance, scholars have routinely noted that the project of the European Enlightenment birthed the figure of the man. This birth produced a

“rational” being but the perimeter of his rationality was constructed by the exclusion of all beings that were not man. So, man comes to be man, and rationality itself comes to be defined as such by the marking of a boundary. From the enclosure of this boundary, man gazes into the abyss of all that he is not. This site of negation is the foundation of man’s subject formation.

In her 1999 book A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing

Present, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak traces the figuration of man in the canonical works of

9 Here I recognize that logocentrism and positivism are not philosophically equivalent. One could argue however that positivism is undergirded by logocentrism. Further, radical critique of “western” “rationality” often diffuses these concepts and I seek to narrate their trajectory rather than to be philosophically accurate.

Western philosophy: Kant, Hegel, Marx. When one reads Spivak’s expositions, it seems like the work has been done; we have understood the problem well. Spivak invokes a nuanced double bind in mapping a "postcolonial" response to these works; I place postcolonial in quotes because

Spivak forcefully disavows the label. She says:

In my estimation, these source texts of European ethico-political selfrepresentation (sic) are also complicitous with what is today a self-styled postcolonial discourse. On the margins of my reading is the imagined and (im)possible perspective I have called the native informant. Ostentatiously to turn one's back on, say, this trio, when so much of one's critique is clearly if sometimes unwittingly copied from them, is to disavow agency, declare kingdom come by a denial of history. On the other hand, to imagine that the positioning of the other remains the same in all their work is to assume that the only real engagement with the other is in the "objective" social science disciplines, after all. (9)

Spivak's "imagined and (im)possible perspective” is what she later labels "affirmative sabotage.”

On the one hand, she seeks to expose the ethnically and arbitrarily demarcated subjectivity in these source texts of Europe. But at once, she compares a clean disavowal as complicitous with what it disavows. If the error with Kant, Hegel, and Marx is that their project is ethnocentric then a mirrored response from "self-styled postcolonial discourse” that rejects these texts on the grounds of ethnicity is a repetition of what it critiques. Yet, an uncritical acceptance of these texts is not an option, something she condemns as social scientific objectivity. Spivak's project initiates an ethical discourse that is often ignored by post-critical theories of interacting with the

European canon.

A refusal to engage in the difficult work of ethico-political transformation has resulted in two variants of discourses that arrive after postcolonialism: cosmopolitanism and decolonialism.

I shall very briefly discuss the former as the fault lines of cosmopolitanism have been exposed by

many thinkers. The second discourse of decolonial thinking relitigates the question of race and demands an ethico-political solution to account for the acute violence of racialization. This demand is one of political urgency and cannot go unheeded.

In the cosmopolitan camp, Leela Gandhi’s book The Common Cause: Postcolonial Ethics and the Practice of Democracy questions the assumption that democracy originated and developed exclusively in western thought. By pointing out alternate expositions and theorizations of democracy in the works of thinkers like Mahatma Gandhi, she seeks to proffer a global history of thought as it relates to the development of liberal democracy. So, we might say that Gandhi provides a counter-history, one that de-centers Europe in the interest of a polycentric vision.

Another word for this is cosmopolitanism. We know that there are intellectual centers all around the world and as thought is produced and exchanged between these intellectual centers, a heady cosmopolitan conception of the globe emerges. Gandhi’s invocation of the “common cause” is an invocation of cosmopolitan commonality. In its claims, cosmopolitanism is an all-inclusive site and we might wish to hold on to it as an abstraction. However, in its facts, Gandhi’s cosmopolitanism betrays a metropolitan privilege. In invoking Mahatma Gandhi, she reaches for a figure who is highly visible in the western imaginary. Further, to suggest that evidence of democratic thinking in the subcontinent undermines Eurocentrism is to display too much faith in territorial segmentation. Such overzealous faith causes Hardt and Negri to dramatically declare neoliberalism as an altogether unprecedented empire. An incisive glance at colonial history will reveal that empire seldom depended on the requirements of ethnic purity and Mahatma Gandhi could be as quickly deployed in the service of Empire as any other European thinker. One would be hard pressed to explain how Marx but not Gandhi provided alibis for colonial exploitation.

Further, an imagination that is racist enough might conjure up Gandhi’s examples as the fleeting

successes of the white man’s burden. Cosmopolitan encounters and exchanges certainly do not have to be discredited entirely without an assessment of their substance. However, they can never function as a means to undermine Eurocentrism.

A second prominent discourse initiated in the aftermath of postcolonialism is

Decolonialism. Decolonial thought is nourished by the idea that European colonial conquest initiated global modernity and this initiation depended upon an epistemological revolution. In response, it proffers an alternative epistemology. Walter Mignolo, one of the foremost intellectuals to champion decolonial thinking describes it as follows:

It is a colonial subaltern epistemology in and of the global and the variegated faces of the

colonial wound inflicted by five hundred years of the historical foundation of modernity

as a weapon of imperial/colonial global expansion of Western capitalism. (18)

An alternative finds its definitional foundation from the center— its point of departure and site of difference. Thus, an alternative epistemology cannot be definitionally universal as its existence relies upon this point of departure. For decolonial thinking, its political virtue also relies upon its dissonance from European thinking. A global collectivism founded on the rejection of European thought might be a wonderful site to begin a utopia, if it were possible. But yet again, decolonial thought over invests in geographical segmentation and presumes that knowledge production outside the recognizable sphere of Europe's institutional structures is necessarily alternative. Far worse, it implies that it is politically virtuous on this account. Appeals to such logics of alterity reinscribe an unacknowledged Eurocentrism. As Spivak points out, “To be alternative is to be most Eurocentric.”10 An ethico-political project on the other hand undermines Eurocentrism by

10 Said in an interview with the Centro de Estudos Sociais da Universidade de Coimbra. Youtube URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdU5G-dunPQ

taking responsibility for the universal, placing epistemological difference in confrontation with one another, and imagining that a global collective may emerge not through a departure from some great and unexamined evil, but through the resolution of incomplete thinking. In other words, an ethico-political project fulfills the author function and refuses spectatorship as a destiny.

