What then of the “error” of followers? — Cedric Robinson

You could call this a crisis or a struggle, a personal struggle. Perhaps an opportunity for repentance, autocritique, a think-piece. Or you could call it a political contest, a conflict, and even a war, an ongoing war (which often calls for repentance, as well, collective repentance, and indeed autocritique). Well past any beginning, Jacques Derrida knew something about calling and naming such things and others, too. On a number of occasions, at any rate, Derrida named war and specifically when speaking of the university — of Nietzsche and the university, for instance — but also when asserting "that we can no longer trust, we know that it was undoubtedly never possible, in fact, to trust to such a boundary between ‘war’ and ‘conflict,’ between the socio-political outsides and insides of an institution like the university."[1] At the risk of spreading confusion (by now unavoidable, in any case), Derrida invoked war again when writing of politics and of one (or One), of any so-called singular or collective unit at war with itself, doing violence to, and also guarding, itself for and from itself, or another. And again, particularly vividly, in his last interview, Derrida named war again. There, he spoke of being at war with himself.

We, then. For it would have to be a “we” that speaks henceforth, in and of the university, given that state of division and of discord. A “we” neither timely nor representative, and certainly not of any alleged unit (“We cannot represent ourselves,” Stefano Harney and Fred Moten write, recasting Marx), nor facing any agreed-upon war front or well-identified emergency.[2] None otherwise loudly carried by headlines or public pronouncements, or with the dubious obviousness of a defining (and always poorly defined) moment (Did Hegel know that the revolution in Haiti would turn into philosophy’s or history’s defining moment? And did it?). A “we” that is many, exposed with varying degrees of vulnerability (or security) and transparency to permanent contestation and conflict, but a “we” nevertheless. We, then, are or become divided. Which is to say, out of the diminished lexical sources that remain: we are at war with ourselves.

So much for an introduction. And hardly a newsflash these days, even if an account, much less a topography, or a geography of that “event” (division, war), is indeed wanting. We still do not know ourselves, we scholars. Or so Nietzsche declared, who, expert that he was, intended by no means to confine himself to (warning) the university, much less “his” university. We certainly do not know our divisions, the divisions of the university, the conflicts of the faculties. Not what they are, nor where they are (here or there, inside or outside, on this earth or in a poem, as Mahmoud Darwish wrote), nor therefore who we are or become with regard to the sides of this or that division, the nature and relative importance, the urgency, of the fractures, as we hold onto this fort or that brokenness. As we gather, if we gather, what do we call or name ourselves? Are we standing our ground, as they say, defending our values, praying for survival, or announcing better days, a bright future, or else a house divided? A house destroyed?

It might have seemed extreme once to refer to the current conjecture, to the current state of our affairs, academic or other, and to call it, war (Is inner struggle better? Is polarization? Is education? How about security and safety, “equal opportunity and safety,” as Audre Lorde reminded us[3]?). By now, violent operations and confrontations, no longer covert, are all too manifest. Well past any beginning, at any given moment, all of us, each and every righteous among us, might experience or else initiate a transgression of some unexpected border (national, racial, sexual or grammatical, historical even or, obviously, emotional). An abrupt kaleidoscopic rotation — ah but to which side? — might reveal a failure or failing, an (un)protected vulnerability, an inner or outer fragment or fragmentation, a new division or exclusion, ephemeral as it may also be, that nevertheless constitutes this or that face of ours exposed to an audience or to a witness, to the police or to the public (or at least the cameras), to the world, but also to another within or among us, and even to ourselves. And it is difficult, in the abstract but concretely, too, to acknowledge faults or to identify stable fault lines. Difficult to identify the proper enclave, to refer to any one of these fragments or divisions as primary, indisputably urgent (whose safety most urgent, whose survival), or indeed, to distinguish between closure, disclosure and concealment, between substance and appearance, essence or accident, fact and fiction. Between war and peace.

Are we, for instance — am I? — merchant or Jew? Activist or scholar (“Speak to it, Horatio!”)? Indebted body or free soul? Gendered, classed, or raced? Race or religion? Individual or social? Public or private? Leader or follower? Local or global? Right or Left, I mean, right or wrong? Bereft of rhetorical resources, in any case, we might nevertheless recognize that “progressives” today are those who hold on to a rapidly vanishing past (institutions, principles, protections), while “conservatives” are moving fast and breaking things, old and new, past and future. There are masters of war, and then there are teachers of words. Those who can (not teach) . . .

