Knowledge under Cover

Disidentification is about recycling and rethinking encoded meaning. The process of disidentification scrambles and reconstructs the encoded message of a cultural text in a fashion that both exposes the encoded message's universalizing and exclusionary machinations and recircuits its workings to account for, include, and empower minority identities and identifications. Thus, disidentification is a step further than cracking open the code of the majority; it proceeds to use this code as raw material for representing a disempowered politics or positionality that has been rendered unthinkable by the dominant culture. — JOSÉ ESTEBAN MUÑOZ, Disidentifications

I have begun to suggest the distinctive importance of aesthetic inquiry to the project of disarticulating the humanities from liberalism. That importance may be understood in short form in this twofold way: One, aesthetic inquiry emphasizes the link between what is held to be reasonable and what is viscerally experienced. In that way, it brings forward the doubled meaning of sensibility (what is held to be reasonable and what is available to the senses) and the sensus communis as a key domain of political struggle. Two, aesthetic inquiry, turned on the aesthetic itself, elucidates the historic and ongoing uses of art — of its meanings, its constitution and definition — in the service of dominant regimes of power (i.e., liberal modernity) as well as by those subjugated by and within them. The suppression of experience and onto-epistemologies incommensurate with the logics of the dominant is of a piece with the dehumanization through colonialism, settler colonialism, and racism justified by the developmental telos of liberalism. The aesthetic and the subordinated — "the minor" — accordingly are aligned, a shared positioning that gives aesthetic inquiry special purchase in the project of bringing alternative humanities to bear.

In this chapter, I invite us to consider the impact of aesthetic inquiry, understood in this way, on our understanding of the power and operations of the privileged paradigms of the liberal humanities, exemplified by those organizing knowledge production and prioritization in the discipline of English and the field of American Literature. I follow the lead of writer Lan Samantha Chang, and draw from visual art by Allan deSouza and Carrie Mae Weems, as I make the case for deliberate disidentification from the liberal humanities. Chang's novella, Hunger, helps us apprehend such humanities in contemporary form as an apparatus of the U.S. nation-state, and unfolds the meanness and inadequacy of the aesthetic education it offers. Bound to the ideologies of the modern nation-state as exemplified by the United States, they require both a disavowal of its foundational and ongoing violences, which is effected through the production of ignorance under the guise of knowledge, and a prioritization of abstract ideals over empirical realities. DeSouza and Weems, together with Chang, invite us to think here specifically about the implications of these insights on the horizons and practices of minoritized discourses in the academy, as well as those of fields like American Literature, which have become multicultural in ways that attest to the pervasiveness and power of liberal common sense. What emerges is a reminder of the continuing force of U.S. nationalism and its ability, through its promulgation of liberalism, to conserve power and resources for a few at the expense of a great many. Aesthetic education through the received humanities buttresses these exclusionary ideologies and practices. The governing proposition of this chapter is this: While their defunctioning cannot alone forestall the injurious activities of the U.S. nation-state, we can at the least stop submitting to its demands as we claim the humanities as a ground for bringing forth sensibilities that grapple with rather than cover over its constitutive violence.

In this regard, my address here is directed to those of us who, in light of the strategy of "represent and destroy" that is liberalism's response to racism and settler colonialism, seek ways of working in and through the university against and beyond the liberal order. There is much unavailable to our immediate control in remediating the structures and effects of racism and colonialisms, but the creation of curricular and other structural pedagogies that refuse inducement to identify with liberalism and with the U.S. nation is well within our reach. Under the aegis of the humanities, I believe we can amplify the work of antiracist critique, Indigenous and settler colonial studies, ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies — of, in short, the work issuing from and within the dispersed administrative/classification units of the institution, and emergent from the people and communities subjugated or otherwise minoritized in the service of upholding the rightness of the liberal order. I envision our work as putting into place, as others who came before us did, ideas and practices that will allow us to look back on this time and identify what we were collectively able to do despite as well as because of institutionalization, and despite as well as because of the political economic conditions and policies that subordinate the importance of aesthetics to the production of common sense. What will the humanities have stood for, what will they have been and done, in this long era of normalized war making in the name of humanity, impoverishment in the name of progress, surveillance and multifaceted suppression of dissent in the name of civic society, and mass incarceration of especially Black and Brown people for the sake of the public good? How do we put into place concepts and structures to realize a humanities that elicits subjectivities and social formations that demand and secure the conditions necessary to the flourishing of people rather than nations, of lives rather than ideas?

Both the exigency for and the difficulty of contesting the received iteration of the humanities come of the assaultive pressures on higher education that characterize the current conjuncture. Neoliberalization, the process whereby personal responsibility delinked from history and the deployment of free-market ideology in every facet of life are compulsorily mandated, is plainly legible in the defunding of public higher education that has continued apace since the 1970s. The minimal funding that is now available — down to about 34 percent on average, from a high of about 60 percent in 1975 (in national average terms) — is contingent on market-driven performance standards that simultaneously assert the inadequacy of government and the efficiency of corporate structures to administer all aspects of society, and education most decidedly. These policies have led to sharp increases in tuition — as much as 247 percent since the 1970s at flagship state universities, and by about 164 percent at community colleges....