While the flaws of decolonial thinking might be clearly visible, a consideration for race should give us all pause. Decolonial thought recognizes the immediate violence of racism that does not become mitigated through engagement with epistemological complexity. Frantz Fanon, who in Black Skin, White Masks tirelessly theorizes the universal, takes pause when confronted with “the fact of blackness” (82). Fanon demonstrates the humiliations of negritude and yet upon arrival in the “white world” (22) of Paris, the commotion of the white gaze annihilates him. Here is an evocative and deeply troubling description:

My body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning in that white winter day. The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is mean, the Negro is ugly; look, a nigger, it’s cold, the nigger is shivering, the nigger is shivering because he is cold, the little boy is trembling because he is afraid of the nigger, the nigger is shivering with cold, that cold that goes through your bones, the handsome little boy is trembling because he thinks that the nigger is quivering with rage, the little white boy throws himself into his mother’s arms: Mama, the nigger’s going to eat me up. (86) So Fanon, a bourgeois Martinican travels from the colony to the metropole with all the confidence and hope of youth, only to confront his own ethnic degradation. This ethnic degradation is a symbolic remapping of one’s identity, one so severe that only the metaphor of the epiderm suffices: black skin lurks under one’s white mask. Later in the article, Fanon recalls,

“I would have liked to enter our world young and sleek, a world we could build together” (92).

But this young and lithe man was reduced to a body and one that is “distorted, recolored.” The declaratives that follow haunt us, “The Negro is an animal,” “The Negro is bad.”

Upon this crime scene, the decolonial option arrives as refuge. Denise Ferreira Da Silva begins her study in Toward a Global Idea of Race by declaring, “I am dead” (xi). The condition of death, aptly theorized by Achille Mbembe in Necropolitics, evokes urgent moral burdens. But unlike Mbembe who describes the reign of death and its ramification, Silva posits a global racial configuration in order to explain the injustice of the past few hundred years. She critiques

Spivak’s construction of race as an “alibi” for the project of colonial conquest, what Spivak has placed under the general category called the “axiomatics of imperialism” (6). Instead, Silva points out that these axiomatics “constitute the context of emergence of the racial” (11). The difference is slight and easy to miss; at first glance, Silva’s critique looks like splitting hair. What is the difference between an alibi for imperial exploitation and the epistemic production of race itself? In order to synthesize Spivak and Silva, and thereby postcolonial and decolonial thinking, one might suggest that race and racialization were produced as epistemic categories in the knowledge project that was inherently congruent with imperialism and that it functioned as an alibi for imperialism. However, Marxist inflected scholars like Spivak maintain that economic and cultural exploitation was the paramount project of colonialism and that racialization was deployed as a strategy. Therefore, race was forcefully naturalized in order to maintain Europe’s capacity to economically exploit its colonies. Silva on the other hand would suggest that the naturalization of race was prepondent and that the same knowledge project that galvanized the desire for economic exploitation naturalized race. Therefore, we cannot separate one from the other. And by calling race an “alibi,” we reduce the force of racialization.

Racialization marks the life of many people today. If one is personally impacted by race, it is hard to think of it as an alibi for other modes of exploitation. In essence, Spivak and other post-marxist scholars are suggesting that you cannot solve racism by solving racism, that the

systemic roots of racism are always to be found elsewhere, and chiefly in the economic arrangements of the world.

The missing link appears to be a geographical one. Fanon’s confrontation with race occurs only when he moves from the bourgeois Martinique bubble into the metropole of Paris. It is in the “white world” that he encounters the blunt force of his raced body. As long as he remained in Martinique, his bourgeois status prevented him from experiencing this situation. His body had an ontological credence that disappears upon contact with whiteness. He states, “The black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man” (90). So racialization takes on an ontic force and this partly explains why Silva would consider the construct of alibi as especially under-serving the burden of racialization. But Fanon moves on from this encounter, both literally and figuratively. In other words, no matter how heavy the burden of racialization might be, Fanon takes on the responsibility of grasping the universal. In this vein, he utters, “I do not want to be the victim of the Ruse of a black world” (204). A bold statement from someone who had encountered the degradation of racism very personally. Partly, Fanon is able to assert himself in this way because he spent his life moving in and out of the west. It is in the west that the drama of race is played out most spectacularly. But when you return to the “colony,” race morphs into other burdens; its ontological violence dissipates considerably so that you can see its ruse. This also allows other modes of oppression to become more clearly visible, and race, no matter its ontic strength is revealed for its fiction. In simpler words, race cannot be destiny in the postcolonial imagination. Silva points out how a raced destiny marked the European project.

