Category: Arts & Culture

We’re joined by Jennifer Mittelstadt (@MittelstadtJen), professor of history at Rutgers University, to discuss her involvement with Scholars for a New Deal for Higher Education. We speak with Mittelstadt about how Scholars for a New Deal for Higher Education is organizing to address the most pressing threats to US public higher education today, as well as about how her own scholarship on publicly-provisioned welfare systems in the United States shapes her political organizing and advocacy. We also consider the role of Modern Monetary Theory in the struggle to democratize university finance, including Money on the Left’s controversial proposal for a federally backed university currency called the “uni.” 

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Transcript

The following was transcribed by Mike Lewis and has been lightly edited for clarity.

Billy Saas:  Jennifer Mittelstadt welcome to Money On The Left. 

Jennifer Mittelstadt:  Well, thanks for having me. I’m glad to be here.

Billy Saas: We, I think, came in contact first through some mutual friends and by way of the Scholars For A New Deal For Higher Education, and have continued to stay in touch and keep abreast of the developments with a Scholars For A New Deal For Higher Education. Could you talk to us just a little bit? I mean, just to kick things off, give us a sense, or your sense, or your read of the lay of the land for higher education right now. And, you know, the biggest sort of obstacles, big question to start us off on this conversation that’s largely going to be about you and your work. But what’s the lay of the land right now for higher education, as you see it?

Jennifer Mittelstadt:  I think, as I look at higher education now and reflect back on the last three years, that the group I’m involved with, Scholars For A New Deal For Higher Education, has been actively working on it. I think that there are a lot of developments that are even scarier than I imagined, when we began our work thinking about how to make higher education a true public good in the United States three years ago. At the same time, I think there are a few rays of hope. Overall, though, if I’m to balance those two things, I’m very worried about what’s happening in higher education right now. It seems that a lot of the indicators we might look at whether it’s funding from state legislatures, whether it’s the attempts to take over governance at institutions of higher education, public institutions of higher education, whether it’s the trends in tuition, whether it’s the perhaps faltering of the movement to really forgive student debt at a meaningful amount. Like all of those indicators, I think, are suggesting that we’re entering a period of what might be I mean enormous crisis. I hate to say things like this, because there’s been a long crisis in higher ed, but it feels almost like an ending. I feel very nervous about it. That said, the only thing to do is to get up each day and keep fighting it. So we’ve got lots of work to do, is the other way to look at it.

Billy Saas:  Yeah. And it’s come to this point, and you would say you’re a co-founder, one of the founders of the Scholars For A New Deal For Higher Education. And you’ve written publicly and published about all or some of these threats over the last few years as you say it, but you’ve been an academic researcher for much longer than that. So you’ve made your career alongside this long crisis. Can you talk to us about how your professional research interests in the military and the market and the relationship between public spending and militarism and imperialism? How do you end up leading this Scholars For A New Deal For Higher Education?

Jennifer Mittelstadt:  Yeah, I was trained as a historian of politics, but like very broadly defined, I think, with really strong interests in the state, political movements, political economy, and over time, I actually have varied pretty widely in my subject matter. I began by studying actually what I would think of, I guess, as the civilian welfare state. Then, I moved on to the military and thinking about the military welfare state, and then the broader questions of the political economy of the US military. And now I’m actually working on a project on US foreign policy. But I think I have the same questions of power and governance at the heart of the analysis in all of those different projects. Questions like why some people have a different relationship to the state than other people, I guess more or less, that’s at the heart of it. How some programs might be created in the welfare state, but other programs are pushed to the side. How the military evolved certain functions and programs, particularly of social welfare, even as civilian ones were fading. I guess how some people believe they can act on or with or against the state and how they do that. So I’ve had this broad focus, I guess, on state and society with a sharp analysis of the power dynamics in those for a really long time. I will say that as I started to research my subjects of the welfare state and the military, this was happening for me in the beginning in the 90s. And so I was sort of living neoliberalism, and then asking historical questions about the mid to late 20th century that couldn’t be disentangled from the actual present day dynamics that I was in. And so it sort of felt like I was starting to embark on a history of the present that I was trying to figure out these, these questions. And so, I just bumped into them over and over again, and then began to really, particularly after I was working on the history of the military, and had to face privatization really squarely, I think, and it’s a huge… Privatization has affected the American state at the national, state level and local level, profoundly, over the past 40 years or so. And having to learn it really carefully in one sector, the military, is what I ended up doing. And so that puts this question of like, what are state functions? What is the role of the private sector? What does it mean to govern a public good? What does it mean to delegate that governance at the center of that analysis? And then, I think that really what’s happened is that that has come home to roost, and the very institution in which I have done all of this work in the institution of the public university, in the United States. And it’s no secret, of course, to anybody who works in higher education that the same political and economic trends that have affected the US State have profoundly affected higher education, largely public, but also private, I think, to very significant degrees. And so it’s like, then I was not only sort of living in the same time period as neoliberalism and asking historical questions that related to the present, but I was actually living the historical experience of it in my own institution, watching the increasing devastation that’s resulted from it. And then more or less, I think, panicked. I panicked when COVID-19 happened, and I was like: now what will happen? It will only get worse. I don’t think I would have had the wherewithal, I have to say this, to call some people together, some friends and scholars, to think about what we could do for higher education. If two things weren’t also happening, and that is that if I hadn’t been a member of a really effective union at Rutgers, and I think it’s worth thinking about the importance of the labor movement, when we think about what’s happening in higher education right now and what’s happened over the years. I think we’re seeing, as you know, resurgent organizing in higher education across a variety of different job descriptions. There’s a lot of activism and militancy among graduate students, and grad workers, grad fellows, postdocs, but also I think, for contingent faculty, and we see this in strikes that have taken place over the past year and a half in higher education across the country. But my union at Rutgers, I think, is doing something with that militance and doing organizing in a new way that is, in fact, really exciting, and allows for the opportunity to imagine really different, not just outcomes for workers in higher ed, but different formations within higher education that return it to the public good. And so if I could just say, my union at Rutgers, which is Rutgers AAUP AFT, has been organizing for about the past five years on I guess what can really be described as quasi industrial lines. It’s been uniting workers from different divisions of Rutgers. So medical faculty with faculty at the University, with many different unions. I’m gonna get this wrong. It’s somewhere between 16 and 18 different unions representing Rutgers workers from staff, all the way through students, all the way up through different kinds of faculty members. It’s called the Coalition of Unions, And they have been working very hard to build solidarity among those unions and to confront the university collectively to make them consider the power of the entire group. And I think my leaders in my union are also really strategic, really politically savvy. They think of the work that they do at Rutgers as part of a much larger, national movement, not just only the work they’re doing at Rutgers. I think they have a vision of where they would like higher education to go, which is a vision of a real, public good, restored public funding, restored public governance, and protection of worker rights. And within that framework, I think, that vision allowed me to imagine what we might talk about as scholars who are playing a very different role from a labor union. We’re not a membership organization. We are trying to change the way people imagine what’s possible for higher education in this country. Imagine what’s possible for students, for families, for staff, for faculty, for communities, when they’re part of these institutions, and connected to these institutions; that they might have a democratic say in them that they might benefit from them without going into usurious debt, that we might actually, really prioritize research and teaching and focusing on our students and producing knowledge, understanding, the things that we think are important and necessary in a complicated and changing world. And I think that drawing on the vision that comes out of this particular union was a real source of inspiration for the work that we’re doing. And then I would just say, the other place that the work came from in Scholars For A New Deal For Higher Education, for me, was as a graduate mentor. I think that is very personal. When you are at a big research university, and you have a Ph. D program, and you’re taking on graduate students, these are long term commitments that you take on to students. You get to know them and their work very well. And it is heartbreaking, and a travesty to think that these students who are smarter than me, who are fantastic, are not going to have a secure place of employment going forward. And that really, I think, is devastating. It’s devastating for them, of course, even more than me, but just, it’s heartbreaking. And so that was another real source of this desperate move to see what maybe we could do as researchers, scholars, teachers, to change the discussion on higher education.

Scott Ferguson:  So maybe we can pivot here, to hear the story of how the organization came into being. Who called who first? Where did the name come from? What actions did you pursue at first and that kind of thing?

Jennifer Mittelstadt:  Well, so it started with me panicking. And I was panicking because I was the Director of Graduate Studies. And I was watching my own university struggle with the adjustment that occurred in March of 2020, to this pandemic world. And I had a lot of hope that the university would do right by the graduate program and the graduate students. And I also had a lot of hope that maybe the federal government and the state government would do right by the university. And by early April, or mid April, I guess it was,  it looked like it might not go that way. And it looked like in fact, the university was not going to collect the statistics on the number of people who had had their field work, or their research in archives cut short, and we’re clearly going to need extra funding. The state legislature made it clear that it was cutting the budget, not increasing the budget. And it wasn’t until June that the federal government actually agreed to think about giving any funding to higher education. So I just contacted a few of my friends who, like me, were really trained in the history of the state and the welfare state. And we’d work together over the years, particularly on issues of social welfare, coming together in different formations at different times around mostly trying to advocate for programs for low income Americans and for women. And I said, Do you want to start a change.org petition that just asks Congress to give funding to higher education like they give to the airlines. We’re a much bigger industry than the airlines, actually, higher education. We do very important work and so they agreed right away. There was a collection of about six of us. And that was the start of it. And then once we got a massive number of people signing on to it, we started to think bigger, like, what could we do with some of this energy? And then we moved to professional organizations in higher ed and asked groups. In my field in history, that would be the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association. For people who worked in musicology, it was the National Association for Musicology, etc, and asked them, would you sign a letter in support of this? And in the course of doing that, we moved to the national AAUP and AF T. And that’s where we started to talk to them about whether or not a bigger program oriented around advocating for a new funding model for higher education could actually take place during this time of crisis. And I have to say, as historians, most of us in the group, because that’s who I knew, were historians. I guess we honestly looked back to history a little bit to try to imagine what was possible. And we landed on the New Deal, which is not a perfect historical model. But in the crisis of the 30s. I think a lot of people asked not only what had caused the crash of 1929, but more importantly, what was the depression telling them about the broader failures of economic and social systems. Why they needed to be totally overhauled in order to give people new and better security in their lives. And it wasn’t perfect, as I said, it had a lack of commitment to gender and racial equity that actually we find ourselves dealing with today, this legacy. But I think, actually, we thought that both its successes and its failures prompted us to ask, at this historic moment in this crisis, could we do better? And so we started to think of it as actually a True New Deal for higher education. And then just worked in an ad hoc, manic fashion, talking to anyone we could talk to, having meetings whenever we could, trying to pull people on board, and producing the series of partnerships. So we did end up partnering for about a year and a half with the AAUP and the AFT. And they took on a campaign for a year that was aimed at trying to get the Biden administration and Congress to consider in that period, would they provide massive support for higher education, with strings attached that protected labor, that sent money towards research and teaching, that considered lowering drastically the cost of tuition, and considered the matter of student debt and debt forgiveness. That didn’t pan out, as we all know. At the same time, we worked with the Roosevelt Institute to write a white paper on this subject. And then we began talking with labor unions. And I think also because of the really good connections that we had with with Rutgers, and being here in the Northeast, where there are a lot of active unions like PSC CUNY for it, which is the City University of New York union and the big SUNY unions, which is State University of New York. We worked with them to think about even alternative formations in higher education labor. We had a big plenary session where the idea for Higher Education Labor United was born. And Higher Education Labor United, for people who don’t know, is like a cross-union organization that brings together people in different higher education unions across the country who really want to pursue what I would call the closest model that exists right now: College For All. Their vision of protecting labor and higher education has to be embedded within College For All. So actually, then, we all pushed not only for the Biden administration to do more with things like the infrastructure bill Build Back Better, for example, but to support the Bernie Sanders and Pramila Jayapal College For All bill, again, which was reintroduced. And that was not successful either. So I think a lot of us who were involved in that mobilization in 2021 are now going back regrouping and seeing where do we go forward? I think Higher Education Labor United is really drawing in more and more people working at the local, state and national level to try to build support for this broader vision. We are doing our part, we’re writing op eds, we started a newsletter. We have toolkits that people can use to bring these questions, the fundamental questions about what is the crisis in higher ed, the fundamental questions of governance and academic freedom in higher ed, the fundamental questions of College For All and supporting a truly public good: we’ve created these toolkits that people can use if they want to bring it to one of their national conferences, if they want to bring it to their faculty senate, if they want to basically do an educational process in whatever organizations they’re in to raise awareness about it. So we’re working on a number of different fronts to change the horizon on what’s imaginable, I think, in higher education, along with a collective of allied groups who come from different spaces, to see what we can do and how we can sort of keep planning and strategizing for what’s coming down the road.

Billy Saas:  So glad you have mentioned twice now that those initial moments early in the COVID pandemic. I remember them very vividly, it was such an intense time. And I think I wonder if we have higher ed workers to reckon with at that moment. Or even culturally, broadly, I’ve thought this a lot and just in general terms, it’s like, oh, that happened. Yeah, we’re moved on now. Like, COVID is definitely not over. But do you sense that moment, that energy that accumulated in March, April, May, June, July, around higher education, or I mean, we at Money on the Left, were very busy with the Uni currency project. And that was that moment. There were just a lot of ideas and energy flowing. Do you see that still today? Is that continuous? Has it diminished as it naturally would?