Speaking of individuals, Erwin Goffman famously broke the matter down and described our many masks (the word ‘person,’ from the Latin persona, used to mean ‘mask’). Goffman also spoke of “fronts” and “front regions,” which he thought divided as well, and difficult, in any case, to confine to individual performances. Judith Butler, in a passage of sheer brilliance and promise, doubled down. Butler is notorious for having written about performance, of course, but equally important, I think, is their elaboration of an “embarrassed” and “exasperated,” “illimitable et cetera” that inevitably concludes, without concluding, a list of predicates, a “horizontal trajectory of adjectives” that seek to “encompass a situated subject, but invariably fail to be complete.”[4] Et cetera — one (but it is many) more inchoate fragment among the exposed faces or hidden features of an ever uncertain subject, that poorly named, and ever so divided, ever so crowded, disseminated, individual (“the current mode of civility is control itself which asks the subject to move from one identification to the next without the promise of an end or discrete starting point for a progressive and autonomous life path,” in Julie Webber’s uneasy rendering[5]). A “we” that dare not, that cannot call their name. Our name. Et cetera may very well be one of our names (meta-data another). Or all of them. It is, in any case, “the supplément, the excess that necessarily accompanies any effort to posit identity once and for all,” and it “offers itself as a new departure,” Butler promises, toward a different political thought.

Among the political models, ways of thinking and governing the plural, which we have inherited from navigation to medicine, from the pastoral to the mechanical, the commercial and the managerial (the digital recently snuck in on the heels of the financial, and these may well be the end of all models, the season finale of our discontent), war has certainly been ubiquitous, differentially dystopic or even atopic, if not necessarily, or not obviously, dominating attention (think: “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword,” for instance). War, which we still think distinct from “civil war,” imposes a plurality — a “we” lived on scales of impossibility — and it seems compelling, therefore, as a way of thinking, let alone of confronting, administering fronts or eradicating divisions, within and without. Elsewhere, I have tried to argue that dance could have offered a different, and perhaps more generative, leaderless and also ephemeral, imaginary for the concerted, collective action in time, which we might otherwise feel compelled to call by that Greek word, politics, such as it has imposed itself in translation (unless it has been, like dēmokratía, “mere” transliteration).[6]

Here, at any rate, I wish to pursue a different line of reflection, explore a different model, perhaps, one that, disconcerted and disconcerting, might appear, were it to have appeared, to fly in the face of a definite consensus. Such consensus has politics find its point of departure where “family” ends (over against “politics,” the term family comes from Latin, the “same” Latin that will accompany us here). Variations, one might say, of Butler’s et cetera (which is Latin too, of course). Indeed, whether it has ever been possible to think politics outside of kinship, a slightly better term, and, more precisely, outside of reproductive practices, indeed outside of what Amaryah Armstrong calls “theological reproduction,” the figure, one might say, of reproduction, has certainly persisted (even Donna Haraway writes, towards “a more livable cosmopolitics,” of “making kin” but think of the rhetoric of demographic decline, of demographic threat[7]). It remains the case that fathers, what are called fathers, while never quite Cartesian (or Foucauldian) subjects, have repeatedly appeared and persisted as significant political figures, models of leadership and government, vectors of power, order and of stability (the terms of order, in Cedric Robinson’s phrase). As have brothers, of course, with the whole thing being conveniently summarized by Freud as war within the family — that is, the “manosphere” version of the family — in Totem and Taboo. If reproduction constitutes a keyword here, it is however less because of some primacy of origin, natural, historical or biological, much less because it provides a transparent model of authority, rule or government, let alone of subjectivity or subjectivation, but rather because politics — what I am calling here concerted collective action in time — cannot be thought, or practiced, outside of time and temporality and, more specifically, outside of duration. Time exposes any and all collective to the problem of perdurance and preservation, transmission and, more generally therefore, reproduction. Neither origin nor beginning, reproduction extends and gives form to, it enables change and duration, preservation and transformation. Dissolution or destruction too. The end of the republic or the death of the people.[8] You might say that it disconcerts too.