Even more so, it must not mark the ethico-political project. The work of reclaiming raced identities makes a grievous and ahistorical error. It is European whiteness that needs to be exposed as the greatest instantiation of identity politics ever undertaken.

Ethical Subjects in Racist Societies

If the theater of racism operates zealously in the west so that its function as an alibi is eclipsed, then the need for ethical subjectivity is prepondant in these locations. Black radicalism offers us a direct way to confront the acute burden of racism and from within this tradition we might retrieve an exemplary ethical figure.

The poet Audre Lorde wrestles with such an ethico-political dilemma in her poem

Equinox. Here is the first stanza:

My daughter marks the day that spring begins. I cannot celebrate spring without remembering how the bodies of unborn children bake in their mothers flesh like ovens consecrated to the flame that eats them lit by mobiloil and easternstandard Unborn children in their blasted mothers floating like small monuments in an ocean of oil. Lorde's speaker begins by attaching her subjective experience of celebration with other beings who cannot partake in the celebration. The first line links natural phenomenon to an eventuality in the speaker's personal life. This is a common trope in literature to express the force of one's personal subjectivity—concretizing it with the force of nature. If spring itself declares her daughter's birth, the speaker may grasp an ontic declaration. For her to then look toward an

“ocean of oil” is to refuse a circumscribing reality in the interest of a dispersal. This dispersal is so severe that it robs the speaker of celebrating her daughter's birth so that she may mourn the death of other unborn children. She continues:

The year my daughter was born

DuBois died in Accra while I marched into Washington to a death knell of dreaming which 250,000 others mistook for a hope believing only Birmingham’s black children were being pounded into mortar in churches that year some of us still thought Vietnam was a suburb of Korea. Here, the political stakes of the ethical dilemma become starkly visible. These stakes are distributed across the divide that separates not just the personal and the political, but also the local and the global. The year of her daughter’s death is the death knell of a kind of pan-

Africanism. The personal interacts with the distantly political, a form of politics that does not immediately interact with the speaker’s life. Politics at home becomes a “death knell” when its myopia is revealed: “only Birmingham's black children” (emphasis mine); this is a rejection of identarian ends and the ethical subject insists that political proclamations account for the distant and alien ramifications of actions at home. In effect, the speaker recognizes the illegibility and the illegitimacy of African American self-representation in a land that is concurrently pounding

Vietnamese children into mortar. In the face of this, a preoccupation with only Birmingham's black children is “a death knell of dreaming.”

The poem's title Equinox conveys the poem's thematic stake. The day of equinox equally divides night and day, north and south, and such an equal accounting of global concern brings the speaker's ethical subjectivity into sharp relief. A politics vantaged from the equinox of global awareness displays systemic fault lines that necessitate a revision in one's political priorities.

Toward the end of the poem, the speaker doubles down on her commitment:

I want to tell them that we have no right to spring because our sisters and brothers are burning

because every year the oil grows thicker and even the earth is crying This refusal to celebrate small victories might strike some as puritanical but if the mechanisms of invisibility did not interfere with our capacities to empathize, would we not take up the same position as of the speaker in this poem? A righteous declaration bookends this thought, "even the earth is crying," and the biblical allusion is not missed. The effect is a universal declaration, an authorial and authoritative take on global politics, expressed with uncompromising fervor.

The High Cost

Such an uncompromising personal subjectivity may harm individual life and interfere with a person's capacity to flourish. It is noteworthy that much of contemporary ethical theory in the American academy is framed by the value of flourishing. The moral philosopher Lisa

Tessman describes Audre Lorde's ethical commitments as "burdened virtues” (87) and she spends considerable effort in devising a philosophical framework that would help an individual navigate these burdened virtues. However, what if the question of ethics was not framed by notions of individual flourishing but through a commitment to the general truth value of a given virtue? If an ethical stance is derived for its truth value, then sacrifice may once again emerge as a legible category. It is true that sacrifice marks the life of many individuals but much of academic moral theory remains narrowly preoccupied with the questions of personal flourishing.

The radical Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto raises the question of normative ethics in a time of the emergence of new ethnic categories. Born in Bombay during the tail end of British imperialism, Manto becomes a part of the Progressive Writers Association. While the association stressed social commentary and socialist praxis, Manto's writing is overwhelmingly marked by concerns surrounding individual ethic. In 2018, the Indian director Nandita Das created Manto, a

biopic in which she interweaves Manto's life narrative with those of his characters. The drama of partition becomes the primary site of Das's production. When forced to leave the city of his birth,

Manto arrives in Lahore with his young family and becomes preoccupied with the everyday cost of partition: one borne by Manto and his characters in equal measure. He writes several provocative stories including the famous Thanda Ghost (translated as Cold Meat) which is charged with obscenity in the Lahore High Court. He defends his craft to the very end, even in the face of legal persecution, poverty, and eventual death. Das dramatizes his unerring commitment to aesthetic and individual freedom.