Jennifer Mittelstadt:  A really good question, I think, I think it’s taking new forms is I think what’s happening. I mean, one can’t operate at a level of panic and manic organizing, at the same level, for a continuous period. If you look at the history of social movements, there are these peak moments where everyone can come together and put in what you might think of as a double time, you know, they can put in double time, double resources. But it’s unsustainable for a long period of time. So then you sort of see periods of consolidation of the knowledge and gains that have been made. A repositioning, a gathering of energy and deciding, again, what your strategy is, and the tactics that go with that strategy for a new period. And that’s if you’re lucky, right? Because sometimes these things are so exhausting for the people who are involved that it’s very hard to sustain, period, right. So I think a lot of people are who’ve I’ve worked with here, so both in the scholars group, and in some of the other formations, were able to make real gains in getting the messaging out, or in organizing in the labor movement and enforcing contracts in the labor movement, or in really putting a new possibility, like forgiveness of student debt on the table. And then there’s this pushback, and then you stop and you think, Okay, what do I do with the gains that were made? Because those were real. And how do I continue to fight the barriers that are coming up? And I mean, I can really only speak for myself and our group. And in some ways, I think our group is better organized, with a clearer understanding of what we might think of as we’ve done a full power analysis of the lay of the land, I guess, in higher education is what I would, I would say. We’ve learned a lot in the past three years about what we can do, where our relative strengths are, where our weaknesses are, where someone else is better suited to do the work. We’ve learned a lot about strategic possibilities of partnerships. We’ve started to learn more. I mean, you think that people who study politics and the state would be savvier about governance and trying to influence elected officials, but we’re, I think we’re still maybe I don’t want to say we’re naive. I would just say it’s a more complicated terrain than we would have known. So we’re learning a lot of that, and are really committed to keep going. I mean, I have to tell you with all of the sadness, and I guess, pessimism that accompanies doing this work, I feel like the only way you can go to bed at night and get up in the morning, is if you try to do something about it. And so I wouldn’t say so much that I have optimism as I just feel like a necessity to keep trying, to keep throwing things at it. And I think that’s the way a lot of people in our group feel. What we’ve learned is, it can get worse. So even stopping it from getting worse is important. And so the things that we can do, to mobilize and throw obstacles in the way of worse, are worthwhile, as well. So, you know, that’s my take on it. It’s interesting, I wonder if you talk to somebody in labor, they might feel a little more excited, because of the particular gains, sort of, in particular realms in that sector. But what’s so complicated is that they’re occurring on almost separate tracks. So like, here in the Northeast, and in California, I think labor unions are making big gains in places where labor unions have sway in state politics, and with people who are in politics of the state who have national ambitions and who have declared themselves on the side of labor, and some gains have been made. I see what’s happening in Florida, for example, or in North Carolina, for example. It just looks like not only can labor not make any gains, but the legislature is on fire in their attacks on higher education. That looks like it’s growing stronger, those attacks. They are more emboldened in what they’re doing. And that’s, you know, half the country, more than half the country. Those are essential institutions in the states where they operate, employing hundreds of 1000s of people overall, educating millions of students, and that I find sort of terrifying. So like in certain parts of the higher education world, I think there are these reasons for hope. And then there are other reasons I think, for I mean, maybe not despair, but terror?

Scott Ferguson:  Absolutely terror. I mean, I can speak to the Florida situation a little bit since that’s where I live and work. And hope and terror comes from strange, strange sources. So the faculty senate at my university really was a sleepy body for a long time, but I think it really stepped up when it came to the financial politics of the university around COVID austerity in ways that were really helpful and impressive. Obviously, the moves of this hard right Governor and legislature are terrifying. And then what’s so interesting is that just in the last couple of weeks since at least the recording of this who knows what’s going to happen by the time this comes out, but they are so out over their skis with radical right wing authoritarian, if not fascist legislation, that they are testing the bounds of administrative workability. So they want to make all of these drastic changes. They want to abolish DEI funding and discourse. They want to abolish, not just Critical Race Theory, but Critical Theory and anything that can be associated with it. They’ve wanted to dissolve women and gender studies programs, Africana Studies programs. And just in the last couple of weeks, the reconciling of the two bills in the House and the Senate have led to people in the legislature realizing that the Florida US state education system is going to lose its accreditation. And they actually can’t do this even if they want to. Obviously, they’ve taken over New College, which is a public small liberal arts college, which is a bastion of left wing and LGBTQ+ culture. And that remains terrifying there. They’ve denied tenure to a handful of hardworking scholars. So it’s an ongoing situation. But I will say I breathe a sigh of relief, whenever it was a week or two ago, when I learned that, actually, these bills going through the legislature were being really, really rolled back or tempered down from what their original plans were. But I guess I remain rattled, terrified, and I know that they think they have a mandate, and they’re going to keep going and going and going.

Jennifer Mittelstadt:  I think we’re seeing that in other places. I mean, that’s just what happened a couple of days ago, in North Carolina. There’s been a progressive attack there as well, but the breadth of the budget cuts, and the breadth of the takeover of academic governance, decisions about hiring, firing, tenure, you know, promotion, things like that is now becoming clear. And, of course, the things are tied, right? So I mean, the right is really emboldened by these portrayals of people in higher education and pedagogy curricula, right, that it’s radical, and that it’s, you know, filled with ideas that they find terrifying regarding sexual and gender rights and understandings about racism and inequality. And those serve as a cudgel, really, to attack higher education that makes possible the actual administrative and budgetary gutting of it at the same time. The two are not disconnected, they’re of a piece, and if you look at the longer history, of course, the right has been railing against higher education for a very long time. It just so happens, I’m in the archives on a project now on the right and US foreign policy. And although I’m mostly looking at foreign policy, every folder I look in, in the correspondence has something about the corruption, subversion and perfidy of professors in higher education, whether it’s in the 50s, 60s, or 70s. It really took form, I think, in the 1980s, with David Horowitz and some others who were really going after Women’s Studies programs, and African American Studies programs, and I think, in some ways, never went away. It became a hallmark of thinking on the right, that universities were these hopelessly left as places where people on the right were discriminated against. But as other things were, I think, vivified by the election of Trump and the transformation of the Republican Party in that period, so too was this long term argument reignited. And now it’s on steroids, I think. And it’s no coincidence, though, that the other thing that has been happening over that period, and more so in Republican dominated states than democratic ones, is the diminution of funding, the cutting of state funding for higher education. So where the states spend far less in general, per student proportionally than they spent 30 years ago, and the portion of the state budget that goes to higher education is much lower. There are some complicated reasons for that. There are a lot of health care costs that states didn’t have before that they have now. But mostly, it’s been a decision to defund and privatize, to some degree, well, to a significant degree, public higher education. And those two things I think, are now both reignited with this idea that there is a budget crisis because of COVID. Right, that there’s an overall lack of funding in the United States now. That we all have to return to austerity, whether it’s a national government, the state government, or individual institutions. It coincides with the ramping up of the attack that is ideological in nature, on higher education and its self reinforcing. Your point though, about whether they sort of — what was that phrase you used? They’ve gotten out in front of their skis?

Scott Ferguson:  Yeah, out over their skies.

Jennifer Mittelstadt:  Out over their skis, right. One wonders, maybe not only in terms of accreditation, but I think that people who are attacking higher education right now underestimate the degree to which actually a lot of Americans have a lot of trust in higher education. These are major employers in their towns, they’re proud of the schools that they went to. They want their kids to get an education that allows them to get a job and be, in their view, a productive member of society. It might be that the University is one of the few that supports the arts in their town, and they have a kid or a spouse who loves drama, or something like that, right? It might be the only museum within a 150 mile radius. The related spin offs that come from higher education to produce new firms doing work and the research that I don’t do, but so many colleagues do in the sciences and engineering, computer science and things like that. Yeah, keeping up the ability of your state to educate its own young people and not have a tremendous out migration of people to other states spending their tuition dollars in other places, right? I think that there’s a real possibility that I’m hoping that they will hit the limits of this, and that the people who, for very practical terms, have always relied on higher education will speak up and say: enough is enough. I mean, one of the things that I think is really interesting to think about is whether or not you will indeed see students in shorthand, what we might call red states, where more of the attacks on higher education are happening, make the decision to go to school in blue states. Now, for most kids who are going to school at a public institution, that might not be an option for them, because the in-state tuition is vital for their ability to attend a school of higher education. For those where there’s some reciprocity between states, and I know like Wisconsin and Minnesota have reciprocity. So you can use an in-state tuition voucher to go to school in Minnesota, if you live in Wisconsin. You could see the state of Wisconsin losing people to the University of Minnesota, because the state of higher education in Wisconsin is significantly poorer compared to the state of higher education in Minnesota. But I’m curious to see what are some of the outcomes of doing this? I mean, I’m not curious in a way, like, Oh, that’ll be interesting. I’m actually terrified and curious about it. Right? But I do wonder about how this is a long term trend, it’s very powerful. It’s just damaging higher education terribly right now. But your point about the overextension, your point about going too far, I think that’s real, too. And I’m hoping that the more we talk about it, the more we make our voices heard, the more we partner with communities and families and students, maybe we can get people to stop and say something about this, rather than just shake their heads at it in the paper.

Scott Ferguson:  To pivot from here, I would like to hear you talk a little bit about the educational challenges when you’re writing op eds, when you’re putting together workshops, when you’re putting together resources. I know when we first joined up with you all and had a Zoom, meet and greet, some of your colleagues in the organization were stressing over and over again how surprisingly little, let’s say faculty members at the universities in our country are aware of the budgetary politics. So maybe you can speak to that.

Jennifer Mittelstadt:  I can and when I when I think about this I feel like I have to be careful and diplomatic in a way because I think the lack of awareness among faculty members, particularly tenured faculty members, and maybe it particularly at institutions, which have a little bit more in the way of budgetary or political protection from attacks on higher education are unaware of it because some things haven’t changed that much in their own everyday lives. And I think it’s true for almost all of us, right? That the way that we become involved in a social movement or a political movement is when a problem comes to our door, our doorstep, and it affects us. And when it’s affecting you, and you can no longer do the things that you wish to do in the way that you wish to do them, you are forced into some action. And so that’s a shorthand to say that I think for some people, they feel that the problem hasn’t appeared on their doorstep in a form that can’t be ignored. And it, of course, is in their university, right? Any number of what we might call these bogus accounting systems that universities have adopted in order to shift the money around in ways that they want surely are affecting their lives. Any number of the privatized contracts that they’ve purchased, either for assigning rooms or class periods, poorly I might add in most cases, and they’re spending too much on them. That does affect their life. There are graduate students being unable to find jobs, those who teach at programs where they have PhD programs. That has affected their life, but maybe not dramatically. I think more and more people are now being affected dramatically. And the move by state legislatures in conservative states, affect even the flagship universities, public universities and their states. And so I think there is a growing awareness of the problems. That said, the very system that we are all operating in, in higher education, mitigates against this recognition because it has created this two tier system of, at least if we’re speaking of faculty of faculty members, where there’s actually not much interaction between tenure line faculty and non tenure line faculty and contingent faculty. And I don’t think that tenured faculty have fully appreciated the conditions under which non tenured faculty are working. And the penury and lack of dignity that is associated with that work. Not for all people who do that work. There’s some people who really just want to teach one class who are financially secure, who really enjoy it. But for a lot of other people, it’s really, incredibly difficult. And they haven’t realized that. So it is strange to take on the role of talking to your colleagues about the things that you think are really self evident, and have been happening for a long time in the very institutions where they’re working and saying, even if it’s not affecting you at this moment, it’s more than you think. It’s affecting you more than you think. And it’s affecting a lot of people around you who you’re relying on to have this university function, and we really have to do something about it. So yeah, I think it’s difficult. Another way to look at this, I will say, I use that metaphor of like a problem coming to your door, and you being unable to ignore it anymore. I think the other way that people become mobilized to act is when they can sit back and tell themselves a story, a coherent story about what they think is happening. And I think a lot of people don’t have the time to either learn about and then tell themselves the story, or they don’t even know where to go to get the full story. They’re just sort of living it bit by bit. I sort of imagine it as like, you’re driving down the road, and there’s this windshield, and one thing is coming at you after another but you haven’t risen up to, you know, 1000 feet to look and see Oh, there’s more stuff coming. And there was a lot of stuff behind me and what do I say about this perilous road I’m driving on? And I think that’s true, too. I have found that in my discussions, so one of the things that we do in Scholars For New Deal For Higher Education, is we get invited to go talk to faculty senates, or like the State Association of faculty. And it’s really interesting, there are people who feel like they’re hearing the story of the crisis in higher education for the first time, even though they say, oh, yeah, I remember that. And I saw that and I don’t like that. But it’s as though no one ever framed it as a really important historical narrative in which they were an actor, and there was sort of something happening to them, and there was something they could do about it. And, you know, I think, in large part, it could be because many of us who are in higher education are there, because we love our teaching, we love our research, we get really involved in day to day classroom issues, we get really involved in our day to day labs, we get really involved in our research, you know, moment by moment. And it’s hard to make the time to sort of come up when you’re taking all that really seriously. And we all know that that just has its own inherent challenges, to sort of look up and take on even more. So, you know, I think there are a variety of different reasons for why there isn’t just a massive outcry of the, whatever it is, over a million faculty members or something that people who work in higher education all at once. And there’s also, let’s face it, drastically different experiences. The experience of somebody who is teaching at Harvard is really different than the experience of someone who’s teaching at a community college in Louisiana, and sort of making the alliances between that we’re kidding ourselves if we think that there’s not a gap there and a difficulty. So there’s plenty of room for work, I guess that’s what I would say. There’s plenty of room for talking to people and hearing from them, and having them find a way to articulate their own stories, telling them stories about what’s happening and sort of seeing what can happen. For what it’s worth, I don’t think we, as a group of people who care about higher education, are much aided by the national media. And this, I think, is a great disappointment. I do think if there were more local news, unfortunately, journalism has been gutted by Neoliberalism over the past 40 years, as well. If there were more local news, I think really local journalism would be all over this. These are really important institutions in towns, cities and states, colleges and universities, right. But at the national level, really, the interest seems to be only about, oh, trigger warnings, excessive use of trigger warnings. Are basically college students delicate flowers who can’t hear things anymore? Is there a scandal at Harvard about somebody who was fired for saying something that was perceived to be insensitive? I mean, this seems to be the level of interest, certainly of the New York Times. But I think other national publications in the media as well. And I think they just believe, like they don’t believe issues about labor and inequality and poverty are very interesting, in general and don’t believe they’re interested in higher education either. And so it does make it very difficult to educate the broader public about what’s happening when these stories aren’t covered. I have to say as I am incredibly worried about the attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion and the intrusion into research and teaching about gender and race, all of my courses hinge on these historical subjects. They hinge on the analysis that comes out of people who take those historical subjects seriously. But at the same time, It troubles me that often those stories are reported without the discussion on the takeover of tenure, promotion, hiring, budget. Because those are really existential questions, as well, for higher education. And we could be protesting about freedom of speech. And if we don’t also bring to light and have a light on these questions of governance and budget, we’ll all just not have jobs. We won’t be able to teach period, full stop. And so I think the media is really not doing us any favors. And if I could crack the code, I mean, we’re just trying to–the scholars group–we do a lot of joint writing in the group. There’s individual writing, too, but we do a lot of joint writing. And right now, we’re trying to put out an op ed about what’s going to happen when COVID funding ends May 31. So that’s the end of COVID relief funding. Three successive laws have been passed that have put about $76B into higher education. What’s going to happen when that funding disappears? Well, it looks like state legislators and governors, even in blue states, are using that opportunity to confer with our Board of Governors to institute greater cuts. And they actually are sort of pointing at institutions of higher education and saying, Well, you got all this extra money for three years, like, now it’s time to pay the piper. Now, there’ll be budget cuts, because you spent that money. But of course, they were supposed to spend that money. That was the point, right? And they’re using this as an occasion to enact yet more of the same types of policies of poor choices in a corporate style governance, that de-emphasize research, teaching and the services that students need in favor of spending on other things. We can’t get anyone to take that op ed. We’ve gone to three different places, and they just say, that’s not really on our agenda. And you think, Okay, this is an industry that educates 19.7 million students every year. It’s in every single state, every, many different cities and towns. We thought Ed’s and meds, we were told, were supposed to be the source of economic growth in the United States, but isn’t it an interesting story that they’re being cut to the bone? So it’s difficult, it’s difficult to do the work and, and get the word out. And I really wish people who worked in the national media would understand higher education is more than an opportunity, basically, for clickbait by bringing up sensitive subjects.

