NOTE FOR THE OPENING PLENARY: WHAT IS INSURRECTIONARY KNOWLEDGE?

PROTEST WORKSHOP SEPTEMBER 14, 2011 SONIPAT, INDIA By WENDY BROWN University of California, Berkeley

I am very sorry not to be with you in person today at this timely and exciting workshop. Human Rights Beyond the Law promises to be at once intellectually stimulating, artistically rich and politically inspiringa feast for critical intellectuals. In lieu of a formal talk (which he did his persistent and charming best to try to get me to come to India to deliver) Oishik Sircar asked me to offer a few brief thoughts about the plenary theme, What is Insurrectionary Knowledge? This question, as we all know, always has geopolitically and historically specific answers: what is insurrectionary at one time and place may not be so at another. Here I think of Herbert Marcuses insightful recognition, at the opening of Repressive Tolerance, that tolerance doctrine emerged in early modern Europe as subversive and liberating but became in the twentieth century an instrument of false neutrality that facilitated passivity in the face of grievous political formations and practices. I think, too, of the ways in which insurrectionary knowledges about women, sexual and ethnic minorities, and even class became institutionalized in universities as programs in gender and ethnic studies, or sociology, and how this institutionalization at times neutered and tamed their insurrectionary force, even turning them in a conservative direction more invested in securing the identity-based programs than in emancipating individuals from those identity markings. I think of how subaltern and postcolonial studies, so important in decentering the West and challenging Orientalist epistemologies and ontologies, became a hegemonic critical knowledge frame for the global south yet comported poorly with the history and politics of a place like China. I think, too, of the markedly differential ways in which critical theoretical concerns with secularism and religion, or human rights and freedom, travel, speak and are heard in various parts of the globe today. Or consider the importance of challenging the Western Civilization courses comprising dead white men in EuroAtlantic universities in the middle of the last century, and then contemplate the meaning of the potential disappearance of liberal arts curriculums from public universities today. This last problem is the one I wish to dwell on for a moment, with the reminder, again, that it is surely peculiar to my time and place and may not even travel well to the one in which you are listening to these words. One devastating effect of neoliberalism on higher education in the United States and England is that, in all but the most elite tier (Oxford, Harvard, etc.), neoliberal metrics are exerting enormous pressure on universities to provide workplace skills rather than develop the intellect and character of the citizen and the person. Neoliberalisms construction of education as an investment in human capital means that a liberal arts education for the many is rapidly being thrown over for a 1

high end technical or vocational one. We are essentially witnessing a return to a past in which the liberal arts were restricted to the leisured class while education for the many is oriented toward labor. In some cases, this development literally means that university-eligible students choose vocational rather than university educations, abjuring ever more expensive universities for post-secondary schools (often proprietary) that expressly offer job training. But it also means there is a great deal of pressure on universities themselves, especially those historically attended by the working and middle classes, to orient their curriculums and culture to practical skill acquisition, a pressure compounded by skyrocketing tuition rates and student debt-financing of their education. Concretely this means universities are bulking up business, sciences, engineering and other professional schools and disinvesting in the soft social sciences, humanities and arts. They are using more on-line courses and shrinking time to degree, reducing breadth requirements and the sheer time for exploration and contemplation that a baccalaureate has long entailed. Indeed, every aspect of university life is being re-made by the emphasis on developing students as human capital and developing research as immediately marketable: the American public university is less and less a place of thinking, wondering, researching and deliberating. All of this is old news but heres the specific point I want to make today: As the liberal arts are diminished in value and reduced in availability, those of us long critical of the conservative aspects of a liberal arts curriculum must shift horses and do so very fast. In my view, we must articulate the value and right to a specifically liberal arts education for the masses. This means arguing both for the central place of such education in the university and of arguing for the importance of continued access to that education by those with decreased means to obtain it as public universities privatize in every respect. We must argue for the importance of the broadly and deeply educated citizen, one who may well have a specialization but above all gains knowledge across the arts, sciences and letters. There is hardly anything more radical today, hardly anything more subversive of neoliberal values and their reduction of university purposes and human beings to market metrics. An educated citizenry, which the liberal arts was originally born to nourish among the elite and which was also the radical democratic promise of extending it to the many, is an essential element in the struggle against the neoliberalization of the earth. This is not to say that all who are educated will oppose the submission of every aspect of planetary existence to a market rationality. But there is no hope of mounting this opposition, at a mass level, without such education. To conclude: Critical theory and radical pedagogy are great. Academic boycotts are sometimes necessary as are mass strikes. But at this conjuncture, at least where I work and think, there is enormous radical potential in fighting for what, at another time and place, might have seemed a rather tepid project. The struggle for mass access to a liberal arts higher education, a struggle Chilean, Greek, Swedish, American, British and activists elsewhere have been waging in recent months, is also an occasion to link arms with university faculty and citizens not particularly identified with or drawn to the Left. The threatened disappearance of liberal arts curriculums from public universities and threatened elimination of mass access to higher educationthese are issues that can 2

politicize and radicalize the most staid classicist, the most politically withdrawn physicist, the most scholarly worm in the soon-to-be-shrinking university libraries. In our time, insurrectionary knowledge may be knowledge and thinking as such. Its threatened status is not only urgent to resist, this resistance may win us new allies in the struggle against governance of all sentient life by this latest and most astonishing modality of capital we call neoliberalism.