Reproduction is why what I have proposed to consider, namely, the political as maternal, might reveal pertinent in the time that remains. It speaks to the past, obviously, with no programmatic ambition and merely to foreground the temporal and lasting dimension of collectives, the dimension of duration, with reproduction as perdurance and preservation. As loss and destruction, too, or extinction. It signals, in any case, the reiterated (but by no means necessarily the selfsame) inscription of the collective upon the world and upon the bodies of “newcomers by birth” and by other means, other immigrants, as Hannah Arendt put it, these “new ones.”[9] An aesthetic education, Gayatri Spivak adds, outside in the teaching machine, but mostly a continuing education, lasting practices of instruction and of repetition, of training or disciplining, branding and inscribing. The condition of possibility and impossibility of the collective, of any collective. Thus far, that is. Because, to summarize, we have all been mothered. More or less, well, more or less by our own mothers. Over time. Reproduction in this broad sense, the perdurance of the collective, is thus maternal because its essential aspects — giving and sustaining, extending and reproducing forms — have everything to do with mothering, the multiple functions and multifarious instructions and inscriptions that, extending time and extended in time, have been historically and habitually performed by mothers, which is to say, overwhelmingly though not exclusively by women. Of “diverse” (if not equal or inclusive) complexions. Or so you might recall, if you’ve read Hortense Spillers, say, Rita Segato or Leila Slimani. But the Bible would work just as well (Sarah and Hagar). Even better. Think of these as opportunities to learn that the maternal is plural, inherently so. Conflicted. At war. In an endless field of variations (other et ceteras), mothers and, Patricia Hill Collins reminds us, othermothers are, in any case, “real,” which is to say that they have been at once material and figurative, fictitious (made, unmade, and surely enforced) embodiments and ensoulments of functions, maternal functions and divisions (less often of authority and order, if not by any measure of necessity), indispensable for the preservation and perdurance of collectives over time, their interruption and destruction.

Mothers, I am saying (as if it were my idea), have long inscribed the world upon children and these children upon the world. Never simply origins, birth or beginnings, never simply “natural,” much less “biological” (that common anachronism in the wake of modern scientism),[10] mothers and othermothers raise children (they also kill them, yes, they do). They shape them and instruct them by feeding, touching, talking, guiding, teaching. They inscribe themselves as and upon adults as well, with and for the world, sometimes also against or in the absence of world, a present absence that registers in a “positive” struggle or in actual abandonment, often with devastating effects.

Mothers and, otherwise concretely, maternal writing, thus constitute, institute, and potentially destroy — over time, that is — the infrastructure of the political. There is or was, accordingly, a maternal contract that transgenerationally binds and unbinds mothers to mothers and mothers to children (mothers to slaves too, but I won’t revisit this here, except to signpost that some functions, faculties or disciplines have been considered ancillary, from ancillae, servants or handmaids, slaves even, about which there remains so much more to say, as Sara-Maria Sorentino reminds us[11]). A maternal contract. Eminently revocable, such contract alerts us to that which, otherwise perfectly evident (and therefore mostly invisible), flashed in a moment of danger in, but this is only one example, the writings of Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes, of all people, grasped the rudiments of maternal sovereignty, which he identified as the power to preserve and the power to destroy. A reproduction that is also an extinction, a writing that is also an erasure. That one of the most essential of maternal functions would thus be called “education” — the instructive and destructive dimensions of which cannot be overstated — is hardly surprising, therefore, whether we understand by this word the work (or war) of “actual” mothers, or the disseminated series of affective, nourishing and otherwise physical (sculptural and gestural, sartorial too) as well as habitual, material, linguistic and rhetorical, social and ritual, technical or economic training and formation — inscription and erasure. And also care, of course, scarce as it might be, yet no less necessary to the collective, always collective, becoming of beings, human and other, over time. Needless to say, innumerable struggles, unspeakable wars and (il)legible inscriptions, “the violence of education in the socialization process,” or “the civilizing process,” are here enfolded and concealed, mobilized and arrested, confirmed and erased, integrated or disintegrated.[12] The political as maternal is, in every case, divided, fragmented. Perhaps, again, disconcerted. You might say, as if this too were a newsflash, that mothers have been at war with themselves.

This state of war that is also the state of our education could perhaps contribute to an opportune understanding, an old-new angle, or else another kaleidoscopic turn (in Erica Edward’s take on James Baldwin[13]), on that peculiar and largely unreflected maternal site, the political site I mean to address in the second and third parts of this essay, along with the divisions out of which I write. Out of which we write and teach. I mean not those “ancient centers of higher learning,” to which Michael Peters rightly called our attention, not primarily, but here at least (and at last) the Western university. Alma mater.

Anidjar's Alma Mater (the University at War) 4-part series continues with Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.