Billy Saas:  I’ll go ahead and bring up my own sensitive subject. You mentioned a couple of times, tenure, which also, in the last couple of years, Georgia has put tenure under threat. We just talked to Liz Anker for a previous episode, and she’s at Cornell studying paradox and looking at the importance of the logical framework of paradox and like critical theoretical work over the last, you know, 30-40 years in the humanities. I feel like tenure is one of those paradoxes where it is critical, critically important, in that it guarantees academic freedom. Guarantees are in quotation marks, right? It’s never really 100% certain, but it’s this important thing, right? We need to defend it, and we have come out and the AAUP and other organizations do a lot of work to make this case. On the other hand, to get there as a junior faculty member, which a lot of those folks who I think would like to be vibrantly participating in and spending their time in addition to teaching, in addition to research, fighting for higher education. The instruction broadly, and not everybody does this, but the mandate on the tenure track is keep your head down, do your work, spend your time wisely so you can get tenure, and you can get that prized security, and be a better advocate. But you go through that process of six, seven years, eight years of keeping your head down, and it’s hard to recalibrate. And so the paradox of tenure as a thing to be prized, but also maybe in its current structure, as it’s been developed over the century plus that it’s been around as problematic, but also, I think, as importantly, emblematic of a deeper rooted problem of faculty culpability for the situation that we find ourselves in now. I think tenure is good. In one of our Uni papers, we talk about Tenure For All. We want those basic rights and job security for everybody. Is there space in this conversation, or maybe it’s a conversation best reserved for later or for offline about not just say, Hey, this is happening. But hey, this is happening, and here’s your part in it, and here’s how here’s what we need to do differently beginning yesterday.

Jennifer Mittelstadt:  Let me just give you an example. I mean, those are excellent questions, I just want to say, and I like the opportunity to think about it and to think about how it’s operating in the work right now that we’re doing and Scholars For a New Deal for Higher Education. It’s exciting, sort of think about this. Let me give you a really specific example. So I told you that we’re just trying to get this op-ed placed. So I’m co authoring it with a colleague of mine in North Carolina. And we’ve been writing together for many years, and we’re very good friends, and we hit an impasse Monday. We had the weekend to think about what we were looking at, and very understandably what she said is this op ed contains a criticism of the administrations and leadership in higher education in the use of COVID funds that I as a faculty member in North Carolina, where the state legislature is so vicious, and so heartless and loath to air, publicly in a way, right now, when mostly what I need is to attack the legislature. That is where the greatest danger is right now. I don’t disagree that people in the administration have made and continue to make terrible decisions, the austerity of 1000 cuts type decisions. But I can’t make that an equal partner in this critique that we have right now about what’s going to happen to higher education. And I, coming from New Jersey, in a state where there was more funding for higher education where I have a powerful union. And where, really, I think one of the real problems we have at Rutgers is terrible administration. Literally horrible administration. It has made budgetary decisions that are illegal, we were sanctioned for the way that the accounting department did its accounting, taking I want to say, I’m gonna get the number wrong, many, many, many, many, many millions in the 10s of millions of dollars out of the education budget, putting it in the athletic budget, and calling it revenue for the athletic budget. That got hearings in the state legislature. So we have a terrible administration. And I felt like that’s something that I can talk about, that needs to be talked about. But I think in different places, in different settings, the question of where, how much we bring to light, elucidate and discuss critical University matters is a question of real politics that I think has to be taken seriously. I don’t fault my colleague for wanting to shift the op-ed so that readers that she felt in North Carolina and the South could sort of take clear aim at the state legislators. It’s complicated to tell the story of higher education in a way that does justice to the numerous sources that are undermining it without undermining overall support for higher education. So I mean, a way that we might put it as just if we take a look at the COVID funds, right. So if you do a deep dive into the way that the COVID funds were used, half of the COVID funds went directly to students who are in need. The other half went to institutions. The funding that went to institutions was allowed to be used for a wide variety of reasons. I think one of the things that’s most remarkable is that there’s actually been very little detailed reporting on what institutions have used that funding for. A shocking level of opacity, really I think, surrounding it. Whether it’s on purpose, or whether it’s because everybody’s moving quickly, whether it’s because the federal government hasn’t demanded the detailed accounting that one might want. I don’t actually know. And I’m not an expert in that. However, there is self reporting that they did at a very general level. And it really looks like, except for HBCUs, about only 60% of institutions used their funding to maintain critical programs and to maintain faculty and staff. So that means they’ve pocketed the money and used it for other things. They might have used it to pay down private debt, for example. They might have used it just to compensate themselves for certain losses in revenue. What they didn’t do is draw on their rainy day funds, and many big research universities, even public ones, have them, and a fraction of a percent would have allowed them to keep a lot of the programming that they wanted. Or to put the COVID funds back in the rainy day fund, but spend some of it out. I mean, there were many, many options, and that didn’t happen. And it leads us to conclude when we think about the end of COVID funding that because so many schools basically doubled down, school leadership doubled down on their ongoing long term plans to build revenue through high tuition and attracting students. Meanwhile, cutting academic teaching and research and support budgets in order to fund the bells and whistles that need to attract those students. Right? They doubled down on that during COVID, using the COVID funds. It seems like they’re going to triple down on it when the COVID funds end. That’s a complicated story to tell people who live in communities where a university operates. It’s a complicated story to tell parents who may have taken out a loan for their child to be able to get a higher education, right? It runs the risk of making people who won’t differentiate between the university and its leadership, it runs the risk of portraying the institution as sort of feckless or disorganized, or untrustworthy or something. Part of the difficulty is carving out, in these critical discussions of higher education, the nuances of the different groups that we know exist within the orbit of higher education. Thinking about who they are, how they evolved institutionally, what their particular role is, and then communicating why some of those roles are more detrimental than others. It’s really complicated. So I think tenure is one of those things, right? Talking about tenure is one of those hard nuts to crack. And it’s difficult because in fall 2021, I saw an interview with trustee McMillan Cotton. And she talked about tenure. And it was one of the best discussions I’d seen about tenure ever. And what she pointed out was that it’s really hard to defend tenure right now. Because job insecurity is endemic across every sector, not just higher education. And it looks more and more like an outlier and a period where people don’t have steady careers and steady jobs, where unions overall have declined. The whole changing nature of the economy that you all know very well, right. It’s very hard to do that. And also, when we want to defend it on the grounds of academic freedom and expression, that’s something most people in their day to day lives don’t have a lot of familiarity with, and contact with. And it doesn’t really move them, I think. And what she said, and I think this is true, is that really the only way to defend tenure is to think about it as the best expression we can imagine of what it means to have secure, stable employment. And that it should be, as you said, Billy, for all. That some version of stable, secure employment should exist in this country for people. Tenure is one expression of that. And if we let it go because it looks slightly better than the work situation in other fields, we let go like one of the bulwarks that we can have for envisioning, for protecting and I think envisioning what stable, secure employment could look like. What you’re pointing to, I think, is this paradox, because you started with the word paradox, that tenure can also function counter to the very political processes that we would like to foster and ignite. Of course. It asks faculty members to do precisely the thing that we as activists don’t want them to do, which is to put their head down to do nothing but their work to close their vision on the things that distract them from that. And if you’re one of the lucky people who basically got your hands on the golden ring as it’s evaporating, you’re loath to let go. Right? That’s real for those people to be one of the last quarter of people in the United States who have access to tenure. Right now 75% of people who work in higher education work in contingent positions. That’s not nothing. And that person may have a tremendous amount of student debt. They may have obligations for care in their community or in their family, and it makes a difference that they get this. And so to sort of admonish them that they can’t do what I, for example, did, which was keep my head down for seven years and get tenure. I wasn’t ignorant of other things. It was also another period of time long ago. But I did have that privilege to be able to do it. And it’s now that I do have a secure position that I am able to actually say really hard things about my university, about my university president, about the board, in general. I have the space to be able to do that. So yeah, I think it really is a paradox. And I don’t know if I have a solution to it. In general, I think that the –how would I put it– that the limiting and inaction that it might produce among a small number of people who are actually going through the tenure process, it’s not the most important thing that is standing in the way of success in this movement. It is one element. And so making it a target, for me, doesn’t make sense.

Scott Ferguson:  Speaking of difficult nuts to crack and other metaphors like that. So we came to you because obviously, we’re we’re dedicated to Modern Monetary Theory and other theories of what’s sometimes called endogenous money creation, which sees money as a governance project, a creature of law, and essentially, as a credit relation or a credit-debt relation that does not behave like a finite thing that must be transferred from one entity to another. Evacuating the coffers of one space to fill up the coffers of the other. And we’re very dedicated to critiquing the kinds of zero-sum logics that come with Orthodox and even a lot of critical political economy. We were so grateful that our historian colleague, David Freund put us together, and that you were willing to hear us out. And I think especially when one is trying to make the case, often in places of power on the national stage, or the stage of the state or wherever, this organization of yours is working and trying to convince people. Modern Monetary Theory, and this whole other perspective, can feel, I’m sure, like a lot. Like, yes, I understand. But, people already think I’m crazy. So why would I add more crazy to my crazy, and I respect that. I respect it, and I am, again, so grateful that you’ve invited us to collaborate and to publish alongside you all. And it’s been really wonderful. And I look forward to more workshops, more collaboration, more publishing. But I’m wondering, do you have any thoughts about this? And you can be honest, I mean, I’m trying to open up the door to honesty. Yeah, so the floor is yours.

Jennifer Mittelstadt:  So David Freund and I went to graduate school together. And I was down in DC for something in I think 2008-2009. He told me he was starting on a new project. And the way David works is really exciting. I think he’s one of the most exciting historians who does 20th century US history. And what he tends to do is take on a subject matter and then question the knowledge creation that is behind that subject matter and historicize it right. So he did that with property in his first book, and now he’s doing it with money. And I’m sure he’d be the first to say, the learning curve on money was steep for him. And I remember he gave me a really early draft, I want to say somewhere around 2010-2011 that I don’t even know what it was, if it was an article or piece of a chapter or just some thoughts he had. And I remember where I was when I was reading it, which took like two and a half hours, because every sentence I had to say to myself — Okay, so he was basically explaining going back to the history of heterodox money, right? Like heterodox money theories. And then recapitulating what the orthodox view is and and what the heterodox view is, and where it made its way into certain policies in the US. And I mean, I was pausing like every sentence to sort of say: OK, now say this out loud to yourself. Now put it in your own words to see if you can understand it.  And it was so hard, though, is my point. I can learn other things more easily than I learned this. What was hilarious about it is I went back to the memo I wrote, because I think I wrote him something on it. And I forgot all of it. Like, I don’t even remember it now. And so when David said to me I think you should meet these people on Monday on the Left, who are talking about this Uni considering what you’re working on now in higher education, I thought, Okay, well, I have to learn it all again. So I’m just going to just say from the outset, that I have not learned it all again, but I’m going to tell you the bit that I’ve learned, that I think is really compelling, as somebody who has studied the history of the state and Governance and politics broadly construed. I have to make an analogy, really, with the ways that the subjects that I’ve looked at, in order to understand it. And the way I understand it, and it may be imperfect, is that many government functions have been performed through delegated governance outside of the government, or inside the state by state actors. And can be considered public, in some sense, in either framework. But in fact, the balance of power shifts, the control over whatever the function is can shift if it’s delegated governance to the private sector. It depends on which institution and in the private sector that might be, but it might become associated with things that are decidedly non-public, whether it be religion, or whether it be profit making and corporations or what have you. And for me, the way I understood what David and what you all are sort of saying about money is not just this question of the finite that you pointed out, and not just understanding money as credit, but for me, what’s most compelling is understanding money and credit as public functions that have, in fact, for reasons that I don’t know, because I still don’t know the history, I’m waiting for David. Why they have been, in fact, turned over largely to the private sector and are treated in a way that does not allow them to be marshaled for public democratic governance or good. And that is what I think lies at the heart of what the problem is in higher education. It’s deciding that so much of it will not, in fact, operate as a public good or for the public good. But deciding that higher education is a site for revenue generation, or deciding that it’s a market that firms can feast on and grow their own profits on. Deciding to operate it using logics within the institution itself that come from the private sector. That is creating terrible problems of effectiveness and inequity. Basically what happened to me is, I thought hey, anyone who wants to bring some tool in this battle to reimagine higher education as a public good is an ally. And I’m going to really try to wrap my head around it, and I’m going to really try to think about it. And this is a particular value because it, like no other theory out there, I think, like no other understanding questions the total logic of finite resources, full stop. Right? That, I think, is a really powerful tool. And if what we in Scholars For a New Deal For Higher Education want to do is provide opportunities to change the horizon of what’s possible. This seems like a pretty astounding horizon. One undervalued underappreciated, and I will not lie more than one person said. Oh, they’re crazy.

Scott Ferguson:  Yeah, that’s learning!

Jennifer Mittelstadt:  Yeah, I’m not surprised at all. We feel crazy. We feel crazy, but also we can’t unsee it.

Billy Saas:  I feel perfectly sane, Scott.

Scott Ferguson:  Well, my sane colleague will speak.

Billy Saas:  Yeah. I think, in terms of heuristics or keywords or shortcuts to understanding MMT and how this transition that it sounds like David’s describing, for me that’s been helpful, and Scott and I have had conversations about this before, to read the ascendance and maintenance of Orthodox money theory as a fundamentally demophobic, like it’s informed by a deep fear of democracy. Yes, it positively also serves private interests and profit seeking for all the fun that that can be for people. But I do think we can point back to, there’s a great quote from Paul Samuelson that we love to talk about where Paul Samuelson wrote like the most influential economics textbooks of the 20th century. He’s on camera for a documentary about Keynes and he’s asked about the importance of the balanced budget. And he says something along the lines of, I might play the clip here for people who haven’t heard it enough, saying that it’s important that the idea we must balance the budget remain in place because if it didn’t, anarchistic, chaos and inefficiency would prevail., Those are his exact words. So you have this authoritative, probably the most widely recognized, at least in academic circles, economist saying: Yeah, it’s not true effectively, but it serves important social, cultural, political functions, and so we ought to keep it in place. And I think that that bears out when we look at, and maybe I’m not locating demophibia in critics of MMT so much as I am saying there’s a discomfort, potentially, that I think comes with it. I think, maybe full stop, unmitigated democracy isn’t the best way to go. But then that’s a conversation we can have, I think, but I do think that there is something fundamentally, there’s more faith in democracy in the heterodox money theory of MMT, than you can find in others.

