Slipping in and out of the university creates networks of care and study against structures the 1AC cannot overcome.

Scenes and sights and sounds that recede into the normative and quotidian, that recede into memory, recede because of current moments of unfamiliarity. But they are unfamiliar only insofar as they mark what we have allowed to recede, what we have allowed to go unnoticed. It is easy to think of white supremacist rallies on campuses—in Charlottesville, or protests in Berkeley, or the racial terrorizing in Boston, campuses all—as spectacular because they are unfamiliar. Yet, the unfamiliar is the spectacular such that the division between— the categorical distinction of—the spectacle and the mundane are disoriented, undone. Disoriented and undone like the (non)distinction between the inside and the outside. The counterintuitive is intuitive for someone else. Disorientation, in other words, names orientation for others, orientation otherwise. The distinction between the two is not categorical, not constant, certainly not about being, not about existence. But disorientation does, at the moment of feeling, mark connection to pasts, connections to that which could be otherwise. This themed issue of Critical Ethnic Studies slips between the presumption of safety that the supposed distinction between outside and inside is thought to provide, that the distinction between the spectacular and mundane is supposed to hold. We seek, in this themed special issue, to interrogate knowledge production in academia, to consider the ways disorientation is what is necessary, disorientation as a kind of making of the mundane spectacle, allowing the quotidian and ordinary to flash before us, in haptic force, as a perpetual moment of crisis. Disorienting first, then slipping between the space, diving in the break, the essays consider what is possible, which alternative structures and logics can be practiced and performed, what otherwise modality of thought, enfleshed, collective, improvisational action can emerge from the space of the neoliberal university. To extend conversations about the efficacy of Black studies, Indigenous studies, Asian American studies, Latinx studies, women and gender studies, critical ethnic studies, to extend and enlarge the conversations to a material practice of thinking and breathing and performing the plural possibility of alternative logics is urgent in these times. Such plural possibility would be boldly irreducible. Such plural possibility would be the grounds of operation. The neoliberal university is a choice that vivifies the political economy, a choice that the political economy thus in reciprocity vivifies for the university. But as a choice, it is but one of an infinite range of choices that could be made. The university is a site of struggle and contestation. And what the university attempts is against the flourishing of survivance and abundance. The line and root of the word “abundant” marks relation to an overflowing quantity, a large number, marks an exorbitance of sufficiency, an exorbitance of plenty. The university thrives in the antithesis to abundance, thrives in producing knowledge as a limited resource and good, a limited supply and store. The university is as much a place of inhabitation and dwelling for neoliberal logics of privatization and financialization as it is an idea, a concept, a way to think antisociality as the grounds for relation. The university is a gathering of resources but in our neoliberal world, such gathering is at the expense of the intensification of displacement and degradation through settler colonial logics of land acquisition, privatization of knowledge production and the adjunctification of faculties, the making students into customers, and the financialization and profitability of research projects. In its normative function and form, then, the university exists to make some knowledges major and others minor, and then to shortcircuit and extinguish minor knowledges, minor epistemologies, because they constitute an ongoing, thoroughgoing, and unceasing variation around a theme: the performative force of the critique of Western civilization. The university, in its normative function and form, is against the flourishing of abundance. Of course, in music at least, major and minor scales mark a relation to normative Western knowledge regimes, such that the very concept of the major and minor would be interrogated by otherwise music epistemologies. The minor knowledges the university attempts to extinguish, in other words, are only minor insofar as they mark relation to otherwise modalities of thought and practice. So we turn to what minor knowledges do to the university, what such epistemological displacements produce as a disruption within and without the university, minor knowledges as a meditative practice of collective improvisation as a knowledge project of the commons. So we write and think and imagine otherwise possibility, the as if of Derrida. The as if that Derrida describes imagines that what the university is and what it could be is a space of distinction. Riffing on Derrida, the university professes the truth, and that is its profession. It declares and promises an unlimited commitment to the truth. No doubt the status of and the changes to the value of truth can be discussed ad infinitum . . . But these are discussed, precisely, in the university and in departments that belong to the humanities. These immense questions of truth and of light, of the Enlightenment . . . have always been linked to the question of man, to a concept of that which is proper to man, on which concept were founded both humanism and the historical idea of the humanities.1 We are always struggling, in other words, over the conceptual object that allows to cohere the thought related to such an object. To think about the academy and what can be done is to interrogate what—no, really, who—is supposed to occupy the space of the university, who is its pedagogies and plans created to satiate, who is its imagined audience, who is its imagined thinker that would come to learn, and in the service of what kind of world is such learning, such audience, such pedagogy, created? We are precisely always at the concerns that critical ethnic studies elaborates as an interdisciplinary field, as a way of thought, a way of life. We must now interrogate and make disoriented the very man that is considered to occupy the space of thought and action from within the university. But we must now also interrogate and make disoriented the man who produces the conceptual possibility of a hermetically sealed place of thought as well. Turns out, it’s the same concept, the same subject, dancing around and producing itself, thinking itself into being. Derrida wants to treat the university as if it is what it says it is, as if it is a space of flourishing thought, as if it is a place of critical inquiry. And this against its modernization, its corporatization, its militarization. How to work within, think within, practice poetics of peace and equity from within the space while also remaining critically aware of how the space would attempt to exploit the very projects against the university in the service of the flourishing of the neoliberal logics of the university? This is the challenge. It is also the opportunity. It is a gap to which we must be mindful, a space and break of possibility. It is in that space that the flourishing of radical thought and mood and movement can occur. I follow Cedric J. Robinson’s line and root, his theorizing of the Black Radical Tradition as the thinking that charges my imagination for imagining what can be done with the university. Robinson, in The Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership, offers that though myths exist that order the normative world, because they are mythical, they can be changed. What he offers, in other words, is a way to consider otherwise possibilities for thought, that the myths that order the normative world are but a choice made. And there is hope insofar as we can choose differently, choose alternatives.2 In this way, the essays collected are not just about what the university has excluded, what it has produced in terms of pain and suffering—though the university as concept and as a space of operation certainly has produced pain and suffering—but they are also about what can be done, how we can think, what we can be by utilizing the university as a site of inquiry and object of knowledge. We attempt ways to reimagine, to recast, to think myth differently of the university. This is a practice and process of imagination. And we can do this imagining as practice and process because the university that emerges from within Western knowledge regimes, epistemologies, and mythologies lacks the capacity to make impossible, to make a connection. We can reimagine and create otherwise mythology because connection as possible remains with us, is that which we seek and desire and outpour and extend. It is this failure, the failure to produce severance, a failure that produces the occasion for flowering in which we find joy, pleasure, knowledge as a collective project and practice. And, following the theorizing and thought Robinson made available for my own thinking, the essays collected here are not to exhaust the possibilities of discussing the problems or potentials of the modern university, but simply to suggest that therein is a potential for otherwise, for alternatives, to what is known and conceded as normative. We are not exhausting the conversation but suggesting that otherwise possibility has already been realized, is already there. 3