The Categorical Crisis Moment
To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough.
Combahee River Collective (1977)
There’s a categorical category crisis going on. There is a categorical imperative to “denounce” and “condemn,” even as the category of humans in whose name this denouncing and condemning is being done—Jews—are not allowed to question it. It’s so excessive that it’s become a decisive moment, one that could go either way. People in higher education: this means you, now.
This week the president of Penn, a WASP institution if ever there was one, was fired for not being actively anti-antisemitic enough. According to a private-equity firm manager and donor. Although it seems everyone is ok with the white supremacist law professor at Penn, not to mention the chaos over its collections of human remains.
If you feel like you’re losing your mind among all this, you are—or more exactly, you’re losing a fiction of “mind” known as the Western “rational” self. When the Algerian-Jewish philosopher Jacques Derrida said this was happening in the 1980s, he was denounced. The denouncers then are still denouncing, only this time it’s supposedly “for” Jews, or at least the Israeli nation-state. A Jew must also be denounced as antisemitic if they have not sufficiently denounced. All this has displaced the categorical moral imperative into a category crisis.
Kant Can’t
In Immanuel Kant’s famous 1785 formulation, the categorical imperative requires that one should:
Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.
In today’s categorical imperative, each person must denounce “Hamas” to demonstrate that this denunciation should become a universal law. Palestinians have become pirates, hostis humani generis, the enemy of humankind. But that simply begs the question of who counts as “human” in the first place.
I still remember reading Henry Louis Gates’ “Race,” Writing and Difference (1985) as a graduate student and being shocked by Kant’s naked racism, as in his claim that “the Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling.” At the time, Kant’s Critique of Judgment was still highly influential in art history and this collision set me on a direction away from the discipline.
Inevitably, as Fanon pointed out, such anti-Black racism implied anti-Jewish racism. Kant defined Jews as “heteronomous,” defined by philosopher Laurie Shrage as meaning “incapable of transcending material forces, which a moral order required.” It followed that, as Shrage put it, “Jews are the opposite of autonomous, rational Christians.” Maybe not the best way to combat antisemitism, after all.
Further, as Macarthur Fellow and scholar of art and mass incarceration Nicole Fleetwood has recently argued,
Kant’s racial hierarchy of aesthetic discernment is also key to his thinking about punishment and captivity (Marking Time, 30).
Fleetwood shows how Kant insisted on inflexible punishment of the criminal, as he put it, “simply because he has committed a crime.” This hierarchy of punishment marks both the prison-industrial complex in the US, and the doctrine of non-equivalent suffering in Palestine. Israel always ensures that Palestinian suffering exceeds Israeli suffering by a large factor, as if each potential Palestinian fighter or resister would make a rational calculation and decide that this made action too costly.
In short, Kant and his categories can’t help us here—unless we detour.
Infrastructures of Solidarity
Writing in Document in the past week, media theorist McKenzie Wark understands
the gamespace of the world as… a zero-sum contest of winners and losers… a media infrastructure designed to steer us away from solidarity.
Needless to say, most games are first-person shooters.
Many activists and thinkers have sought to unbuild the hierarchy of “winners and losers,” as constructed by Kant. The artist Adrian Piper has long thought with Kant against the notion of a single “rational” self. Piper instead aspires to create “a collaborative and transpersonally rational procedure of deliberation” to overcome the contradiction between individual desire(s) and reason.
Perhaps the “trans” in her transpersonal reads differently now than it did in 2008, but Piper had performed The Mythic Being, a masculine transpersonality in 1973-75, who some art critics have described as a “drag king.” Even if that feels reductive, it opens the conventional philosophical discussion of Piper’s work to a more speculative take.
Writing about The Mythic Being, Piper further described how
The point at which I FALTERED indicated something fairly significant about my transition in and out of self consciousness… When I was dancing at first... I had abdicated conscious control, and somehow I felt more control than ever before.
The combination of transition and dissociation here produced not failure of the “self” but a greater degree of control that was all the more notable for being unconscious.
By 2006, she saw how her being, mythic or otherwise, produces category crisis:
I very often have the experience of being a cognitive and perceptual anomaly that other people can't fit into their preset categories. They usually find it hard to make sense of me, hard to pin me down or fix my actual attributes.
I note that gap, I note the gap between Piper and her categories. Similarly, Wark perceives that gap between what she’s doing and the work of Black writers and artists:
It’s also what I pay attention to closer to home, among trans writers and artists. I don’t want that to harden into an identity with rules and borders. I think we learn more when we’re not all on the same page. And we have more fun.