Jennifer Mittelstadt:  There’s more faith in public institutions, also. Like the way I read the Uni, there’s a way to read that, and wonder what it is about the leadership of public universities, that makes them actually decline to take a power that they might have. Decline to gain greater autonomy than they might otherwise have. You talk about demophobia, and I’m not sure if that’s right, but there is a fear, I think, of relinquishing the discipline and authority of the private sector and banks. And there’s a fear of moving outside of that world. I don’t think it’s only an intellectual question. I think it’s a real question of power and people and material interests. I mean, there’s absolutely no question that the people who run universities, whether they’re presidents of universities or whether they’re the boards, have real material ties to private sector firms, and banks. Some of them come from that world in order to sit on the boards. Others expect that when they finish up their positions, they will be able to take those positions. The idea of declaring themselves able to issue credit, and to take on that power and authority would make them anathema among the very institutions that they currently rely on in order to make their institutions run and that they rely on for a material and political status or legitimacy. Because when I looked at it, I said it was fantastic. I’m a desperate Provost or university president. And I need some ways to be able to keep my programs running to fund my amazing staff, you know, and faculty, to benefit people who live in my community. Let me see if I can give this a try by exercising my power to really think about credit and what it could do. And I feel okay, so that’s what we would do. Maybe, I don’t know. If I do, I’d need a consultation on that. I don’t really know how it worked or anything like that, despite having read the article multiple times. I mean, what is it? I mean, it brings you back, I think, to these questions of learning a power analysis of the situation, the disincentives that there are for people to acknowledge the multiple ways in which we all might more have have more control over the resources and functioning of the institutions we’re a part of than we think we do.

Scott Ferguson:  One of the things that I often point out is that the MMT and endogenous money framework is actually far more straightforward and dare I say simple than the neoclassical framework, the Marxist framework because it simply says that money is a function of government, loosely defined. It doesn’t have to be the modern nation state of governance. And it is a legal structure that is designed and that can be allocated and designed in any number of ways. So then, you just hit the ground running from there. So you ask, well, how is my society of money designed? How is it set up? Is the power to issue money delegated, principally, to private banks and private financial institutions? Is it organized to fuel a profit motive? Or is it designed in another way, and maybe it’s a mix design, and usually it isn’t a mix design. Where things get really complicated is when you have to work through the thorny forest of the dominant ideology to pull back all of its obscuring assumptions to see what’s actually going on. Where the authority, where the power structures are, and how they’re being delegated. And to me, that’s the ultimate lesson of the Uni. Look, we are 110% behind this project, and we’ll continue to advocate for it and theorize it and write about it. We want to see it manifested in one way or another. But on the other hand, it also is a rhetorical tool, right? It’s designed to open up the question of wait, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, how are we delegating financial powers in this country, in general and then specifically around higher ed. So whether or not this leads anywhere that we’re projecting or imagining or wanting it to go is less important for us than cracking open the conversation such that we stop talking about, as we say, finding this finite money that’s circulating in private coffers, but instead going to the source and asking, how might we structure that source in a different way that’s serving people and communities and environments rather than private profit and corporate capital?

Jennifer Mittelstadt:  So when you say that it raises a question that I have for you two, and I’ve had from the start. I think, for me, the answer was very simple about why, after reading the Uni, I would want to hear more from you to bring you on board and to say, hey, you know, what can we talk about here, and that is because I want resources and I want democratic accountability in higher education, and this is one way to get it. However, there are a million other things and let’s just face it, College For All doesn’t take into account at all what you are thinking about, right? It is funded on a completely different model that we know, as is literally everything in the United States. Like all legislation. So I can see why I would just say, Hey, let a million flowers bloom, right? Like anyone who’s got an idea, let’s bring it. It seems to me, you can do two things at the same time, like we can try out Unis while we still live within a universe that still operates on a Keynesian or Neoclassical model. These two things can happen, right? But for you, I’m wondering what it’s like for you to imagine, as part of your larger project to also, I think, changing the horizon on what we can imagine about money. What it is, what it does, how it functions, what does it mean, for you all to collaborate on specific projects, where things get really down in the weeds with real people, real institutions? I mean, you are living in states where there’s real attacks on higher education, where you’re just gonna have to say, no, please don’t cut the budget. Not: actually, you can cut the budget, because I’m still going to just work on the Uni here. Right? Like, how does that feel for you all?

Scott Ferguson:  Yeah, Billy do you want to take it?

Billy Saas:  I’m gonna see where you go.

Scott Ferguson:  Yeah, I mean, the answer is complex. And it depends on what time it is. Right? Yeah, we all make strategic decisions to open our mouths and articulate certain things at different times. Okay, so one of your questions in there was about what does it mean to be thinking about — The broader project is reimagining money in its political horizon. I think the university system in the United States, but also elsewhere, but the university system in the United States is such an important case study. Not only because it’s in crisis, and we live in that crisis, and it’s a way of doing the organic intellectual work that Gramsci would appreciate. But it’s also an important case study because it develops and even problematizes some of the Modern Monetary Theory discourse. Some of the Modern Monetary Theory discourse, especially when it in its popularizing forms, will draw this very clean distinction between the state as a sovereign issuer of the currency and cast off everyone else off that sub federal government, all private entities, all nonprofits, any kind of economic organization as mere users of this currency. So the sovereign issuer can decide as sovereign when to spend, what not to spend, when to delegate currency-issuing power, or when not to delegate currency-issuing power. And everyone else is a user. And for us at Money on the Left, we’ve, for a long time been keen on complicating that, and nuancing that what to us is too severe of a binary opposition that actually is disempowering for local politics for sub federal politics. The state university systems are critically situated, I think, in the midst of this problematic as tremendously powerful public, often public, institutions that actually do have credit creation power, but instead we call it a bond issuance, and we say they produce credits for student credit hours, right? It’s already engaged, in a massive way, in credit creation, but pretends that it’s not. We all pretend that these institutions are weak and running out of money, and they’re on their heels, and whoa, what are they going to do? Well, we have to cut the budget. So I think one of the central points of significance about taking on the Uni and taking on university spending has to do with problematizing that anti democratic distinction between the issuer and the user. So that’s one thing I can say. When it comes to trying to collaborate, I mean, it also happens at different scales. So some of us, especially those of us who come out of heterodox economics and come out of the PhD Program at the University of Missouri Kansas City, they have learned and participated in and now continue to practice in their own classrooms, these very small scale community service based class currency projects that might last a semester at a time. Maybe they carry on beyond the semester, maybe they begin to grow ties with the surrounding community in a more ongoing way. And certainly, the work of our colleague Benjamin Wilson at SUNY Cortland is a premier example of that kind of work. And no one really thinks that’s crazy. That just seems like good community service learning out of a classroom. And our point is that well, yeah but what if you bring in the United States Treasury, and you scale this up to the entire University System across the country, and it would essentially be doing the same thing. But that’s when people start using words like nuts, right? Like, what are you even talking about? How could that even possibly work?

Billy Saas:  On that note, the ‘nuts how could that even possibly work’, I feel like it’s been illuminating over the years to come into that and, and get it said in different ways with sort of different implicit meanings. And I think most often the implicit ‘you’re crazy’ comes from a lack of faith that it’s politically feasible, right? Not that it’s wrong, right? Or that you’re fundamentally nuts. It’s that, yeah, because of all the entanglements that exist in place, and the lack of willingness of administrators at the university level to put themselves out on the line and risk their relationships with the private sector. That’s what’s crazy about it, it’s not that the thing itself is not. I think, for me, that’s heartening, because it’s good to not feel crazy. On the classroom currency thing, too, in the class that we just ended, or are ending now. Students designed, following the models of UMKC and other places that have done the classroom currency project, which is all about teaching money. But then also, you learn that teaching money is teaching collectivity, and living in common. What is this thing for and what social purposes does it serve? Rather than do the sovereign, I’ve developed this currency, you are now going out into the community to earn it and pay a tax at the end of the semester, which is roughly what those experiences have been so far as like, okay, you’ll design your own currencies, identify a social purpose or problem around this area that we’re in, in New Orleans, that can be solved by the creation of a complementary currency. They all came up with their own ideas, some of them were really great. And it’s clear, I guess, Scott. For me, it’s clearest, and it’s sort of a localist expression, and then the politics of the thing get impossible the further and further you get out from that classroom, that’s like a controlled thing. And that’s where I think that the skepticism, the critique is often coming from not on the logical analytical level, but the, you can’t do that level.

Scott Ferguson:  Yeah, and we’ve worked with folks. Some Deans at a major university system that we will not name.

Billy Saas:  We had an article spiked in the Chronicle.

Scott Ferguson:  Oh, yeah. That’s something else. I guess we’re going on record saying that

Billy Saas:  No, I think cut out. Between you and us.

Scott Ferguson:  Yeah, we finally got into The Chronicle of Higher Ed. And we wrote a piece and then they got cold feet, and they paid us not to run it. They paid us off.

Jennifer Mittelstadt:  Wow. Wow.

Scott Ferguson:  Talk about entrenched.

Jennifer Mittelstadt:  I will just add one last thing that it sounds like the way for this to go. I mean, y’all have to build up from the bottom right, you’re just gonna have to find a university you can take over and then see.

Billy Saas:  Or system! CUNY maybe.

Jennifer Mitelstadt: Exactly, and see how that goes. I just want to say it’s a really rare thing. One of the great things about Scholars For New Deal for Higher Education is meeting all the people and having fun. Honestly, one of the true gifts of having gone down this road is just meeting other super engaged people who are smart and fun and want to solve things and yeah. I’ve really enjoyed it. I’m really enjoying it. I plan to enjoy it in the future.

Scott Ferguson:  Well, let’s keep working together. So thank you so much for joining us and yeah, come back. Let’s keep talking.

Jennifer Mittelstadt:  Sounds good.

* Thanks to the Money on the Left production team: William Saas (audio editor), Mike Lewis (transcription), & Emily Reynolds of The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art (graphic art)

Elizabeth S. Anker joins Money on the Left to discuss her provocative new book, On Paradox: The Claims of Theory (Duke University Press, 2022). Anker is Associate Professor of English at Cornell University and Professor of Law in the Cornell Law School. In On Paradox, Anker contends that faith in the logic of paradox has been the cornerstone of left intellectualism since the second half of the twentieth century. She attributes the ubiquity of paradox in the humanities to its appeal as an incisive tool for exposing and dismantling hierarchies. Anker, however, suggests that paradox not only generates the very exclusions it critiques but also creates a disempowering haze of indecision. 

Tracing the ascent of paradox in theories of modernity, in rights discourse, in the history of literary criticism and the linguistic turn, and in the transformation of the liberal arts in higher education, Anker shows that reasoning through paradox has become deeply problematic: it engrains a startling homogeneity of thought while undercutting the commitment to social justice that remains a guiding imperative of theory. Rather than calling for a wholesale abandonment of such reasoning, Anker argues for an expanded, diversified theory toolkit that can help theorists escape the seductions and traps of paradox. In our conversation, we explore strong parallels between Anker’s call for a reparative “integrative criticism” and our own constructive hermeneutics of provision. 

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Transcript

The following was transcribed by Mike Lewis and has been lightly edited for clarity.

Billy Saas:  Elizabeth Anker, welcome to Money On The Left.

Elizabeth Anker:  Thank you so much for having me. It’s great to be here. Wonderful to meet you guys.

Billy Saas:  It’s great to meet you, too. We were just talking about coming into contact with your book and some of the reasons we’re excited about it. That book is On Paradox: The Claims of Theory out with Duke University Press in 2022. Before we get into and I think to help us contextualize our discussion, could you share a little bit about your personal and professional background and kind of the academic fields and concerns that have driven your scholarship and, and your teaching up to the point of like the publication of On Paradox?

Elizabeth Anker:  Yeah, absolutely. I have an unusual background, and that I have both a JD, and a PhD in Literary Studies, and a joint appointment between the law school at Cornell and the English department. So I’ve spent lots of time thinking about both the stakes of interdisciplinarity and some of the challenges of doing interdisciplinary work and kind of speaking across audiences. So I’m incredibly sensitive to the difficulty of certain humanities fields that they experience in addressing wider audiences. But in a way, this book really stemmed from two different projects that I spent a lot of time working on, both of which were edited collections. The first was a big edited collection on law and literature, which is actually an interesting field because it was one of the first interdisciplinary junctures, so to speak. So scholars already back in the early 80s, were bringing literature to bear to think about legal questions, and vice versa. So a few years ago, I edited this collection with my friend and colleague at Stanford Law School, Bernie Meyler. And in the process of doing that, we really tried to make sense out of the dominant shape and orientation of scholarship that thinks about law and literature together. And in that effort to taxonomize and dissect these main approaches to that particular interdisciplinary field, we seized on a series of problems. And there’s a way in which those problems also inform some of the arguments that I make in this book. For instance, literature scholars tend to almost scapegoat law, precisely so that they can make the argument that literature comes along to save the day. So a lot of humanistic work on legal questions turns law, this big monolithic thing, into almost a kind of straw man. It’s really easy to be torn down, but through a series of super reductive critiques that actually ended up falsifying the legal process, and its real world operations in certain ways. One of the arguments in On Paradox has to do with this ongoing tendency to explain law in ways that are just plain inaccurate, and reductive and simplifying, I’m sure I’ll get to talk a little bit more about that in a minute. But the other big project that I spent years working on that very much sowed the seeds for this book, was another edited collection with my former mentor, Rita Felski on critique and post critique. Rita has written a lot about the limits of critique. And in a way, that’s a big project trying to weigh in on what people refer to as the method wars within theory. So this book On Paradox is kind of my own foray into the method wars to account for where theory has gone wrong, so to speak, and for the ways in which it needs to reinvent itself. So, just to sum up, a lot of the book stems from the fact that I’m somebody who has one foot in law and one foot in literary studies, and have therefore been able to assume something of an outsider’s vantage point, asking about the crisis in the humanities, and these larger trends that are overtaking humanistic inquiry. But with all of that in mind, there’s a way in which the book is also kind of my take on the crisis in the humanities. People have probably seen the recent article about “The Death of the English Major”. And these outcries about the end of the liberal arts or the corporatization of the university, have been on everybody’s mind of late. And in a way the book is also its own account of where that crisis came from. That’s in part an account taken from an outsider’s viewpoint and there’s a way in which I take an unpopular view, which is that humanists are in part responsible for their own growing obsolescence. Obviously, there are all sorts of other big factors tied to neoliberalism, and so on. But some of that responsibility that humanists carry themselves has to do with what I call paradox, or this idea that some other primary methodological approaches have either backfired or gone astray or simply haven’t delivered on their promise. So there is a way in which the book is a plea for humanists’ own self reckoning.

