I have just submitted the final draft for a monograph with MayFly Books. The title is The Dissolution of the Universities. This book was written in the shadow of Gaza. It forms one strand of my grieving and mourning the wrongness of the world
The blurb for the book is as follows…
The English University feels broken. We witness a political economic crisis for institutions that is tightening. Through this, the power of finance capital is a limiting factor shaping the horizon of our intellectual work. It feels like this terrain has been unfolding in ever more negative ways, in spite of the demonstrations, occupations and alternative education projects in the period after 2010. Beyond value-for-money, our universities are shaped tactically against culture wars, fetishised ideas of freedom of speech, and authoritarian responses to student protest in the form of Gaza encampments.
Yet a range of recent abolitionist praxis, with a deep, historical lineage, helps us to question how our intellectuality might be released towards a new horizon. The Dissolution of the Universities places these connected moments and movements of struggle into dialogue with the student revolts of 2010-11 and the Gaza encampments , in order to develop a key question of radical educator Mike Neary in his work on student-as-producer and pedagogies of excess. This becomes: how and where do revolutionary teachers teach, after [the revelation of] Gaza?
This book engages with this question as a means of challenging the wrongness of the University in its settler-colonial forms and contents. It connects with the recent history of radical alternatives as a moment of dissolution and resolution, through dialogue with traditions of indigenous, decolonial and abolitionist studies. Its intention is to describe what lies at the horizon of University abolition, and what its transcendence might mean.
The work engages with Mike Neary’s analysis of the social form of the University and our doing inside-and-against it. This is a critique of the wrongness represented by the University and the opportunities that our students being in excess of themselves offer us, for negating, abolishing and transcending (sublating) the identities, disciplines and institutions that we fetishise.
On sending me some feedback for this book, Ana Dinerstein pointed me to a quotation of Walter Benjamin from the final chapter: ‘Hell is not what awaits us but this life, here and now… That it goes on like this is the catastrophe.’ Ana asked me to consider my position in relation to this, and asked me to think about the possibility for struggle, negation, dissolution, resolution and so on. She asked me, ‘where do you position yourself: catastrophe? Pull the brake to stop the train?’ I dwell on this question. Of course, I bear witness and listen to testimony. I try not to forget my humanity. I try to hold the door open for people, as best I can. And I try to remember that dissolution and sublation must begin at home, and with heart.
However, it also feels important to remind myself that a core metaphor for me in this book is that of the mycorrhizal network – an organic process grounded in life and living, unfolding and emerging through composting and recycling. This cannot be detailed as a blueprint or a model or a plan. So, I cannot engage in the work of prescribing what educators should do now. Instead, I steward my energy to end this book with a statement of what I will commit to doing now: my heartfelt commitment to enriching the possibility for a new social horizon beyond the inhumanity of capital and the toxic value-form.
I am immensely grateful to Dr Basma Hajir, for her foreword. It is a gift.
The structure of the book is as follows.
1: we are not for the University
2: being against what the University has become
3: abolition, sublation, dissolution
4: this kaleidoscope must be smashed
5: the political economy of Mike Neary: anti-value in motion
6: Occupy!, populist organising and the University
7: co-operative organising in-and-against the University
8: student-as-producer and a pedagogy of excess
9: social being and becoming
10: is another University possible?
Go well, and in peace.