Last year at Rethinking the University, John Conley argued that politically engaged pedagogy was a political alibi that the academic labor can’t afford to indulge in. Here, in a curious essay that has appeared in Social Text and also on interactivist, Fred Moten and Stefano Harvey argue something similar: that critical pedagogy is only the perfection of the university’s professionalizing tendencies.
…Critical education only attempts to perfect professional education. The professions constitute themselves in an opposition to the unregulated and the ignorant without acknowledging the unregulated, ignorant, unprofessional labor that goes on not opposite them but within them. But if professional education ever slips in its labor, ever reveals its condition of possibility to the professions it supports and reconstitutes, critical education is there to pick it up, and to tell it, never mind—it was just a bad dream, the ravings, the drawings of the mad. Because critical education is precisely there to tell professional education to rethink its relationship to its opposite—by which critical education means both itself and the unregulated, against which professional education is deployed. In other words, critical education arrives to support any faltering negligence, to be vigilant in its negligence, to be critically engaged in its negligence. It is more than an ally of professional education, it is its attempted completion.