This commitment is most startlingly displayed at the very end of the movie. Manto has lost the court battle, alcoholism has taken a toll on him, and financial crisis beset him. Forced into a rehab center, Manto finds himself among mad men. At this point, Das masterfully interjects Manto's biography with his most famous story Toba Tek Singh. The protagonist of this story, Bhisan Singh is an institutionalized lunatic. Manto’s story is framed by an often forgotten historical detail: in the aftermath of partition, the countries of India and Pakistan decide to exchange their lunatics on religious lines. So, Bhisan Singh, a Hindu lunatic in a Pakistani asylum is to be sent to India. Cursed with the ethico-political imagination, he refuses this command and insists that instead of India, he should be taken back to his hometown of Toba Tek

Singh. When the asylum authorities refuse his demand, he protests by changing his name from

Bhisan Singh to Toba Tek Singh. He becomes his lost homeland. In a time when national identity had abruptly emerged to determine the destinies of large swathes of people, this act of self-(re)- naming becomes a defiant refusal of such determinism. Toba Tek Singh, a lost man and a lost homeland, become agential even as they become unrecognizable to a new form of sovereignty.

This refusal interrupts Toba Tek Singh's flourishing but is ethically justifiable on account of its

truth value, in this case these values are based on such “enlightenment” virtues like autonomy and self-determination. The demand itself is subversive, not only in its refusal of sovereignty's claim to determine an individual's life, but also in its refusal to acknowledge lunacy as a limiting social category.

Das's frames flip back and forth between the figure of Manto and of Toba Tek Singh.

Their identities begin to conjoin. Here is one example of a sequential flip in the frames:

Fig. 1. Still from Das, Manto (49.6) Fig. 2. Still from Das, Manto (49.7)

On a narrative level, Manto is supposed to conjure up Toba Tek Singh, his final fictional character during his time in the asylum "rehab." But the effect of Das's framing means that such authorial agency is lost to Manto. But it is replaced by an ethical authority, as Manto's uncompromising ethics have led him into his current condition. It also explains the artistic choice to enact these self-same frames; Manto's ethic renders him proverbially mad and Singh's ethics renders him proverbially wise. Their roles alter, mix into one another, until they are the same subjectivity. This confluence overwhelms the last few frames of the film. They are also the frames that declare their individual deaths.

Fig. 3. Still from Das, Manto (51.3) Fig. 4. Still from Das, Manto (51.6)

In this frame, Toba Tek Singh stands in the no man's land between India and Pakistan, refusing to make a choice. This is effectively a scene of suicide as the guards slowly abandon the lone mad man who will not move. Singh utters incomprehensible phrases in made up languages as his body convulses to death. Anger seeps out in every detail. I am reminded of the phrase Toni

Morrison uses to describe the incomprehensible language emanating from the house on bluestone road as the language of "the black and angry dead," and elsewhere as “unspeakable thoughts, unspoken” (281). This mad man in no man's land utters an impossible to account for anger. He stands dying in the face of sovereignties as a subject who insists on grasping control of his existence, of never letting go of responsibility, and of the willingness to pay the high cost of such an orientation. This is a far stretch from the demands of flourishing. A radical commitment to something like truth allows Manto to repeat the mad man's language, in despairing resolve and unfailing anger. The final scene display Manto mimicking his character and becoming his character's character, reversing the author function, or confusing it in some way. As the last frame fades, these words appear on the screen, "Saadat Hasan died at 42.” And this is the end.

It is in the silence of the end, as these conjoined figures have together perished that we recall the identitarian impostions that produced their fate. Manto failed to be a good Muslim by writing obscene tails and Toba Tek Singh failed to be a good Hindu by refusing to go to India.

Madness and Art intermingle to tell a tale of freedom bought at a very high cost. This freedom remains unrecognizable to the identitarian factions fighting British colonialism. But, in by- passing the short-term political logics of flag and religion, it theorizes the possibility of a humanity to come.

Article 2

The Pedagogical Imperative

“Of course, the whole thing is, once you cease to be a master, once you throw of your master’s yoke, you are no longer human rubbish, you are just a human being, and all the things that adds up to. So, too, with the slaves. Once they are no longer slaves, once they are free, they are no longer noble and exalted; they are just human being.” —Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place

I ended the last article by accounting for the high cost of an ethical orientation in global hegemony. In order to remain hopeful, I find it necessary to theorize a solution. I pointed out the limitations of contemporary moral philosophy by noticing its preoccupation with individual flourishing at the expense of investigating the truth value of an ethical claim. Yet, one may not romanticize death and horror for too long before it becomes necessary to think about flourishing in the world with ethical commitments. For such an ethical flourishing to occur, a site where truth and care intermingle becomes necessary. Among all the institutions that mark our lives in global neoliberalism, the classroom offers itself up as such a site. Of course, one might endlessly point out the ways in which modern schooling and the neoliberal university are sites of grave complicity and coercion. Yet, this is not my primary aim. Since the avowed goals of a university have not explicitly shifted, that is, the university at least still pretends to be a site of learning, we may witness the classroom as a fertile ground for ethical subjectivities to emerge and for ethical confrontations to occur. The possibility of such contestation constructs the brick and mortar of a pedagogical community. The obligation to engage in ethical self-articulation for the flourishing of self and community is what I will label the pedagogical imperative.