First, find an identity; second, step away from it; third, come together to get free.
It’s hard to have fun with the “mythic being” of Jewishness right now. But I’m more than willing to step away from this identity that has again been projected onto me; to work on shifting Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s “infrastructure of feeling” into a trans/personal “infrastructure of solidarity.”
To do this means both that traditional liberal notions of consensus won’t be the solution; and that the specters of essentialism will have to be confronted. It won’t be a comfortable change, but then change never is.
What Is A University?
I don’t think this is naive optimism of the will. The extreme violence of this war and its categorical extension to the practices of art, literature, and teaching shows that the hierarchy believes itself to be at risk. That’s why the reaction has been so extreme. Of course, there is real danger here, absolutely, but there is also a chance to make change.
Evidence of category crisis abounds. In the not-at-all radical New Yorker this week, Jewish writer Masha Gessen notes “the unholy alliance between Israel and the European far right.” Going further, Gessen sees not only that Gaza has become “like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany” but that “the ghetto is being liquidated.” That is to say, Holocaust memory counts against Israel’s actions in the house journal of the Upper West Side.
The situation has now come to focus on universities. I think we should embrace it, rather than run away from it, and in the manner of Kant’s question “what is Enlightenment?” ask again: “what is a university?”
The neoliberal answer has been “an administrative body supported by financial donations with real estate, sporting, travel and tuition divisions.” Since 2020, there has been some effective pushback, especially with regard to Indigenous, Black, Brown and PoC issues. The far-right sees this as the moment not to just to reverse those gains but to take the university back to 1953, before Brown v Board of Education.
The “game” played out via this week’s “scandal” over the testimony of Ivy League university presidents. Clearly, they had been coached as if for a legal deposition. Like the Congressional hearing, depositions go on for hours in the hope of eliciting a mistake. I’ve done depositions as an expert witness and it’s exhausting. The difference is that I wasn’t on TV.
When far-right convert Elise Stefanik, a Catholic from upstate New York, went after the presidents, they should have been ready. Time and again, she revisited the question of promoting “genocide,” switching direction to say:
You understand that the use of the term ‘intifada’ in the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict is indeed a call for violent armed resistance against the state of Israel, including violence against civilians and the genocide of Jews.
Except of course it isn’t. “Intifada” is usually translated as “uprising” and has taken many forms, most non-violent or using stones rather than weapons. To call it “genocide” is to read into the word an meaning that isn’t there.
The college bureaucrats either didn’t get this in the heat of the moment or relied on their legal preparation and returned answers about “context.” Legally, that’s correct. Moustafa Bayoumi cites the 2011 statement of the American Bar Association:
It is the context that matters, and the context helps to make the determination about whether conduct is actionable under school policy or protected by the First Amendment.
But in the gamespace of the media, this nuance was “game over” for the administrators. Now the game moves to the next level in recreating hierarchy.
At the University of Wisconsin, a deal was cut to end all diversity, equity and inclusion positions in exchange for a small pay raise and a new engineering building. Surprisingly, the University Regents rejected it in a rare display of backbone. The billionaire donors at Harvard and Penn who caused the difficulties for their administrators are equally raising far-reaching questions such as “criteria for qualification for membership in the faculty.”
In short, for academics this is our Pastor Niemöller moment. First they came for the Palestinians, then for the anti-zionist Jews. Now they’re coming for all of you in higher education. Take a look at what’s happening in Germany if you don’t think it will amount to much.
Like the Israeli regime, they’ve overplayed their hand. In the soundbite- and meme-driven gamespace, a nuanced argument about post-Enlightenment subjectivity like the one I made above certainly doesn’t cut it.
I think we can win a debate on this question:
“Who runs the university, billionaire donors or the faculty?”
That starts by refusing their money, certainly when it comes with strings as in Wisconsin. Let’s follow that through: refuse the money of hedge-fund billionaires, who profit on other people’s misery; or anyone with a connection to Jeffrey Epstein or Donald Trump; those making money on fossil fuels or arms sales; and any person credibly accused of sexual assault, harassment or rape.
Those conditions won’t change much at, say, CUNY— but almost all the “elite” universities would have very few trustees, if they acted on their own words about faculty governance and independence.
Michael Hardt taught me a decade ago that Palestine is exemplary, not exceptional. It’s the place where the intersection between neoliberalism and settler-colonialism in the form of the punitive state becomes most visible. In Europe, the far-right has advanced incrementally, often in alliance with mainstream right wing parties. In Israel and the US, the cards are now on the table from bodily autonomy to reproductive rights and now higher education. Our move.