Abolition Pedagogy

Abstract

Abstract As the South African student movement of 2015–16 began to develop a deeper critique of the character of the transition out of apartheid and its minimal effect on the institutions of colonialism and apartheid, the administrators of postapartheid universities worked with the managers of the security infrastructure of the state to orchestrate a national police shutdown of the student and worker movement. This essay is an effort to sustain an objection to that coordinated effort, and to work through a proposal for how the new managers of the postapartheid state and university could have—should have—acted otherwise. This proposal is called abolition pedagogy, a refusal of the long-standing relationship between education and violence, and a reading of the pedagogic labor involved in antiviolence work. In the midst of the recent student protests, a 1969 exchange of letters between Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse—in which Adorno justifies his having “called the police” on the student movement in Germany—was used to justify calling the police on South African students some fifty years later. This article unpacks the citation, and uses Adorno's own commitment to critique as a “force field” to show up the limitations of his position, and to call for a different mode of engagement with the difficulties and possibilities of ongoing struggle. Adorno's “force field” is contrasted with his poor reckoning with jazz and his inability to see the work of critique in jazz and by implication in many other forms. Abolition pedagogy pursues a transformative orientation to histories of violence, asking how to sustain strategies for their unmaking.