In the first part of this article, I frame the conditions of sound pedagogy by intervening in a broader debate around the status of critique in the humanities. This debate has been ongoing

and my focus will be upon its specific formulations in pedagogical theory. James Berlin and Julie

Lindquist provide the primary exemplars to stage this debate, as their work has initiated, in

American academia, discourses on critical and affective pedagogies respectively. My conclusion aims at a synthesis of critical and affective considerations, though it quickly becomes apparent that I am partial toward Berlin’s framework and find embedded within the traditions of critique, something like a road map to recognize affective complexity. Many scholars in “affect theory” have also suggested this, starting from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick who maintains in the introduction to Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity that “the most salient preposition” in her work is “beside” and one of the aims of her theorizing is to “get a little distance from beyond” (8) or the constant need to adumbrate a new theory. While Lindquist’s affective pedagogical model promises something similar, I caution against affective pedagogies that move from a para-critical mode to a post-critical mode. The urgency of critique is heightened in the latter half of this article where I closely examine Laurent Cantet’s 2008 documentary style film The Class. Set in the immigrant suburbs of Paris, Cantet’s narrative presents a contact zone rife with the burdens of neoliberal hegemonies. In the trenches of ethnic determinisms, ethico-political subjects routinely emerge, (mis)identified as renegades and counterfeits, who insist on their right to intellectual and ethical labor.

Critique and Affect

In order for the classroom to become a site of ethical contestation, a healthy relationship between critique and affect must be articulated. Much of academic discourse in the English humanities today seems to occupy itself in articulating its relationship to critique. Since critique is an old tradition in the academy and scholars find themselves engaged in the habit of critique,

much attention is paid to the necessity of considering affect, aesthetic commitment, and reparative practice. While critique brings down ideological dogmatisms, a consideration for affect allows for more personal and particularly individual concerns to become a part of classroom discourses and reading practices. My own introduction to the alternatives of critique began with reading the works of Rita Felski, Eve Sedgwick, and Bruno Latour. There is much in all of these works that I wholeheartedly agree with, particularly Sedgwick’s claim about the limitations of the linguistic mode and the need for a paralinguistic mode of doing business in the humanities. I find that this is a theoretically ambitious promise and at least at the level of abstraction, I resonate with it. In literacy studies as well, scholars like Julie Lindquist have argued for a para-critical methodology that centers affect. In her essay on working class pedagogies, she notes that the “impulse for justice is largely driven by faith in the power of moral commitments” but at once “critical and cultural pedagogy teachers often deny students access to the very forms of affective experience that have produced the teachers’ own beliefs”

(190-91). Lindquist’s description evokes the caricature of a leftist professor, so common in our zeitgeist, one who lectures at his students on the evils of capitalism and white supremacy. Words like hegemony, imperialism, and class struggle circulate the air leaving bemused students troubled and alienated. And if students are alienated then what exactly is the point of critical instruction?

Instead of dwelling in the suspense of a rhetorical question, I would like to ask, what is the point of a classroom? What do we hope to accomplish in the space-time infrastructure of a class? Our answer to this question will tell us everything we need to know about the relationship of critique and affect for pedagogy. We might say that we want students to be equipped with skills and knowledges that will enable them to become successful and critical citizens. We might

say that we want our students to chart an autonomous path for self-discovery. And finally, we might say that we want our students to recognize the fundamentally unjust ordering of the world and to understand their position in this ordering. In a way, I am repeating James Berlin’s tripartite frame of pedagogy: cognitivist, expressivist, and social-epistemic. Berlin advocates for the social-epistemic mode which promises a democratic re-ordering of the classroom infrastructure so that it becomes heavy with revolutionary possibilities. These revolutionary possibilities not only engage the classroom and institutional infrastructure but also the givenness of the world in which the classroom inhabits. So, for Berlin, the role of the classroom is never independent of the thought of justice. He reminds us that “a way of teaching is never innocent” but that “every pedagogy is imbricated in ideology, in a set of tacit assumptions about what is real, what is good, what is possible, and how power ought to be distributed” (492). I posit that we cannot resolve the tension between critique and post-(para)-critique, and specifically between critical pedagogy and affective pedagogy without examining what each mode posits as the conditions for what is “good,” “real,” and “possible.” In other words, I am wholly convinced that berating students about the evils of capitalism is bad pedagogy, but I am not satisfied that the solution is to focus on affects without a road-map for addressing ideology. The replacement of critique with consideration for affect is too quick of a move, too easy of a solution and it does not address the final problem: what are we doing here? Why do we have universities and schools?

And would we close shop if we were to rationally determine that the classroom is a site of inevitable and complete violence that cannot be redeemed by the goodness of the pedagogue or through the attentiveness of his actions? This last question should remain a provocative possibility. As it will become clear, I do not subscribe to the abolition of the classroom but if we do not hold abolition as a future possibility, our praxis will rust dogmatically.

The Problem of the Head-Heart Binary

Before I proceed any further with my argument, I want to make clear that I am not constructing an argument against the umbrella descriptor affect theory. To do so by pointing out the problematic assumption of post-(para)-critical classroom practices would be to rely on a straw man argument. It would mean that I conflate affect theory with affect-centered pedagogical theory, and both of these, with vague evocations of mis-managed classrooms where teachers deploy affect or consider affect as an intentional pedagogical act. On the contrary, my aim is to demonstrate that such a conflation marks post-(para)-critical pedagogical theory. I will demonstrate that the rejection of critical pedagogical models depends on such sweeping conflations in the interest of centering common-sense emotional considerations that classrooms demand. Julie Lindquist’s influential essay Class Affects, Classroom Affectations: Working through the Paradoxes of Strategic Empathy is a good example for this study. Her essay is divided into two parts, first, she establishes a need for a theory of classroom affects and then proceeds to establish a pedagogical model that practices “deep acting” (197). Deep acting, as