Scott Ferguson:  Thanks for that. So maybe we can focus a little bit more about the specific origins of On Paradox. It’s a pretty wide ranging book in terms of the topics and the issues that it covers. So what are the origins of this specific project? What questions did it emerge from? Did its arguments spring from a core inquiry or focus, we know from communicating with you that you were going to write a modest, small book about one little thing, and then it kind of blossomed into what it’s become?

Elizabeth Anker:  Yeah, the book initially was going to be a mere fraction of its current length and scope. And it was initially an attempt to wrestle with what people have referred to as the human rights turn in the humanities, about 10 to 15 years ago. A whole series of humanistic fields: history, anthropology, even gender studies, literary studies, were all abuzz with excitement talking about human rights, and what rights were their limits and their promise, and I decided I was gonna write a short book that attempted to make sense out of that growing preoccupation. Given the skepticism about law that prevails within a lot of these fields, to me, it seemed perplexing that suddenly a bunch of literary critics thought human rights were so important, and were kind of rah rah jumping on the human rights bandwagon. In the process of accumulating, trying to digest, trying to make sense out of what on earth people thought they were talking about, when they started talking about human rights. I was struck by a series of things. The big thing being almost everybody either began or concluded by observing just how paradoxical rights were. So as a diagnosis of rights, paradox was held out and arrived at by almost everybody. And often people did so in a way that also presented paradox as some kind of epiphanic recognition. So I was struck by the kind of rote predictability of paradox as a way of talking about rights discourse and human rights. And in a way that’s absolutely true. There’s no question that rights have proven deeply paradoxical. They’ve been kind of impaled by their paradoxes, again and again, whether in practice, or as a philosophical construct, or even as a discourse. Rights are deeply contradictory. There’s no question about that. But I was nevertheless troubled by the uniformity of the ways that theorists were talking about rights. And in the process, I was also struck by the fact that paradox tended to stand in for deeply polar things. On the one hand, paradox was a way of talking about the fatalities of rights, the failures, the limits, the disappointments, the spent promise, so everything wrong with rights, it was almost a way of critiquing rights by saying they’re too paradoxical to be valuable. But at the same time, all sorts of other theorists and literary critics were citing paradox as the very locus of rights’ ongoing promise. The fact that rights were paradoxical was what made them fertile, fecund, open ended this valuable source of justice for the future. I was trying to make sense out of the fact that paradox meant two totally different things. And it often would even do so in the same study. Somebody would blame rights for being willfully paradoxical and therefore complicit with power. But then say, well, their paradoxes is also what makes them democratic and ethical, and just, so I was initially trying to wrestle with all of this and suddenly realized that this framework, these tendencies for making sense out of rights, were showing up in all sorts of other areas: debates about democracy, debates about the humanities, debates about modernity. And so I came to recognize that I was really attempting to map and contend with a whole kind of worldview or mentality, or even epistemology or way of knowing, we could say that really has been definitive of theory. So I felt the need to really broaden the focus of this initially narrow study on right, to make sense out of and grapple with the genetics of theory, so to speak, or some of the dominant assumptions that inform critical theory as this really far reaching intellectual formation and intellectual tradition. So it became, as one of my friends would tell me, a book about everything.

Billy Saas:  It really is a book about everything. And it got me thinking a lot about the evolution of my relationship with critical theory from the experience of graduate school, this sort of initial excitement of encounters with paradox. And then the eventual kind of malaise, melancholy and inertia that comes from paradox, ultimately realizing while on the job market, and then in my first job, that humanities scholars have been talking about these things for a long time, and our work conditions, our workplaces have not gotten the same kind of critical attention or critical self reflection, and that the paradox of that is, is very difficult to live with. And so I think part of what we’re up to here at Money On The Left, and our collective more broadly, is the kind of constructive, let’s build something, in place of this void of paradox. Let’s improve our workplaces. Let’s take that inventory and get to the business of making a better world which is why your work and Rita Felski’s work resonated for me, especially, but I know that her work and your work are also having broader and deeper impact. So we’re super excited to have you and to talk more about this.

Elizabeth Anker:  That comment very much captured the trajectory or history of this style of thought, or sort of intellectual mindset that I’m trying to track and make sense out of, which is that you’re absolutely right, that paradoxes are thrilling, and a particular style of thought, grounded in reasoning through paradox or the discovery of these, again, revelatory eye opening capacities of paradox was this exhilarating, new, highly creative thing when theory came of age in the Academy right. So with the advent of theory 50 years ago, or what have you, 40-50 years ago, paradox was new. But over the last 40 years, it’s become routinized. This particular style of thought that once carried all this promise has become too predictable, too much of what we do, and really fails to speak to our kind of lived conditions, and ongoing, most urgent political realities. So some of the book’s arguments are, first, that this style of thought needs to be updated. It’s become passe, right? Ideas that made sense 40 years ago, don’t necessarily make sense in the present. And one of the big reasons, secondly, that it needs updating is that it’s failed to translate into what we could call a practice, or an applied theory, or a set of tools for building better worlds. And I think one of my arguments is that it’s not only that it’s failed to translate, that this style of thought that I call paradox can actually short circuit or impede forms of real world action, because of the various sort of hang ups that come with it.

Billy Saas:  When you start to encounter administration, within the context of the university, you start to wonder to what extent that paradox, that style of thought, actually serves the system as it exists, the de facto administrative apparatus, and, of course, folks who end up in administration have been around for a long time, and they weren’t in those theory wars at the beginning or theory development at the beginning.

Elizabeth Anker:  Yeah, just piggyback on that, we theorists have tended to presume that this method of reasoning that again, I call paradox, equals a particular politics, that to be attuned to paradox is to be a good lefty, to be a good radical to be social justice oriented. And that’s just not the case. This style of thought is highly susceptible to being co opted or hijacked. And in fact, I really think that’s what we’re witnessing at this moment in history, whether by administrators who might not actually have the best interests of English departments or other humanities fields in mind, or, frankly, by really powerful political actors who are kind of ruining democracy right now. I hope we get to talk a little bit about my next project at some point. But the thing I’m working on right now is precisely to try to track how this style of thought is being actively misappropriated to undermine and sabotage a left social justice progressive political agenda.

Billy Saas:  You can sort of see it in your teaching. And I wonder if this is something that you may have experienced, too, where the same kind of surprise and delight that I got from paradox as a student, maybe it’s my own failings as a teacher, but I struggle to reproduce that for students today because it feels so de rigueur, and not surprising, and not delightful, right? In fact, it’s all over everywhere. So where does pedagogy figure into your kind of view of the situation of paradoxes effects?

Elizabeth Anker:  You know, to be totally honest, pedagogy is where it gets hardest for me. On the one hand, it is absolutely true that paradox has become second nature to our current generation of college students, kids in their 20s. All you have to do is a quick search of Amazon for books with “paradox” in the title. That language actively works to trivialize and dumb things down and, again, applies to everything from food crises. So if anything, it’s become its own sort of neoliberal mantra, or self help recipe to talk about paradox and there’s a self-indulgent-wallowing-in-paradox-feel-good-self-discovery element that gets capitalized on in a lot of bestsellers, popular culture or what have you. So students, there’s nothing new about paradox to students. But I find that it’s tricky because I myself in the classroom sometimes do, nevertheless, praise the virtues of things like indeterminacy, inconclusivity, indecision, irresolution as values for awakening, or eliciting a particular kind of moral and ethical engagement. So pedagogy and the experience of teaching very much helped to crystallize and motivate some of the book’s arguments but, to be honest, it’s also where I find myself still championing and celebrating the powers of paradox and insisting that we still need some paradox, and there are still lots of things that we can learn from it. I’m by no means arguing that we need to do away with this style of thought, the book’s main take is that it’s simply become far too much of what we do. And if anything, the only thing that theorists have learned to do, and that’s the problem with it, not that it doesn’t contain value in certain contexts, but that we’ve lost sight of the specificity of context and deploy this reasoning everywhere, whereas it should be confined to much narrower types of debates and inquiries.

Scott Ferguson:  So across your first five chapters, and a brief interlude, your book traces paradox’s surprisingly consistent importance and centrality for a wide range of critical disciplines, fields, discourses, and even social movements. Would you mind walking us through some of your key arguments in the specific chapters and maybe we can start with chapter one where you take on the grand conception of modernity as a periodizing term. And you make the case that our very theorisation and conception of modernity is, to the bones, thoroughly paradoxical.

Elizabeth Anker:  Yeah, again, one of the book’s goals is to really show that this reasoning shows up absolutely everywhere. Basically, any issue that has been deemed worthy of serious intellectual attention, or theorisation, ends up being found to be paradoxical. And one of the prime sites where that occurs, and I would wager even one of the earliest sites where that occurs, if you think about intellectual history, is debates about modernity. And if you do one of those Google ngrams it’s even right when people started using the language of modernity, late 18th century you see a spike in the use of the term paradox. Once again, that diagnosis makes total sense: of course, to be modern is to be steeped in paradox. Basically everything about modern life, selfhood, individuality, politics, you name it is no doubt paradoxical. But one of the things I tried to trace in that chapter is, again, the routinization of that diagnosis, and how it came to be a kind of intellectual second nature, so that it became impossible to talk about something like modernity, without citing to its paradoxes. But I kind of use modernity and debates about modernity in that chapter as an example also to show the very ambidextrous and multifaceted intellectual labor that that citation to paradox carries out. This is true within most theory that performs a particular kind of reasoning. So paradox basically oversees all stages and all aspects of the reasoning process. So for instance, it’s a diagnosis. Right? Modernity is paradoxical, of course it is. But that diagnosis usually embeds a critique of certain aspects of modernity, we can think about classic Marxist critiques of capitalism as a distinctly modern bequest, right. Capitalism is obviously a bad thing. It’s by way of citing to or excavating its many paradoxes and contradictions, that it’s revealed to be so lethal, and predatory, and all of those things. So paradox is a diagnosis, it’s a critique, it comes to basically oversee method or become the backbone of method. Again, it’s almost impossible to find theory that doesn’t operate or proceed by way of the identification and mining of success of paradoxes. So it becomes hardwired into a method. One of the things I try to wrestle with in the book is how this diagnosis of paradox which most immediately encodes all of the bad things and liabilities is something like modernity, with the emergence and arrival of post structuralism, and all of the intellectual ferment that happens in the 1980s and 1990s with the rise of identity politics, the revolution in the humanities, etc, also leads to a change in the way people started thinking and talking about paradox. So that this very notion of equality, that sums up all of the perils of something like modernity, simultaneously comes to be redemptive or salvific, much in the way I was talking about with rights. So the fact that modernity is paradoxical, also comes to be something to be celebrated as the source of modernity’s untapped promise. And I develop an account for the confluence of factors and intellectual developments that allow this diagnosis of paradox to suddenly also become a salvific one. What happens is that paradox also emerges as a kind of destination or cure, or remedy or antidote to all of these liabilities. And that’s in part because paradox does something else too. And that is that it becomes deeply autobiographical for theory. It becomes its own kind of self-referential way of talking about what it means to be an intellectual to inhabit paradox. And paradox almost comes to be transposed onto the persona or character of the great thinker, or the harbinger of modernity, or the great intellectual stage. And there, too, everybody from Max Weber to you name it. These great thinkers are almost always deemed embodiments of paradox and what makes them great is because their own personas metabolize all of these different paradoxes. So it also becomes, again, deeply autobiographical or about the identity of what it means to do theory. And just really quickly, we can see how that would play out. Even in terms of the way people have defined theory over the years to be Paradoxa: as to be contrary to Orthodoxy, to be a dissident, to be a gadfly, to be anti-authoritarian, all of those things. And so it makes complete sense that we as theorists would cathect onto that logic of paradox, or see within it mirrors of our own understanding of our job as leftist, critically-minded intellectuals. Paradoxes are also deeply anti normative. So we can see just thinking about the sheer etymology of the word paradox, why it would be part of the genetics of theory.

Scott Ferguson:  Could you talk a little bit more about the Cold War context in which you trace the rise of post structuralism, especially in the states and why paradox becomes so newly enticing given that context?

Elizabeth Anker:  Yeah, absolutely. Basically, my argument about what happens in the 70s is that there are a whole series of intellectual development and a particular historical milieu, that come together in ways that really reinforce paradox as a way of knowing or an epistemology, but all provide separate kind of intellectual warrants for intellectual reasons that paradox becomes so incredibly powerful as an explanatory framework. One of those is absolutely the Cold War context. And a particular definition or account of totalitarianism that begins to take hold, and that everybody agrees on and totalitarianism is increasingly defined as a political system that is hostile to pluralism, plural vocality, paradox. And so totalitarianism is misunderstood as the sort of unifying force that’s going to, by definition, devour multiplicity and paradox and dissent, and all of that. Democracy and everything anti totalitarian, is increasingly explained in terms of its paradoxes. This sort of thinking is, I think, generally in the air at that moment in history, the kind of anti totalitarianism of paradox, but also explain why deconstruction would continue, would be one of the most influential progenitors of this kind of reasoning, perhaps, within the academy. So there’s something about that cold war environment and a celebration of speech for speech’s sake, that lends this logic of paradox incredible currency. That cold war environment, one of my arguments, also colluded with these lingering residues of the 1960s and 68, which also endowed the dissidents of paradox and the anti authoritarianism of paradox with a particular kind of purchase. We can think about the sort of magical psychedelic thinking of 68 as its own appetite for paradox, and for those mind altering discoveries that we can associate with that thinking, but a series of other things come along in sort of intellectual developments within the academy, perhaps the biggest is the linguistic turn. And the rise of Saussurean theories of language and representation provide a separate warrant for why paradox is so powerful and all meaning is going to stem from or inhere within paradox. I also talk about the rise of literary study. The 80s are sort of the heyday of aesthetic theory. I talked a little bit about how these thinkers are also drawing from theology. But the point is that all of these things kind of come together in the perfect intellectual storm that all separately reinforce and incite this sense that to be paradoxical is to be alive and energetic and attuned as a thinker.

Scott Ferguson:  Would you mind discussing one particular example of one of the supposed paradoxes of modernity, whether it’s in reference to Baudrillard or any other of the thinkers that you cite.

