In case you haven’t heard, the USA is going Children of Men faster than even the black-pilled doomers and ultraleft pessimists thought it would. This raises uncomfortable questions: If our leaders are depraved, or at best passive in the face of immediate, overlapping, terrifying crises, what are the rest of us supposed to do? If the world is disintegrating, what’s the point of trying to hold fragments together? Why bother? Despair beckons.
A modest comfort for me is understanding that my life in North American academia is part of a vast collective project. Some professors—especially people in the elite tenured classes—think of themselves as stars: brilliant islands of intellectual work. But that isn’t really the case. Even a singular genius is tied to someone else’s (lots of someone elses’) thought and labor in multiple spatiotemporal ways. There are no walled gardens of the mind.
You try to teach with reality in view. To be direct, no fooling: I think it is impossible, now, to do meaningful work in “the humanities” without being fundamentally anticapitalist. Come on, it’s the 2020s. We know the score. If Left and progressive faculty care about the things we say we care about—racism, patriarchy, the refugee crisis, student mental health, climate change—we have to confront (and dismantle) the system that intensifies and generates wealth from these catastrophes.1
The problem is that while the corporate university can make room for all sorts of programmatic critiques of rather broad ills like “systemic racism” or “economic inequality” or “the gender pay gap,” it generally doesn’t want faculty and students creating seminars, symposia, study groups, teach-ins, conferences, clubs, and such oriented toward opposing capitalism itself, at the root.
The suffocating logic of this system bends all human energy and beauty (education included) toward the accumulation of wealth and the political power attendant upon it. Capitalism is violently, ontologically inhuman, a market perversion of sociality, a monster spun off from our own death drive.2 The profit motive is no longer existentially compatible with humanist inquiry, whether lyrical, narrative, or theoretical, because by turning Homo sapiens into Homo economicus it puts thick blinders on us and undercuts the power of critique. It’s not even compatible with biological life—capital is boiling the planet, after all.
In Art After Money, Money After Art (2018), Max Haiven theorizes the radical imagination as a collective, networked project, a transformative solidarity rather than an isolated cognitive capacity. In seeking worlds beyond our despicable status quo, “the radical imagination is not something an individual has, but something collectivities do.”3 We think and dream together.
Could the university harbor this radical imaginative solidarity? Maybe. Certainly, for me, the magic of education is inextricable from the experience of just being in a space with other human intellects. That’s the foundation of “taking a class.”
Then again, actual universities have police forces, contract employees, rental holdings, investment portfolios. They are conservative players in society. But they’re also big, comparatively open zones, labyrinths where the radical might flower, even if surreptitiously now, in an era of rising eco-fascism.
This radical energy is the “dark matter” of higher education. It pulls the entire sector into whatever good it ever does.
My socialist dream is for at least some universities to be true democratic havens, beacons of care and knowledge that could help steer American society toward the satisfaction of human needs (like housing, food, medicine) and away from the demons of profit. We’ll see.
So why bother? I guess because, well, what else are you going to do? Give up and die? I’d prefer not to.
In his forthcoming Toward an Anti-Capitalist Composition (Utah State University Press, 2022), James Rushing Daniel elaborates on how writing instruction in particular might contest capitalist ideology and its associated discursive and imaginative practices. More on this soon; editors, hit me up.
In an 1844 manuscript Marx refers to the profit motive as “an inhuman power [that] rules over everything.” I am indebted to Ben Tarnoff for this observation about Marx’s rhetoric; see Tarnoff, Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future (New York: Verso, 2022), p. 36.
Max Haiven, Art After Money, Money After Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization (London: Pluto, 2018), p. 11, original italics. Haiven rejects the conceit that “art” and “money” are opposites or polarities; rather, he argues that both are imaginative products of capitalism. As such, I’m not sure he would buy my claim that capitalism and humanist inquiry are now antagonists. Certainly many institutional forms of arts + humanities activity are framed within and by liberal capitalism. Rich people donate to universities. Corporations sponsor performances, art shows, book festivals, and so on. You get the picture.