Lindquist defines it, occurs when “You risk becoming the thing you are performing” (197). The two parts of the essay are connected due to the presumption that critical and cultural pedagogy interfere with the process of deep acting. Lindquist describes classroom scenes where she is able to discuss the Iraq war with students who are mostly pro-war. Even though her own views contradict her students’, deep acting allows her to create an environment where their views are affectively acknowledged and worked through.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has defined democratic pedagogy as involving a “non- coercive rearrangement of desire” (11). This aphorism recognizes the coercive potential of

Berlin’s model, since Berlin assumes students’ voluntary participation in a social-epistemic classroom community. This participation is never guaranteed, and it is not safe to assume that the student that enter our classrooms want or desire to discover the tragedy of American imperialism in their study of the Iraq war. Lindquist’s consideration of her students’ affects acknowledges this truth, but it does not attempt a Spivakian rearrangement. Instead, it backs down from the hope that these desires are subject to change, and that the possibility of a non-coercive change may just be what the difficult task of teaching involves. In any case, the presumption that critical and cultural pedagogy interfere with affective consideration is a sweeping generalization. I would posit that critical pedagogy can be affectively nuanced. Berlin quotes Ira Shor’s aphorism about the social-epistemic class by claiming, “The object of this pedagogy is to enable students to ‘extraordinarily re-experience the ordinary’” (491). To “extraordinarily re-experience the ordinary” is to allow students access to the “affective experiences” that have generated the teacher’s “moral commitments.” And so affect is highlighted in the Berlin-Shor model.

Lindquist’s model provides a more specific strategy and one could argue that there is a need for para-critical reassessments that are more strongly focused on affect since an aphorism is hardly a road map. But I find that Lindquist’s case study easily slips from para to post. That is, a claim toward affective considerations renders ideology critique less and less relevant until it risks being completely forgotten.

In her classroom case study on the Iraq war, she presents a homogenous working-class demography that is politically conservative and therefore pro-war. She separates students’ critical and affective engagements and seeks to honor the affective engagements: “students’ reluctance to discuss the war critically and rationally was no indication that they were not eager to make sense of it. On the contrary, they very much wanted to make sense of it, but in a way

that invited their other-than-rational responses into the process” (203). These “other-than- rational” responses are nothing more than imbrications in ideology: American exceptionalism, imperialism, etc. Now, just because many of these students might be personally situated in the circumstance of the war does not render their imbrication into ideology innocent. All ideological imbrication is to some extent personal. What I find interesting in Lindquist’s word choice is the evocation of the head-heart binary. Of course, there is no rational or scientific basis for separating emotion from logical thought. While it may be necessary at times to delineate emotive gestures from intellectual ones, this example does not call for such a fast and lose delineation. To call support for the Iraq war “other-than-rational” is to minimize the epistemic infrastructure that fuels imperialist ideology. It would be like calling Rudyard Kipling “other-than-rational,” or like suggesting that Winston Churchill’s decision to create artificial famine in British colonies was purely emotional. Their inclusion in the material circumstance of conflict does not render their response strictly non-rational. Indeed, critique allows us to examine the ruse of what passes for the rational or what hides behinds personal grief, pain, and horror.

Does this mean that the teacher should berate the students about American imperialism?

That he should pedantically curb dialogue? No, absolutely not. A critical classroom will be affectively a safe space for the recognition of personal complicity. In simpler words, it is ok to find out that your investment in a political program is produced by ideological complicity.

Lindquist’s class does not reach this stage. The best outcome in this case was that her class

“discovered the power and the limitations of their affective responses,” when confronted with

“larger domains of knowledge” (203). Also, her anecdote concludes with a celebratory gesture as the class discovers how navigating these issues is a “research process.” Upon labelling it as such, she declares that the “strategy” worked (203). I disagree with this conclusion, for to only

discover the limitations of your affect when presented with ideological violence is to refuse the moment of learning. These “other domains of knowledge” should bring to crisis the students’ preconceived beliefs. To formalize this failure as a “research process” is nothing short of the trivialization of the critical impulse. The consideration of affect in this situation is no longer para-critical but definitely post-critical. And post-critical practice, in the interest of formalist ends, is a disavowal of the classroom as a site of theorizing. The main purpose of this class is to learn the “research process” in an affectively safe space. But there is no such thing as a “research process” that is not already imbricated in ideology. Many pedagogical settings including fundamentalist cults elicit a “research process,” that is often practiced with equanimity. I would suggest that the purpose of our instruction is higher and better.

Teaching Voltaire to “Ethnic” Kids

All of my analyses thus far leave two questions unanswered, first, what is the right way to affectively engage students in a para-critical mode? And, how does cultural theory (as opposed to the moral formal signifier critical) enter into this conversation? I will answer the second question first and then attempt to construct a road map for the first. As I construct this argument,

I will be closely looking at and learning from the 2008 French movie The Class directed by

Laurent Cantet.

