Thinking and teaching beyond the terror of capitalist reason

Abstract

The contemporary landscape of dread in living and teaching demands a creative and experimental form of investigation that can trace the affective contours of the present and uncover the obscure openings for an oppositional imagination. In a series of interlinked excurses, this essay articulates a poetic probing of the nexus of slow fascism and capitalist realism in the contemporary United States, as this is lived in the waking dreams of pedagogy and imaginative praxis. Looking beyond familiar analyses, this project exposes the terror of loss that motivates the punishments visited upon school and society by elites and points to the spectral presence of justice, which lives with us as persistent horizon even as it is persistently refused by power. Interleaved with these unravelings of the texture of experience as domination, this project gestures toward a thinking and teaching that is wise to capitalism’s recurrent fantasies. This pedagogy inverts the certainties that organize our senses of knowledge and curriculum, navigates the hidden topology of the real (beyond the reflexive affirmation in schools of what is), and proposes an unruly form of thought that moves out past the walls that sign the edge of the classroom and the edge of the truth. This project does not announce a settled approach but rather challenges the limits of the familiar at the level of our structures of feeling. We feel the terror of the given in the present, but we can also follow the seam of experience toward the point at which its impositions are attached—in spite of themselves—to the confounding/liberatory logic of the “impossible.”