HOW DO WE STUDY IN PUBLIC?

Transcript edited for clarity from audio recording. Speaker attributions and proper names have been corrected from the raw transcription. Below is an excerpt; click here for the full transcript.

GREGORY SHOLETTE: Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, in their thesis on the “fugitive undercommons” — which is also something that inspired this particular event — cite Kant’s argument in The Conflict of the Faculties that the university’s critical faculty, philosophy, is free precisely because the state considers it powerless. Here is the story from over 230 years ago:

In 1794, the King of Prussia sent the philosopher Immanuel Kant a formal letter of reprimand. Kant had published Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, and Frederick William II was not pleased. The letter accused Kant of distorting and debasing Christianity and threatened, in the King’s own words, “unpleasant consequences” if he did not stop. Kant replied carefully. He promised the King he would refrain from all public lectures and writings on religion. What he did not say — but what everyone later noticed — was that his promise applied only, as he put it, “during Your Majesty’s lifetime.” The King died in 1797. 

The following year, Kant published The Conflict of the Faculties, his full account of what had happened and why it mattered. In that text, Kant argues that the university’s critical faculty members — who teach theology, law, and medicine — are controlled because they manage the population directly. Philosophy is free precisely because the state considers it powerless. The “higher” faculties of theology, law, and medicine are controlled because they manage the population directly. Philosophy is left alone because it is deemed merely theoretical, harmless. Kant’s wager was that this overlooked space was actually the condition of intellectual freedom.

Tonight, we are not so sure we have that luxury of time. The institutions that once housed critical pedagogy — including the arts, social practice, and experimental education — are no longer being ignored. They are being targeted. So the question we’re here to ask is not just how do we study in public, but what does study even mean when the ground beneath it is being actively cleared?

Now, Tom is going to explain the evening’s program.

TOM FINKELPEARL: Okay, hi. So, what we’re going to do: we have the four of us here, which is Pablo, Tania, myself, and Greg. On the side, taking diligent notes, is Claire Bishop. She’s going to then, after we’ve spoken to each other, make a statement and ask some questions. So we’re going to go around in a little circle. Tania and Greg are going to start. But I want to just take issue with one thing you said — that we are in an auspicious moment. Did you use that word, auspicious? I’ve never been this upset and depressed about the situation we’re in. But I find it comforting that a lot of people wanted to come out tonight and think and talk about these things. So come on up to the front. I’m going to give each of you the mic. We’ve decided to stand. All right. So here’s the first question for Tania.

GREG: Tania — you’ve built pedagogical projects: the Hannah Arendt Institute, Immigrant Movement International, and others, under genuinely different conditions of state power, scarcity, and security than ours. In Cuba, under embargo — not anymore, yes, as we all know. So what I want to ask is: does this travel well, this model? Your projects have consistently refused the standard architecture of the neoliberal university — credentialization, debt structure, institutional validation. And I say this from experience because I traveled with my wife Olga Kopenkina to your Institution in Havana and got a front-row seat of how it worked. But students often need precisely official documentation in order to navigate the precarious circumstances of reality. So the question is: how does that responsibility weigh now that you’re shifting gears into completely different circumstances and a different location? It’s obviously very different at Harvard than at CUNY, or at Queens College for sure. Can the counter-institution or the para-institution (which SPCUNY essentially is by the way), and its critical pedagogy, exist genuinely outside the institution?

[Laughter and brief exchange about the term “parrot institution” — a playful coinage riffing on “para-institution”]

TANIA BRUGUERA: So, yeah — under threats to freedom of expression, you need to be persistent, patient, and completely impatient at the same time. I went into the pedagogical model because I understood that I was doing my work not for the moment, but for a few years later, and that work had to start with rethinking our education. And I think it is an exercise that worked so far. What has happened is — everybody knows the answer here, I don’t have to tell you what to do because it’s very clear — but sharing my experience: sometimes when you are in a place that has a multi-generational relationship with totalitarianism and lack of freedom of expression, you have to learn again and ask yourself very basic questions. I think it’s about value, more than anything. Rethinking what value is and who gives value to things. Because many times, in places like what Trump wants to make the United States, value is controlled solely by certain people, those in political power. And it’s about creating an alternative value system.

It’s about breaking the binarism which you are forced into in places where freedom of expression is being eliminated. Such an artificial and simplistic system (black and white / you are against or in favor) is created to make it easier to link you with other issues you have not expressed your opinion on. The government decides that if you are in favor of A, you are also in favor of B, C, and D, even if it is not the case, and if such a grouping is forced. People, after witnessing this several times, start automatically assuming that every time a person is in favor of A, the other assumptions are logical and real. That is how they create “automatic enemies” — You can address one issue not pleasing to the government, then with such false binarisms they can say that you are automatically in favor of something else, even if it is not true, and your capacity to decide how you define yourself is slowly eroded and the government starts defining who you are under such basis. I’m starting to see this here as well. Only pedagogy can change that, because we need to use the same resources authoritarians use, and education is one of them.

In this moment, I’m not interested in fixing anything inside the political institutions. I think we have to destroy and start over. A kind of abolitionist moment, in the sense of really taking the political institution apart, building with new values. People in power have appropriated our dreams. Are we going to fight over whose dream? Or start over with new dreams? Although we are in a dangerous moment right now, where we have a government that is actually ready to destroy institutions. And as much as we’ve criticized them, they’re doing a much faster and more efficient job. Very fast. So how do we deal with that?