Lindquist’s example pre-supposes a homogenous classroom of working-class, politically conservative students. For most of us, a classroom is never quite this homogenous but it is often a site of productive contestation. How would Lindquist’s strategies alter if working class Iraqi-

American students were to enter her class? What will affective mediation look like in a situation

where one group’s emotional response is just as strong and perhaps more personally mediated when compared to the other group? In clearer words, what do you do when you enter a class where one student has lost his brother or neighbor in military combat but another student has lost his uncle or neighbor in a drone strike? To extend this line of thought further, what do we do when openly racist and sexist students declare their support for a white ethno state? The resurgence of the alt-right certainly leaves this situation in the realm of possibility. The latter example might seem so egregious that preemptive policies might be designed. A course curriculum for instance might explicitly state that openly racist or sexist rhetoric is not permissible in the classroom. But then why is declaring one's support for an imperial war not the same as arguing for a white ethno-state? Especially when “ethnic” students have entered the fray and might take as much issue with the latter as they do with the former. We might certainly respond by dispelling “politics” from the classroom, but this would be a capitulation to the status quo and a disavowal of our work as teachers of the humanities.

Cultural theory may intervene in our classrooms at this juncture. We might recognize that our classroom has what Mary Louise Pratt calls “contact zones” (33). These are sites where differing claims to history and knowledge collide with one another on cultural grounds. These can be sites of contestation and negotiation. Power can never be ignored in contact zones; the recognition that all sides do not possess an equal capacity for speech will help us negotiate a classroom with these contact zones. In a situation where conservative and pro-war working class students come into contact with working class Iraqi American students, the former have access to the entire ideological apparatus of the west: the president, the media, the distilled but sure invocation of American exceptionalism wherever they look. For the latter, adequate speech in the classroom involves overcoming this ideological apparatus first, an uphill task for anyone let

alone for college freshmen. Sure, these students may rely on epistemic frames of their own, their own narratives of history, of power, and of the truth. But in an American classroom and perhaps in a classroom anywhere, their version of events will have less credence. So, cultural theory must always be critical, for to merely insist on the relative value of all truths would be to ignore violent ideologies. To remain neutral in the face of violent ideology will be to caricature the critical voices that emerge in our classroom spaces, asking us to remain accountable to a meta- discursive force that insists on the truth of the matter in any situation.

Meta-discursivity, or the capacity to walk in and out of discourses, may be the spirit of critique. Good critique destabilizes everything including its own grounding. Action is always produced through a recognized “error.” We make these “errors” by acting in the hope that auto- critique will give us the capacity to alter our thoughts, actions, and plans at short notice. So critique always has as its goal the category of truth. This may seem like an old-fashioned idea but I posit that the impulse to critique is always produced out of a burden for truth, no matter how fleeting.

Therefore, we must be careful to not tokenize “ethnic” knowledge in order to create an effect of cultural conversation. I find that the desire to treat culturally produced claims about issues like the Iraq war as signs of ethnic identity is gravely condescending. In other words, the imagined Iraqi-American students are right about opposing the Iraq war not merely because they happen to be Iraqis, but also for the simple reason that they are right. They are speaking the truth by overcoming dense ideology. Their assertions must trespass out of the prison of identity and enter into honest dialogue with other assertions. If we fail to treat their assertions as defying ethnic identitarianism, we will have failed to decipher their speech.

In Cantet’s film, we have a classroom of

working class immigrant students in the suburbs

of Paris. Most of them are from the former

French colonies in the Caribbean and North

Africa but there are immigrants from other parts Fig. 5. Still from Cantet, The Class (34:6) of the world too. We are told from the very beginning that this is a “difficult” classroom. As we enter the first scene in the class, we hear a cacophony of voices followed by a set of instructions from the teacher Francois Marin: “calm down now,” “stop stirring things up,” “Remove you hood, please.”11 The chaotic site is silenced by the rule of law. Marin begins not by an appeal for learning but by announcing the way things will be done and by establishing his authority. He is immediately challenged in multiple ways.

“You always use weird names,” quips one student during a grammar lesson, “You always use whitey names,” another student joins. When she is challenged by Marin, she asserts, “I am not

French.” When challenged further, she restates, “I am, but not proud of it.” Marin’s strategy throughout the many scenes is to be a benevolent but tough instructor, who allows his students to express themselves only to quickly move on to formal instruction. An obvious oversight here is

Marin’s lack of “cultural sensitivity.” He does not fully appreciate the complexities of the immigrant experience. “I am not French,” is a resounding political statement of resistance that has as much to do with Marin’s classroom space as it does with national French politics and as that does with French colonial history. Yet, what lurks underneath these cultural contestation?

Would the problem be solved if Marin were to confess his privilege, acknowledge his

11 All quotes are from the English subtitles included in the film by its creators.

complicity, and move on to instruction? In other words, would the American way of carrying on with these conversations work better than the French way? Not really. As cultural conversations are not only about sensitivity, they are often about truth. When individuals from oppressed backgrounds choose to have these conversations, often they have overcome their sensitivities in order to seek reason and a way out of their situation. Their enunciations Fig. 6. Still from Cantet The Class (14:33) follow the Socratic model that problematizes and complicates our presuppositions. These enunciations, may not always be framed as questions, but they are pedagogical nonetheless: “Why do you treat white culture as neutral? Isn’t the world a very big place?” or “How can you assume that I relate to French identity? Isn’t my Frenchness a coercive set of expectations that I am burdened with?” If we listen carefully, we’d learn.