Elizabeth Anker:  I guess I would come back to something like democracy. And I’ll use that as an example simply because I think this mode of thought, this modality, is particularly rampant still today within a lot of political theory, and especially radical democratic theory. We can see why democracy would be paradoxical, right? It’s a perennially failed project. Democracy depends on this artificial construction of ‘the people’. But we know that nation states are woefully exclusionary, and are never going to have perfect representation. The paradoxes that extend from modern practice of democracy are countless and incurable in many respects. So again, no doubt that democracy as an institution is fatally flawed, and fatally flawed because of these paradoxes of incomplete representation. But what occurs in a lot of political theory is that that very incompleteness comes to be celebrated, because it’s seen as paradoxical. So the fact that ‘the people’ is forever and complete, gets read as a positive thing. And the source of the very fluidity and indeterminacy and open-endedness of that category of ‘the people’. If ‘the people’ was closed, then it wouldn’t be paradoxical. So there’s a sort of embrace of the very properties that one might, and simultaneously in the same breath, is despairing of. So one of my arguments about what this logic of paradox that again, starts to take hold in the 1980s, does is that it performs a kind of alchemy or almost a transient substantiation. There’s almost kind of something theological about it where it works to redeem legitimacy deficits, or justificatory deficits. The fact that ‘the people’ is fatally flawed, going back to Rousseau, it’s clearly a problem for the legitimacy of democracy. One of the reasons democracy is paradoxical is because it confronts this irresolvable legitimacy, crisis and deficit of legitimacy. But by describing that legitimacy deficit is paradoxical, that very failure comes to be rescued and, lo and behold, fully celebrated or extolled as the very wellspring of democracy’s promise. And this is a move that comes very, very clearly from the long history of aesthetic criticism and theology. Let’s think about The Odyssey and attempt to reckon with the limits of a deity, right? We’ve all had to study this stuff once upon a time. The fact that God is omnipresent and omniscient, yet nevertheless allows evil in the world, that’s a paradox. But that, unknowability of God, and unfathomability of God within theology comes to be embraced and exalted as the very essence of what makes God God. Again, this logic of paradox performs a kind of conversion that takes what looks at first blush like a liability into the very locus of the just and ethical promise of something, whether it’s God or the humanities.

Scott Ferguson:  I’d like to try to paraphrase some of the argumentation you’ve been working through in order to tease out some of the resonances that I’m hearing, which is: part of the problem with this mode of paradoxical thinking that, maybe there’s other paradoxical modes of thinking, but this particular mode that’s so widespread that you’re tracing. Part of its major problem is that it weirdly wants to unsettle the master signifier, the law of the Father. Yeah, in order to unsettle these dominant, hegemonic terms, ‘the people’, democracy, right? It has to perform the failure of its univocity. The failure of its single or array of clustered, singular meanings and say, “no, no, it actually does the opposite. You think it does inclusion? It does exclusion. You think it brings people together? No, it brings people apart!” Right? And I think one of the ways in which what you’re up to resonates with what we’re up to, I think, is you don’t have to take those hegemonic understandings for granted. You don’t have to give away the game to a particular enlightenment understanding of “the people”. For us, especially, you don’t have to take the liberal understanding of money and its ontology and its topology. You don’t have to take it for granted and just do immanent critique and show how it’s internally contradictory. You can say: Well, wait a minute, what if you start from different premises? What if you don’t start from the premise that money is a private barter relationship that ends up in this massive system of mutual exploitation? What if you start with it as a public utility or a legal design question, what opens up instead? So to me what’s so illuminating about your book is it gives us this language and so many historical analyses of this problem of giving over to the master term that you’re supposedly trying to undermine.

Elizabeth Anker:  Yeah, I love that point. And I have to confess that I haven’t thought about one of the things I’m after along those lines, and that’s why I love it so much. But I think you’re absolutely right, that some of the problems with this style of thought is that it ends up reinforcing the authority of the very thing ostensibly being critiqued. So it ends up almost like reifying, or ceding the game, to the explanatory power of liberal accounts of capitalism, or liberal accounts of rights, because it’s so dependent on that, again, almost kind of reductive notion of what’s being critiqued. I think you’re absolutely right. And for me, another extension of that is that it can contribute to this kind of romance of failure and romance of impossibility, because part of the logic of paradox is to be adamantly resistant to ever lodging itself, or installing itself as a new dominant or a new normativity. So the moment you win, you have to immediately undercut what you just want. So they’re almost like tripwires installed in this logic. The moment what’s excluded comes to be included: Oh, that very thing becomes bad, right? Because it’s the new dominant, but that becomes an endless game that leads us nowhere. So yeah, I love that way of framing it. Yes. Another paradox. Yeah.

Billy Saas:  Is there something about paradox, inherently, that we could say is atomizing or alienating, and maybe affectively discouraging? It’s exciting, but there’s a sort of flat affect afterwards where there needs to be a kind of supplement. And that might be what you’re after or suggesting here?

Elizabeth Anker:  Yeah, and again, I’m perhaps most critical of the modes of thought that we can associate with post-structuralism that took hold in the 80s. First I very much agree that there’s nothing about this reasoning on its own that’s inherently problematic. The idea is that this logic that’s been so dominant, and, if anything, the exclusive way people think in certain fields really needs to be supplemented or complemented with other styles of thought. We’ve been doing half of what we need to do, and we need to do and the other half. But just kind of is one further example of where this perhaps comes from, to sort of explain how it takes hold and why it has placed a stranglehold on more affirmative, constructive modes of thought. Again, I think so much of this style of thought can actually be attributed to post-Saussurean linguistics and the theories of meaning that emerge. If we think about Jacques Derrida in his account of a text or writing, meaning inheres with the slippages, the deferrals, the gaps between words, the impossibilities of clear presence, the fact that you’re never going to have a transparent understanding. Meaning is going to kind of emerge through those impossibilities, through those delays, through those foreclosures and limits to what we can know. Meaning, action, agency, everything has been imagined to inhere within those kinds of slippages and deferrals. And I think what’s taken hold within a lot of theory is anytime there’s an effort to account for meaning, or agency, or action, that’s not displaced along such lines, it’s dismissed as simply wrong or selling out or “liberal”, or again, just plain mistaken. And one of the challenges in writing the book has been recognizing just how thoroughgoing this mode of thought is, while really trying to push back against a tradition that’s hardwired to dismiss an effort to be affirmative, concrete, constructive, etc, as point blank mistaken, or point blank wrong or missing the picture.

Scott Ferguson:  So this is a great pivot, I think, to our question about your second and third chapters. And that’s where you uncover what you reveal to be this deep anti-legalism that subtends, paradoxically, both a positive discourse of rights, but also the critique of rights. We’ve been kind of referring to it, but can you delve into this problem, and how are dismissals and recuperation of rights both rooted in paradox? And then what, for you, does this have to do with aesthetic theory?

Elizabeth Anker:  Yeah, absolutely. It’s a big question. One of the things I tried to do throughout the book is to think about how reasoning that lends precedence to paradox can lead to polar impulses. One of them that I think we were touching on or you brought up when you talked about how this logic can end up reinforcing the power of the very thing being critiqued is that when something like capitalism, and this is where I, would have a fight to pick with at least some Marxist theory, capitalism, for instance, is seen as fundamentally contradictory in ways that basically ontologize or reify that property. And I’m sorry, right? Paradox is something that my brain is a quality in my head that I’m reading onto something to help me make sense out of it. It is not a material property of reality. I would dispute that it is, but when it is deemed thus, or fatally part of something’s architecture or gene pool, that ends up rendering paradox a foregone conclusion. I worry about that tendency, in terms of how it can tie our hands in resisting a given structure or cause the problem to seem so fatally incurable that it can lead to forms of defeatism and inertia in the face of this structure that’s deemed paradoxical. I think that plays out with particular vividness in the skepticism about law that has prevailed within and basically across the humanities, and even within a lot of critical legal studies circles. My favorite example, Wendy Brown and Janet Halley have edited a collection called Left Legalism/Left Critique, and their introduction basically says, submitting any otherwise principally minded left project to the law is going to contaminate it in certain ways. So making recourse to the legal system is going to, by definition, dilute a particular left progressive justice-oriented agenda and is inevitably going to involve a form of self betrayal. And I think that’s just wrong. But that mindset that law is fundamentally bankrupt prevents all sorts of political action that might be really, really successful. I think that mindset is incredibly widespread, and really gets us in trouble as theorists, because it rationalizes and can lead to an excuse for forms of opting out, or not trying in the first place. And that suspicion of law is so pervasive in a lot of theory. The other example I like to bring to mind is a text like Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, probably one of the most influential theoretical texts, and rightly so, right? It revolutionized our ways of talking about gender, in ways that have trickled down into the popular consciousness, amazingly important and successful text. Nevertheless, within this otherwise fantastic book, the rhetoric of the juridical circulates throughout in ways that basically are shorthand for power and oppression. So to describe something as juridical is basically to mean that it’s oppressive. And again, that just erases and obscures and it’s just plain wrong about all of these really important social, political advances that over the centuries, the law has facilitated. So this kind of suspicion of law is really problematic in terms of how it can basically sanction inaction and discourage inaction. Like I’m sure some of my humanities colleagues kind of looked down their noses at me even having a joint appointment in the law school as its own form of selling out. So, I’m really trying to push back against that legal skepticism as one of the reasons that so much theory has really failed to actualize itself in a viable practice, or why so many humanities fields have remained cloistered and refuse to get their hands dirty by actually tangling with real world forms of action.

Scott Ferguson:  And then what about the school that embraces rights as a framework, and yet in your reading, always predicated on the anti legalistic failure arguments that the straight up anti law scholars embraced?

Elizabeth Anker:  Yeah, yeah, the school of post-structuralism, deconstruction, somebody like Jacques Rancière is this very hot figure these days, I think subscribes to its own kind of anti legalism or legal skepticism, but it plays out in a somewhat different way there in that justice is seen as fundamentally uncodifiable. So the minute you can actually codify or consecrate something in a legal decision or law code, that is seen to be the betrayal of these otherwise just ideas. And again, this comes directly from a particular theological tradition that is antinomian. So antinomianism is perhaps the better way to describe that impulse.

Scott Ferguson:  Can you describe what that means for you?

Elizabeth Anker:  Antinomianism simply means that it’s tied in more Protestant traditions to a conception of grace that is very individualistic. It basically means that law in the books is going to be fundamentally incomplete and flawed. It’s almost more of a Pauline Conception of divine inspiration.

Scott Ferguson:  Yeah, the term that we often use at Money On The Left is anti-medial or anti-mediation, right? There’s a sense that mediation is necessarily extrinsic and imposed. And it’s something that we may be all fallen into in a biblical and Lacanian sense, or a Heideggerian sense. We’re all fallen into it, but it is still nevertheless an imposition that we sort of wish that we could be outside of, and we try to conceive of and imagine a just world with that critical leverage of not being fallen into language or not being fallen into the juridical. Yeah, so that’s how we make sense of it.

Elizabeth Anker:  Yeah, and thinking about the antinomian a bit further,  the big prophet of paradox that, again, everybody was reading in the 80s, is Søren Kierkegaard. Fear and Trembling, this meditation on Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac, and the language of paradox is everywhere in a text like that, and it’s the incommunicability, the un-translatability, the fact that nobody would understand that willingness that it would see mad and, frankly, evil to everybody except Abraham is its own version of antinomianism. Kierkegaard was also a big conduit for the thrill of paradox, right? You probably remember reading Kierkegaard for the first time, and I’ve had people over the years when I tell them about the book say: that sounds like the first time I read Kierkegaard!

Billy Saas:  You mentioned a couple of times the phrase “selling out”, which resonated with me for a couple of reasons. One, we’re talking about, actually, Scott’s book in class yesterday, Money, Culture, Media with students, we were talking about critical theory, so this is very pertinent to what we’re talking about now. The concept of, through discussion, how selling out was more of a concern, it seems like in the heyday of the logic of paradox. I’m making this connection myself. It’s sort of an early rise. And I think today, there’s a romance of selling out now, as opposed to… So it’s the rise and grind. There’s the culture of hustle as a completion of that rejection of selling out as an abject thing that you don’t want to do as a participant in the economy. And it’s part of this idea that money is bad, whereas now it’s like, yeah you gotta get your hustle on, you gotta get your stuff. And selling out is probably a good thing. So you probably have some colleagues who are like, get the bag. Do your thing. Scott, I know that you wanted to get us into the aesthetic question.

Scott Ferguson:  Right. Well in your interlude, Liz, you wrote this anti legalism into an argument about the “aesthetic” as an intellectual project, as an institutional project.

Elizabeth Anker:  Yeah, I think one of the big sources of this style of reasoning is aesthetic theory or literary and poetic criticism, frankly, going all the way back to Plato. There are brief interludes in this long history of literary criticism where people are doing something different in the 18th century for a couple of decades. But there’s been a remarkable centrality attributed to paradox when talking about the power of art, I think to be able to see the symmetries are parallels between what that work does in theology. A lot of these early theorists were also doing literary studies, and as theory kind of migrated through the Anglo American University, it stopped first in English departments. So English departments were the big proponents of it. So I think it picked up a lot of these tendencies there. But already the early moderns, Renaissance thinkers, were obsessed with a paradox that you get from Plato, which was referred to as the liar’s paradox. Everybody loves this paradox, right? If I say I’m about to lie to you, it’s raining outside. Am I telling the truth? Or am I lying? It’s actually like 90 in Ithaca. If you tell someone you’re telling a lie, is that telling the truth, or is it lying? But that’s what fiction does. That’s what all art does. All of art says, I’m a fiction, this is imaginary. And so it’s different, it’s a paradoxical form of truth telling. For Plato, that was one of the reasons to expel the poets from the Republic, because they were fiction tellers, they were lie tellers. And basically, since the early modern period, someone like Sir Philip Sidney is a great example. The logic of paradox, they’ve recuperated that epithet and said: actually, no, what was the problem for Plato, we tell lies, is the very power of art that we tell lies. So this kind of spirit of paradox has defined accounts of what art is, and what the value of art is, you know, basically for hundreds of years. And I think that the endurance and longevity of that tradition is one thing that people picked up on. One of the reasons that this style of thought that I’m saying took hold in the 1980s was so readily internalized, because it capitalized on intellectual traditions that have been around for a very, very long time. There, too, there’s a particular relationship to truth telling, or meaning, that needs to be routed through forms of deferral, and delay, and that it can’t be present and actualizable. It’s something that can’t be codified in any kind of positivistic regime. Does that speak to your question or not?

Billy Saas:  No, I think that answers our questions. Probably better to segue to the selling out bad versus selling out good.

Elizabeth Anker:  But do you mean like an embrace of the fact that everybody’s complicit? And so why not just —

Billy Saas:  Yeah, maybe the headline is: there is no ethical living under capitalism, right, as a kind of catchphrase for millennial Gen Z online life.

Elizabeth Anker:  Yeah. So, I think that’s showing up and, again, the stuff that I’m kind of working on is a spin off of this project. I don’t see that kind of embrace of selling out so much in my colleagues, or among my English majors. I wonder if that’s kind of the mindset of the New Right or the Alt Right. There’s a lot being written and kind of in process on the extent to which the New Right NatCon youth are kind of embracing a certain bastardized version of Marxism. But some of the animating creeds of that kind of crowd are, I think, precisely this real politic where everything is deemed coercive. There’s a generalized view among the right, increasingly, that all actions are coercive, all power is dispersed. So we might as well just engage in some power play, unabashedly. I think this reasoning is kind of in the air in some of these Alt Right circles, but increasingly in institutions of power that are pretty mainstream.

