America needs to own its violent history so as to understand and transform the ways our subjectivities have been formed through the legacies of enslavement, human trafficking, genocide, colonization, war, and commercialization. This requires more of a willingness to interrogate violence in a variety of registers (ranging from the historical and concrete to the abstract and symbolic) than it does a bending of discourses of fate and normalization. America needs to acknowledge its own shameful compromises with various manifestations of power. And America needs to accept that intellectualism shares an intimate relationship with violence both in its complicity with violence and as an act of violence.
There is an echo of the pornographic here in the ethical detachment that now accompanies the spectacles of violence to which we are forced witnesses. We need to reject what Leo Lowenthal has called the imperative to believe that “thinking becomes a stupid crime.” This does not require a return to the language of Benjamin’s idea of “divine violence” as a pure expression of force regardless of its contestable claims to nonviolent violence. We prefer instead to deploy the often abused term “critical pedagogy” as a meaningful political counter to vicissitudes of intellectual violence.
Pedagogy always represents a commitment to the future, and it remains the task of educators to make sure that the future points the way to a more socially just world, a world in which the discourse of critique and possibility in conjunction with the values of reason, freedom, and equality function to alter, as part of a broader democratic project, the grounds upon which life is lived.
Instead of accepting the role of the compromised intellectual as embodied in the likes of Levy and Ferguson, we must acknowledge the urgent need for public intellectuals in the academy, art world, business sphere, media, and other cultural apparatuses to move from negation to hope. Now more than ever we need reasons to believe in this world. This places renewed emphasis on forms of critical pedagogy that enable citizens to reclaim their voices, speak out, exhibit ethical outrage, and create the social movements, tactics, and public sphere that will reverse the growing tide of political fascism on all sides. Such intellectuals are essential to any viable notion of democracy, as social well-being depends on a continuous effort to raise disquieting questions and challenges, use knowledge and analytical skills to address important social problems where possible, and redirect resources back to communities, families, and individuals who cannot survive and flourish without them. Engaged public intellectuals are especially needed at a time when it is necessary to resist the call to violence and its normalization through repetition.
It is time to remind ourselves that critical ideas are a matter of critical importance. Those public spheres in which critical thought is nurtured provide the minimal conditions for people to become worldly, take hold of important social issues, and alleviate human suffering in order to make more equitable and just societies. Ideas are not empty gestures, and they do more than express a free-floating idealism. Ideas provide a crucial foundation for assessing the limits and strengths of our senses of individual and collective agency and what it might mean to exercise civic courage in order to not merely live in the world, but to shape it in light of democratic ideals that would make it a better place for everyone. Critical ideas and the technologies, institutions, and public sphere that enable them matter because they offer us the opportunity to think and act otherwise, challenge common sense, cross over into new lines of inquiry and take positions without standing still—in short, to become border crossers who refuse the silos that isolate and determine the future of thought. Some intellectuals refute the values of criticality. They don’t engage in debates; they simply offer already rehearsed positions in which unsubstantiated opinion and sustained argument collapse into each other. It is time then for critical thinkers with a public interest to make pedagogy central to any viable notion of politics. It is a time to initiate a cultural campaign in which the positive virtues of radical criticality can be reclaimed, courage to truth defended, and learning connected to social change energized. Our task to implement a return to the political is a matter of critical urgency. -- America at War with Itself
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