The problem of the ethnic burden is brought to the fore later in the film’s narrative. Marin is tasked with choosing a book for class reading. In an American classroom, where identity politics is better established, the conversation would be framed between the category of whiteness and ethnicity. In France, the framing is different: tradition and modernity. The history teacher who is going to start a course on the Ancien Regime asks Marin about the books he might introduce to the students. Integration across curricular boundaries is a common pedagogical practice. Marin responds with, “The Enlightenment will be tough for them.” What a cleverly placed dialogue! It reveals all of the hidden presuppositions of the colonial project that

is not at all brought to relief by American identity politics. Both the French and the American models assume that enlightenment is difficult for people framed by ethnicity. The history teacher, presumably failing to understand what the Enlightenment means, asks, “What about

Voltaire? Is he tough?” Marin responds, “He is not easy.” And then the history teacher utters,

“Candide, is simple.” Marin ends up choosing The Diary of Anne Frank instead. The American model might presume that this is a good thing. At least, Marin did not pick another old dead white man for the class reading. The simple truth is that Marin’s class has some exceptional students who would have asked him clever questions no matter which book he’d chosen. But within the frame of the French model, I would suggest that Candide would have been a superior choice.

Like Marin’s student, Candide is an immigrant. He goes to the land of El dorado imagining a utopia, and in some ways he finds that it is a utopian place. But Candide soon discovers that subject formation is impossible in El dorado and he realizes that this place is not everything he had hoped it would be. So, Voltaire’s story actually has a lot of resonance with the experiences of Marin’s students. Both Marin and the History teacher are wrong in suggesting that “the enlightenment is hard” for them. Their presumption reveals a hegemonic cultural memory that is not based in truth. For anyone who has read Candide knows that it is easy to read and for most people far more engaging than Anne Frank’s diary, and for Marin’s students, more relevant.

Maybe Your Books Are Shit

Ordinary resistance occurs again and again in Marin’s class. It betrays both Lindquist’s affective considerations and the over-simplifications of identity politics. The radical situation of

Marin’s class is that his students are intensely tough and resilient. Despite the unjust conditions of their lives, they have been inviting their teachers into Socratic considerations. I want to suggest that whenever students are talking in a classroom, asking questions, challenging the norms, something is going remarkably well. But Marin and the other school staff do not heed these invitations. Instead they throttle the students with more norms and more coercive learning arrangements. In the face of all of this, the students present challenges through eloquent speech and speech acts. Marin does not hear them.

Toward the very end of the film, this confrontation is brought to its full effect. Cantet skillfully situates the coercive arrangements of Marin’s class against the uncompromising desire for autonomy by some of the students. Marin goes around the class asking what they have learned through the year and what they value the most. Most students pick an answer and

Marin is satisfied. But Esmeralda refuses to lie,

“I didn’t learn anything,” she says with a laugh. “You can’t spend nine months at school and not learn anything,” Marin reminds her in a disciplinary monotone. “I’m the living Fig. 7. Still from Cantet, The Class (120:24) proof,” Esmeralda asserts, challenging a hegemonic discourse with remarkable courage. “You got something from the books we read,”

Marin asserts again. Note that he does not ask questions but only presents ways of thinking and being. “Your books are shit,” Esmeralda responds with the truth. Here, we may not get defensive about Anne Frank’s diary but realize how Esmeralda’s speech act is situated in the general frame of her life circumstance. “They’re what?” Marin asks. “They’re useless,” Esmeralda doubles

down. Marin gives up and asks her if she has read a book in her personal time. “The Republic,” she answers. Marin is surprised. The Enlightenment is not so hard after all.

When he checks for proof to ensure that she really has read The Republic, Esmeralda performs the most evocative Socratic enunciation that gets at the heart of the matter very quickly.

She speaks with one voice with Socrates but also on behalf of the other students in her class whose voices have not been heeded. She asks, in the guise of a quote, “Are you sure of thinking what you think? Are you sure of doing what you do?” Marin smiles, but there is no suggestion that she has been heard. The class is dismissed.

Coda

In conclusion, I would like to reflect upon the two words that adjacently mark the title of this work: renegade and counterfeit. In the last article, we met Esmerelda, who in her invocation of Socrates performed an ethico-political act, in refusal of her circumstance. Such an act positions her in a relationship of criminality to the institution that she inhabits. In Cantet’s film, the threat of expulsion always looms closely and one is reminded of Fred Moten and Stefano

Harney’s description of fugitive colonies in academia that posit “the only relationship with the

American university” as a “criminal one” (23). In a contemporary moment, when all institutions are suspect, is criminality a kind of surreptitious refuge for ethical praxis? The answer is an intuitive yes, followed by hesitance to be defined as such permanently. In article one, I claimed that a raced destiny cannot permanently mark the political proclamations of those of us outside hegemonic whiteness. The hesitance that emerges in the face of descriptors like renegade and counterfeit is analogous. These descriptors, akin to ethnic determinisms, emerge out of static relations with hegemonic centers. A renegade decrying institutional coercions, counterfeiting epistemic fatalisms, always falls short of the kind of subjectivity that can act. Fanon reminds us, in the face of utter despondency, “We shall see that another solution is possible. It implies restructuring the world” (63).

Given that a restructuring is our only hope, we must grasp its burdens in re-reading the title of this work: Socratic Enunciation as a praxis to embody, but renegade speech as a description for the unexamined givenness that reneges on the promises of enlightenment, counterfeiting them.

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