Billy Saas:  I think I see it in left cultural spaces, maybe not among left academics, maybe so much. I do think that there is a kind of well what are you going to do, give people a hard time for working and trying to make money so that they can take care of themselves. And then that being sort of like the baseline, but then we should be happy for so and so that they have gotten this big deal or this big outcome, and, if if nothing else, that abject state of sellout is no longer a category, I feel like so much today in the way that it was.

Elizabeth Anker:  I think the kind of internal, the going small, is very much among the left. This kind of downsizing of ambitions, and your comments also making me think about Anna Kornbluh’s forthcoming book, and her accounts of the rise of auto fiction and first person narration. All we can do is think about this very narrow sphere of influence. Everything is so sullied and suspect, so there’s something deeply … kind of retreat or withdrawal, that I think license or sanction by this, like, “everybody’s selling out.”

Scott Ferguson:  I’d like to pivot to your fourth chapter, fourth and fifth. To me, in these chapters, you really drill down into very specific paradoxes or specific fields. And I think that they’re maybe among the most likely to offend, to put it mildly.

Elizabeth Anker:  Yeah. You’re the first person who has said that so directly.

Scott Ferguson:  Oh well, you’re welcome. And I think they are, another way of putting this is that, because they really touch a sensitive nerve of, I think, what the left Intelligencia takes for granted. Just to start with your Chapter Four topic, The Paradox of Exclusion. The paradox of exclusion is that dominant forms exclude. This is bad, it’s unjust, it’s painful, it’s harmful. There’s so many things, negative things, that you can communicate about exclusion. And then the response is often, in this modality, to give voice to the excluded or in an Adornoian parlance, to give voice to suffering. And that becomes the injunction of the paradox of exclusion. And just re-articulating this paradox, it’s really hard to think otherwise, it’s really hard to think: Wait a minute, so what are you saying — exclusion is okay? And are you saying we shouldn’t give voice to the subaltern? What are you saying? So, I want to give you a chance to kind of nuance your critique, and put your most persuasive case forward?

Elizabeth Anker:  Yeah, my critiques have less to do with the power of that mode of consciousness raising, because this really emerges with the consciousness raising campaigns of the 70s and 80s. Right with, you know, it shows up in Catharine MacKinnon’s early work trying to awaken women to their own oppression. But that logic, or that project of forever uncovering new sites of exclusion epitomizes the way in which this style of thought can backfire. On the one hand, it’s limitless or insatiable, there’s no end or stopping points to uncovering yet new sites of exclusion. Because once something gains recognition, or is included, it’s no longer excluded, and so becomes part of the problem. And in my own account, a lot of this has contributed to some of the infighting in a lot of humanities fields. A lot of humanities departments, literary studies, perhaps in particular, have become really internally self divided, even though everybody is on the same team, so to speak. And that’s because we’ve identified with that plight of the excluded. Humanists perceive themselves as being paradoxical or, contrary to doxa, themselves excluded. So if our primary mission is to speak to terms of exclusion, there needs to be exclusion somewhere. So we’re going to find them or create them even if they don’t really exist. I think that this project of giving voice to exclusion has really consumed certain humanities fields in ways that have become really counterproductive, and, again, led to forms of internal infighting and rivalries that prevent those fields from taking up other challenges. We only have so much energy and can only fight so many fights. When we’re incessantly fighting with our colleagues, we’re not going to take on other battles. The kind of internal self reference has become a real problem in certain disciplines. It’s one of the reasons for the crisis in the humanities. And I tried to argue that this political consciousness raising project that, again, has governed some of these fields has ironically, led to a form of navel gazing in certain ways. I know that’s a harsh condemnation, I have two other big complaints that I’ll highlight for now about why this project of consciousness raising by giving voice to exclusion became self limiting. One, the problem with this reasoning is that it gets applied to everything in a self reproducing structure. So regardless of what’s being analyzed, there’s a particular methodology that gets brought to bear. And that does a couple of things that lead to the exact same conclusions when you’re applying the same methodology, regardless of whether the object of exclusion is racial oppression, or misogyny. You’re going to reach the same conclusions. But what that does is that also works to obscure or minimize differences between different sites of exclusion. And that can lead to its own forms of inertia, because I’m sorry, to act in the real world, we need to make decisions about which problem is more grave, or more severe, and which is less severe. And there’s a real reluctance to undertake any sort of judgment, that hierarchizes in a lot of these humanities fields. I’m not saying we should do this, but I’m just using this as an example. So if I were to walk into my faculty meeting later today, and say: I think that abortion access issues are more important than the fight against police violence right now. And I think that that’s where I should direct my energies, I would be exiled from the department within the next half hour. But real world political action requires that we differentiate and draw distinctions. Again, because this particular methodology of analysis has tended to operate on autopilot, it prevents normative analysis that actually tries to differentiate between the magnitude of injuries and their severity suffered in diverse sites of exclusion. So in a way, one of my arguments is that we haven’t been critical enough. And that’s because in critiquing everything, by way of the same methodological apparatus, we actually end up preventing ourselves from making critical judgments about where to direct our limited resources. And this logic of exclusion tends to do that. The third real problem with it is just how easily it’s appropriated. All of the men’s rights stuff buys into and reproduces this exact same formula for talking about exclusion. I’ve mentioned a couple of times, I’m starting to work on what’s going on in the US Supreme Court. I have a reading of Dobbs, the decision that overruled or did away with the right to abortion, and I’m sorry, Samuel Alito deploys this logic of giving voice to exclusion, to talk about the rights of the fetus, and to start to pave a pathway for recognizing fetal personhood. And so this thinking is, again, by no means tied to a particular left progressive agenda. It’s super easily plundered and misappropriated. So I’m not sure that it’s the recipe for all of the good things we expect it’s invariably going to be a recipe for.

Scott Ferguson:  So in your fifth chapter, you take up the role of paradox in what’s called trauma theory. Maybe to get us into that argument, you can tell our listeners a little bit about what trauma theory is, how it arose, and how it’s been on your view, overridingly positive, but that it, too, has limitations and blind spots that we need to be thinking about otherwise and especially when it comes to pedagogical cultures in classrooms where trauma theory is taught?

Elizabeth Anker:  Yeah. Over the course of the book, I look at a series of innovations that demand to be attributed to theory, or this revolution in the humanities, and just how much they’ve really revolutionized popular discourse. Ideas about gender would be one wherein theory won, right? We’ve changed the game, talk of structural oppression. Even five years ago, discussing structural oppression would not be in common parlance. It’s become a kind of dinner table fair. My students arrive in college knowing what structural oppression is. And that’s amazing. Another way in which everything we’ve been doing in the humanities has, in fact, changed things. Trauma theory is another enormous site of influence. Before Vietnam, trauma was not a recognized medical diagnosis. And trauma theory arose in the academy in the 70s, 80s, 90s, and gained enormous popularity. It initially thought specifically about trauma stemming from the Holocaust, and it was heavily influenced in its earliest incarnations by both psychoanalysis, specifically psychoanalysis in the vein of Jacques Lacan, and by deconstruction, so thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man. It’s changed a lot and departed in many ways from its roots and what is often thought of as Yale school, because it happened at Yale. Yale School of Trauma Theory. But trauma theory has also been widely critiqued as colonizing our available vocabularies for talking about victimization and injury. So all sorts of people have complained about… there’s an influential book called The Empire of Trauma, have complained about the ways trauma has become, not that trauma theory is wrong or bad on its own, but it’s become our dominant and often only framework for thinking about forms of abuse, injury, victimization, and all of that. So the perfect example of a theoretical innovation that’s reverberated throughout the real world instituted all sorts of enormously positive change, yet, nevertheless, needs to be rethought precisely because it’s dominated our explanatory framework so much. The book actually concludes by thinking about the ways it has proven limiting. And some of those limits have to do with this recurring theme of just how easy it is to be hijacked. It’s easy to deploy these dominant definitions of what trauma looks like, and to kind of weaponize them in ways that discredit particular injuries. And I’m also concerned about the ways that it draws from an understanding of representation and linguistic meaning that can work to strangely deem trauma ethical. So in a way, it buys into a line of thought that’s really commonplace, and again, enormously productive in many instances, that asks us to think about pain and suffering as endowing the victim with privileged insight and understanding. This is the kind of reasoning that shows up in one of the most influential texts from the African American literary canon W.E.B Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk, where he coins the notion of “Double Consciousness”, which is this idea that to be the victim of protracted racial and other persecution endows one with an elevated way of knowing, or a double and multiple consciousness that allows more sophisticated grasp of not only the forces that lead to oppression, but of one’s own relationship in the world. Du Bois actually called Double Consciousness a paradox, believe it or not. And that thinking is super positive and super empowering, but what it does is it nevertheless takes pain and finds something redemptive within it. Again, this is valuable thinking for all sorts of reasons. But I tried to reckon with the ways it’s maybe gone a little bit too far. And trauma theory draws on a similar type of understanding, but supplement it with a model of the psyche that understands trauma as fundamentally elusive, repressed, fragmentary, that kind of resides within these gaps of consciousness. Trauma is something we can never actually localize, all the brain does and cycles around it kind of questing for its origin or cure. Hence, this repressed nature. But there’s something about that mode of thought that can take repression, and treat it as restorative and even ethical. So some of this early trauma theory actively describes trauma as the ethical connective tissue that will provide a link across cultures. You can see why I may be skeptical of that kind of move. I do try to wrestle with how that kind of thinking can be problematic, among other reasons, and that it can disqualify certain kinds of injuries from counting as trauma, lots of people have made that argument about it. Early trauma theory has been widely critiqued for being beholden to a very Eurocentric conception of the subject along these lines, but I’m interested in how especially that model needs to be updated due to historical factors. But how that model for understanding injury can again be turned on its head, or exploited and manipulated, to discount historical forms of oppression to actually undermine the victim, to gaslight, or ghost particular kinds of injuries. So for me, some of these ways of talking about trauma, again, kind of epitomize the ways all of these really great innovations that come from theory can nevertheless be misappropriated and misused by hostile forces.

Scott Ferguson:  So I want to try to use some legalese. And you can tell me if I’m not using it correctly, but it seems to me that when trauma theory reaches its limit, it sort of edits worse. In the realm of law, it’s like turning everything into torts. It’s like everything is an injury, and from the point of view of what do we do going forward? How do we construct and fight for a just world? Well, let’s tally up the injuries and then remedy the injuries, which we should do. But that’s only one place to start. And I worry that we foreclose posing questions about the right thing to do for people, the right thing to fight for individuals, for collectives, for groups, for the globe, that aren’t necessarily predicated upon intelligible injuries.

Elizabeth Anker:  Yeah, that’s a critique of trauma that others have also raised, that I absolutely agree with because trauma assumes that there was some clearly-isolatable injury that happened at one discrete moment in time. It actually writes off more systemic forms of injustice and injuries that can’t be pinpointed in such a precise fashion. So it can actually do a real disservice to thinking about generalized conditions of harm, or low grade forms of violence and Injury that are woven into the day to day. Trauma is often thought about as exceptional. For most people, a decent percentage of people in the world, trauma is written into their most ordinary, mundane, non-exceptional interactions and realities. And I would also say that one of the things I tried to reckon with in the book is how this particular methodology of reasoning, that I call this Logic of Paradox, tends to be reproduced quite formulaically again and again and again, everywhere, everywhere, everywhere. And trauma theory exemplifies the way in which all sorts of wildly divergent and very, very different injuries nevertheless come to be digested and deciphered, by way of this recurring formal logic. So all traumas end up looking the same or being defined in the same way. And there, too, it works to actually level or erase differences between different traumas that are profoundly meaningful, and that I think we as theorists should be setting out to measure and to wrestle with and to document. A lot of trauma theory precedes from the notion that there’s something fundamentally unverifiable about trauma that can’t be documented, and that can’t lend itself or that will elude legalistic regimes of evidence. And maybe, yes, that clearly is true for certain traumas. But it can actually obscure our ability to engage in forms of documentary labor, or to undertake the kind of normative differentiation that I think the humanities have really forfeited, but that seems essential,

Scott Ferguson:  You have an analysis of the trauma theory classroom that I’d like to give you a chance to elaborate. The classroom in which the pedagogue is encouraging students to confess, I have to say that I don’t think I’ve been in one of those classrooms. But I don’t think I ever took a strictly trauma theory class, either.

Elizabeth Anker:  Yeah, you’re totally right. And I think this plays out within a lot of these really foundational theory texts from the 80s and 90s where, in fact, witnessing one’s own trauma is heralded as its own form of pedagogy. And so the sort of confessional mode has overtaken a lot of humanity’s classrooms. It’s perhaps different now than it was back in the day, but I can absolutely remember classrooms wherein you authorize your own voice as a speaker by first confessing to the forms of injury that had been inflicted on you. I’ve even taken exams back in the day where that confessional mode was how … I won’t name any names … how one was guaranteed an A or not. But what that does is that also deauthorizes certain voices. Again, it risks trivializing the injuries at hand. So I do think that part of the consciousness raising aspect of pedagogy has been about broadcasting one’s own sites of victimization, and that that kind of exercise has become compulsory in a lot of different spaces. I think the other reason we should be a little worried about that model of pedagogy, that’s oriented around consciousness raising in the classroom, is that it presumes that symbolic change in these elite institutions of higher education is going to trickle down or translate into action on the streets. I’m not so confident the symbolic awareness when one’s in college is actually going to meaningfully activate an electorate. I mean, it’d be nice to think it does. But the seamlessness of that trickle down effect, I think, has been overstated, or over-wagered, in a lot of humanities scholarship.

Billy Saas:  I think that there’s some interesting overlap potentially, between what you’re kind of calling for which seems to me like a little bit more specification about trauma like a reconceptualizing, that is about expanding and becoming more specific and not, not just sort of identifying all trauma as co-equal. With some of the histories of money that we interact with, as opposed to the kind of original, primordial barter situation where we’re all just autonomous actors, hopping around trading with each other, and then some genius person or group invents money to make it more efficient. There’s a anthropological history that’s much more feasible or tenable, that locates it in Medieval Period Weregild, which is trying to identify specifically, quantitatively forms of recompense that are adequate for trauma that one inflicts on someone else. And in this case, it’s like, how much is a nose worth? If you took somebody’s nose off, what is that worth in terms of livestock, and gold and money and things like that? And it’s a gruesome origin story. And it’s not the whole story. I want to ask you to maybe specify or differentiate how your theory of integrative criticism, which you have identified toward the end of your book in the second interlude, and then the final chapter is a potential path forward for left theory? How is it not in the field of trauma or in the logic of paradox and trauma studies? How is it different or more than, better than, different from, distinct from? You know, one ear is worth 10 pieces of gold?

