Critical pedagogy beyond the multitude: Decolonizing Hardt and Negri

Abstract

The work of Hardt and Negri offers the field of education important theoretical resources for reconceptualizing subjectivity as a site of politics. Yet recent shifts on the Left toward more articulated mobilizations, along with the emergence of new decolonizing movements that interrogate the undifferentiated character of the common, partly affirm long-standing critiques of Hardt and Negri’s theses. Rather than rejecting their arguments, we should rethink their central assertions—from the starting point of decolonial theory—in a way that responds to these concerns. We argue that the notion of constituent power grounding their theorization of politics be rethought in dialogue with the ethico-political concept of obediential power (Dussel, 2008); that the “monstrous” subjectivity they propose as the mode of exodus from given forms of biopolitical production take direction from Wynter’s (2006) new Human Project; and that the insurrectionary figure of the multitude be reconsidered alongside the variegated figure of insurgent cosmopolitanism (Santos, 2014). This rethinking restores to Hardt and Negri’s project a more contextualized and less universalistic theory of politics, and establishes a foundation for a critical pedagogy that, beginning from an accountability to student agency, engages a form of insurgent leadership that responds to the centrality in capitalist education of the historical processes of colonial partition.