Elizabeth Anker:  Yeah, a great question. I think, first, why is an integrative approach to theorizing things different from the way trauma is often accounted for? I mean, one of the staples of a lot of especially early trauma theory is that it’s resistant to healing or defiance of the cure precisely because it’s kernel, that traumatic kernel is going to remain fundamentally elusive. So what that means is, if you’re a trauma victim, whose trauma is no longer repressed, whose trauma is self present, who maybe thinks that they’re cured, you’re not properly traumatized. And that’s not really trauma that you’re suffering from. So if trauma can be integrated into the psyche, it ceases to be trauma. We can see why we have this really narrow definition and super normative lens for dismissing or discounting certain traumas. In thinking about those types of issues, types of debates that have been left off the table, or kind of prohibited by what I tried to describe as an epistemology of paradox, or paradox as a way of knowing, are a lot of things that are vital ingredients of a livable and effective politics. And so by thinking about the integrative in a way that’s my framework for trying to put my finger on a series of things that it’s been impermissible to talk about, not to mention analyzed, in a lot of critical theory, or lefty circles. And those are things such as when things succeed or work relatively well. I mean, how often have you read a book written in the humanities that takes the relative success story in the history of politics or law and says, I’m gonna write a book about why this worked? Never! Right? So we’re just allergic to taking stock of, not to mention celebrating, our limited accomplishment. Even here, I’m like mincing my words. I’m scared to say success. Right? I certainly can’t say progress, right? Not to mention, I would call something a victory. Ah, right. But come on. There are political accomplishments that have been successful, that have proven lasting and effective, that we should take seriously and take stock of and ask why they worked, so that we can emulate them and replicate them. We should also ask those types of questions about forms of community, day to day practices that prove sustaining and effective. When I appeal to the integrative it’s a call to train our attention to all of these things that have been off the radar screen of theory and actually deemed impermissible. So I think about the integrative as also a matter of when things hold together as sort of something different from the logic of paradox. Paradox has worked to fracture, break apart, fragment established truths, break down orthodoxies. But sometimes it’s important to examine the kind of glue or connective tissue that isn’t about when things fall apart, but is what renders things sustainable, livable, habitable, again, are when things kind of come in hold together in ways that we want to applaud. So it’s really a plea to turn our theoretical attention to those things that prove non contradictory, or we might experience as non contradictory. Not that they’re going to be permanently thus, but even just episodically so…

Scott Ferguson:  One of the things I really appreciate the style of your theorizing, the stylistic turn, that your theorizing takes in the late interlude in the last chapter, is you really stage for us, not in like a “woe is me”, but I think as an important intellectual project. How difficult and challenging this has been for you and has been part of your pedagogy? And how do I get out of those rote forms of the paradoxical with students? And what do they think? And what am I even saying? And what language am I going to use, and what kind of stylization or aesthetics are going to matter for this one potential of many alternatives to the paradoxical? So I just want to say, I really appreciate that bringing us into the problem, that’s a stylistic choice that you make. And I was wondering if you can speak to that, but also tell us a little bit about Virginia Woolf and A Room of One’s Own, which is a bit of a touchstone in the Money On The Left community, just because precisely I think we’re picking up on similar things. She’s making normative demands, a room of one’s and this much money. You want to solve the women in fiction problem, people? Well start paying women to, and furnishing their lives to be able to write fiction. So your response?

Elizabeth Anker:  Yeah, no, thank you. And thank you for saying nice things. I mean, this last chapter of my book where I put forward a kind of alternative or supplement to paradox: single-handedly the hardest thing I have ever written or will ever try to write. I can’t tell you how many different iterations of that I went through. Initially, I had settled on the rhetoric of the prescriptive, or the need to be prescriptive. Getting at normativity without fully going normative, a tentative way. So, to me, that was really a lesson in just how stifling this intellectual tradition had become, and also just how hard it was to escape, again, what increasingly felt like a stranglehold or its own sort of internal policing mechanism. So, to me, it was just an unbelievably both fascinating and kind of arduous and painful experiment to try to think differently. I do feel like I put forward the integrative as one way to think about a supplement to paradox. I do want to emphasize that I’m not saying it’s the only way or the right way, it was the best I could come up with. But to me, what matters most is that we do something different. And we kind of add something to the mix, and that we don’t walk away from every conversation, throwing our hands up in the air and citing paradox. For me, what matters most is that we try to undertake so much more constructive, affirmative, and practically oriented labor. I think there’s a way in which theory has lost sight of all of these aspects of lived experience, and the very pragmatic, practical realities of day to day decisions about how we guide our lives, necessary decisions that factor into any political decision making process, right or any legal judgment for that matter, since I think about law a lot. For me, the integrative was one way of focusing our attention on certain elements of those practical choices that get elided, or written off, and a lot of our intellectual labors. By deploying the term integrative, I am also, of course, trying to think about how we might better integrate our intellectual activities into our lived routines. In directing us to the day to day, you probably also have picked up on the extent to which the day to day is written off as some kind of debased sphere of intervention. There’s an incredible utopian future oriented impulse and a lot of theory that any politics needs to be utopian in its fundamental ambitions. I’m pretty skeptical of that, too. So looking at the integrative is an effort to counteract that impulse that shows up in a lot of places. That’s cool you’re also Woolf people, too. I didn’t realize that everyone’s own …

Scott Ferguson:  Yeah, I’ve taught a class on essayistic writing across text, and photo essay, and video essay, and film essay, and I always do A Room of One’s Own. So I have a really intimate relationship.

Elizabeth Anker:  Yeah, I’ve actually never taught it.

Scott Ferguson:  Oh, god, it’s so great. Yeah.

Elizabeth Anker:  But I’m also in literary studies, right? There are so many of these canonical or widely celebrated texts that tend to be read in through a particular framework. That’s why I’m so, even having written about Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, and I’m still kind of fixated on it because it on the one hand rightly tends to elicit these interpretations that think about it as a meditation on structural oppression, and the tenacity of this kind of monolithic edifice of racism. And that’s right, that’s in there, that absolutely lends itself to those interpretations. But there are all of these other moments in the text that just get neglected or overlooked, that are actually gesturing towards something a lot more complicated, a lot more affirmative. And that’s one of the reasons I’m also so interested in Woolf right, as she’s often one of the great spokespersons for a particular kind of queer consciousness. And that’s true, that’s there. But she’s also doing this really normative project.

Scott Ferguson:  Yeah, while being a radical critic of British Empire,

Elizabeth Anker:  Yeah, yeah. And those two things can go hand in hand. Right? And for all sorts of reasons, again, hence, the book, we’ve just been utterly resistant to thinking about those things as going arm in arm or being part and parcel of the same intellectual fabric, and they can be and they are, and they should be, and they need to be.

Scott Ferguson:  It’s interesting, there’s a certain kind of contemporary defeatist utopianism that I think you’re speaking to, which is like: well, we must overcome capitalism, right? And if we don’t overcome capitalism, which, by the way, on this show, we actually find the word capitalism to be highly reifying. But that’s another conversation. But if we don’t over time,

Elizabeth Anker:  I’m going to be the new regular listener.

Scott Ferguson:  You’re welcome to! So if we don’t fully overcome capitalism, then you can’t ultimately have legitimate justice, right? One of the normative political projects that our heterodox world of econ and law and US humanities folks are committed to is a federal job guarantee, a right to work. This goes way back to Louis Blanc in the 19 century, throughout the Reconstruction period, the Black struggle for freedom. There’s a long, long tradition to point to. And there’s a lot of other leftists we’re in critical conversation with who will say: no, that won’t work under capitalism, capitalism won’t allow that to happen. Our point is not to say, “No, utopia is coming tomorrow. A right to work is arriving. Let’s all start celebrating joyously that utopia is tomorrow.” Nevertheless, we think there’s a difference between standing by principles, and of critically evaluating the world with those normative claims on the table and in mind, and being put into the conversation as the values that were weighing this reality against, that I think we see in Woolf and I also think that we see in your project.

Elizabeth Anker:  Just to echo your observations about how the insistence on a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism is the only way to go, it also blinds us to some of these more complicated histories that exist within a particular intellectual formation. My most recent version of that is four years ago, I started teaching 1L contract law. Which is great fun, but had you talked to me before then, or talked to any of my colleagues in the humanities, they would say: contracts are tools of oppression, they’re individualistic, they’re at the root of capitalism. And so I’m teaching contract law and discover within that history that, lo and behold, there have been all of these very progressive reforms, many of the efforts to codify and systematize contract law, were informed by people influenced by German socialism. So, lo and behold, the sort of real story of the evolution of contract law, especially in the early 20th century, is so much more complicated and nuanced and deeply collectivist, and in a spirit we would actually want to get behind. There’s a way in which this either or thinking leads to these blinkered responses that actually shut down or blind us to avenues for instituting change. I tend to be a bit more willing to accept incrementalist arguments for change, too. But, you know, you don’t want to tell anyone that.

Scott Ferguson:  Well, I think here we’re but we’re open to increments, and we’re open to leaps and everything in between, I guess that’s what I would say.

Elizabeth Anker:  I love your account of capitalism. And yeah, I tend less to run in, I tend to do less of the economic stuff and I’m less steeped in Marxist theory and those debates, just because they sometimes tend to be more, I want to say, inside baseball, but you know that. I don’t know about baseball. But yeah, we need to be coming up with viable approaches and strategies and solutions that don’t depend on the end of capitalism, or what have you.

Billy Saas:  There’s one particular source that I think often gets read by our interlocutors as support for that idea that a job guarantee couldn’t happen under capitalism, because capitalism is a piece by Michał Kalecki, called the political aspects of unemployment, where he argues, basically outlines here are the reasons that capitalists will object to a full employment economy. Here are the reasons that they’re going to do this. And he gives three, the specifics don’t matter so much. They take that as supporting evidence that it will not work. I sort of understand it, anyway, as yeah, these are things to watch out for as you build.

Scott Ferguson:  This is why we fight!

Billy Saas:  Right. This is why you fight and show up and like to propose and repeatedly iterate and build upon experiments and positive affirmative projects. And so I think the language that you’ve provided in the book is really, really awesome. I mean, the language, the argumentation. What are you doing next? You mentioned a next project, are you developing in that project, some of the integrative criticism methodology or what can you tell us?

Elizabeth Anker:  Yeah, I’m still a little bit in between projects, but the one thing I’ve just started avidly working on is precisely to think about the propensity of some of these standard moves and standard left argumentative strategies, and frankly, ideological positions and critiques to be appropriated. So I’m increasingly haunted by how some of that reasoning is getting hijacked by more right wing jurisprudence, and in the court system. Just to give a few examples, one of the things I track in my book is just how hardwired a skepticism of law is among the left. Well, that kind of legal skepticism was a Breitbart platform. And so, skepticism about incrementalist visions of law is becoming rampant among the New Right. I’m very interested in how certain critiques of liberalism, for instance, that we’ve long thought of as kind of the bread and butter of more left progressive theory are being irrigated among the left. I’m sorry, among the right, increasingly on the right in the judiciary, kind of an anti liberalism. And this isn’t just in fringe circles. Like Adrian Vermeule, I don’t know if that’s a name that rings a bell, has this blog called The Post-Liberal Order, and about a year ago published this book called Common Good Constitutionalism, which basically does Carl Schmitt in order to argue for a return of vitalism to politics by way of a strong leader. So it’s this weird apologetics for Trump. He teaches at Harvard Law School, this book is getting taken seriously by all sorts of academics. It is leading to positioning on the right as a result. If we had a half hour, I would catalog the number of sort of staples of theory that are alive and well and flourishing in the right, and I’m simply focusing on legal stuff as a discrete point of entry. I’m trying to sort of prove the extent to which both our ideological positions and our critiques and our methodological tactics are all being actively hijacked. And a lot of these really recent, really controversial Supreme Court cases. It’s precisely in that light, I’d finished the book well before the Dobbs decision was handed down, but that, for me, exemplifies the ways in which a whole series of classically leftist moves are being deployed to justify overturning the right to abortion. But there’s a way in which that decision also gives me new fuel for thinking about the value of integrity as something we need to theorize in affirmative terms because when all of these kinds of modes of critique are being deployed against us, we the critics, how do we react to them? I’m not sure that throwing more indeterminacy into the mix is the answer when somebody like Alito, Samuel Alito says, well, all legal rules are constructs. We don’t respond to that by evoking a constructivist thesis of truth, right? We need to have something that we can independently build or take as a foundation. And I think integrity is one of those values that we maybe need to be adapting, endorsing, not without cognizance of the many dangers that would come with integrity. I mean, integrity carries with it all sorts of problematic associations. I can enumerate, but nevertheless thinking about the integrity of women’s decision making, women’s bodily integrity, all of this stuff might be a helpful counterpoint to such a ruling.

Scott Ferguson:  I was just kind of free associating. I was thinking about, if you thought about these spectacular melodramatic performances, crying, breaking down on the witness stand before a panel like Kyle Rittenhouse or Brett Kavanaugh. The way that there’s a kind of performance of trauma and victimhood on the right that may or may not be playing into the legibility that trauma studies has brought to bear. Not to blame trauma studies for those manipulations, but I’m curious if you’ve thought about that?

Elizabeth Anker:  Oh, yeah, absolutely. I actually have one of my graduate students, Christina Fogarasi, has this brilliant analysis of how the efforts to invalidate the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford in Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing, actively enlisted the conventions of trauma theory but turned them on their head as this pretty savvy tactic for discrediting her testimony, and undermining her authority as a witness. So trauma theory, itself, is a sword that can be weaponized to poke holes or discount particular manifestations of trauma. Her argument is, that’s exactly what happened. I think that would have to go hand in hand with the performance of the traumatized male victim, which just goes to show that all of these bequests of theory have been so valuable, but they’ve been too often presumed to equal a left progressive politics. And these are all examples of how that’s just not true. They don’t necessarily feed into a particular political position or agenda.

Billy Saas:  So not discrediting trauma theory but more crediting or identifying the cynicism, opportunism, appropriation of trauma theory’s strongest aspects by some of its worst opponents.

Elizabeth Anker:  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Scott Ferguson:  Well this has been a great discussion. Thank you so much, Elizabeth Anker for joining us on Money On The Left.

Elizabeth Anker:  Thank you again for having me. This has been so rewarding. I’ve learned new things about my book, because of so many of your really brilliant interventions and spins on its argument. So I am hugely grateful for the chance to talk to the two of you

* Thanks to the Money on the Left production team: William Saas (audio editor), Mike Lewis (transcription), & Emily Reynolds of The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art (graphic art)