The Crisis of Knowledge & The American University: A Report

Contents

The Call

Symposium Report (below) by Sambarta Chatterjee

Re-Examining the State: The American University in the Defense of Western Civilization by Archishman Raju

The Time Is Now for a Peace Industrial Economy* by Meghna Chandra

Postmodernism: An Idea Whose Time Has Come to Die by Jeremiah Kim

The Crisis of Western Science and A New Search for Truth by Nandita Chaturvedi

*Originally published in Issue 2 of Avant-Garde, later presented at June symposium.

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On June 1-2, 2024, the Saturday Free School for Philosophy and Black Liberation organized the third event of the Year of James Baldwin, titled “The Crisis of Knowledge & The American University: James Baldwin and the Struggle for Our Human Future.” Held just over a month after student protests erupted nationwide against Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza—and against the complicity of the U.S. state and the American University—this event sought to understand and clarify the following: What are the foundations of knowledge and thought which canonize today’s University and serve to perpetuate war abroad and social degradation at home? Congregating at the historic Church of the Crucifixion in Philadelphia, where W.E.B. Du Bois stood and conducted the first sociological study of Black America, there could hardly be a more fitting stage to conduct this important ideological struggle.

The conference underlined that the widespread student protests, which were rapidly quashed by authorities, revealed an important truth. At a time when “protest culture” is largely approved and even encouraged by the University—be it for climate policies, LGBTQ rights, or against the “fascist” threat of another Trump presidency—the encampments in solidarity with Palestine brought forth an ugly, vicious reaction from university administrations. This convulsion of authorities, from unleashing riot police on peaceful protesters to forced resignations of university presidents, revealed that this time, the protestors actually threatened the very ideological center of the University—the basis on which it asserts its claim to authority. It also revealed that the University is ultimately an arm of the State, and that the U.S. State is inseparably intertwined with the Nazi Israeli State.

The white supremacist State, and its standard-bearer, the University, however, cannot be fully understood in the usual Marxist-Leninst sense—in which the state is defined as the sole arbiter of violence, sustained by control of the means of production. The conference presented the idea that the U.S. State’s most important function is its hold over the means of ideological production: the right to narratives, thought, and ideological relations that perpetuate and defend white supremacy and Western hegemony throughout historical time, in ever-changing forms. The indispensable role of the University is to dictate the way we know and engage with the world we live in, which ultimately shape the standards by which the State demands its citizens live. 

The conference showed that the role of the University goes beyond ruthless gentrification in all U.S. cities: it is involved in the furthering of a knowledge economy that directly displaces social spending in favor of war, and supplies both the technical know-how and philosophical justification necessary for war. If the State is committed to war and immiseration, the principal function of the University must be the creation of an influential minority that embraces a worldview well-adjusted to war and poverty, and defends the legitimacy of the University. 

Fundamentally, this defense rests on Science and scientific thinking—the inheritance of the Enlightenment, and the pillar on which Europe has assumed its claim to Modernity and Civilization. In other words, the University functions as the ideological powerhouse of a white supremacist world order in its current stage of development. Today, Science is held captive as a weapon to perpetuate white supremacy. 

At the same time, it is reluctantly admitted even in the ivory tower of academia, that Science is going through a profound crisis. On one hand, there is a crisis of legitimacy where ordinary people distrust experts in every field including natural and social sciences, and on the other, scientists themselves are unable to face questions concerning the purpose of Science. If, as Albert Einstein noted, Science is concerned with “the problem of analyzing the nature of everyday thinking,” then there is such a thing as the forward movement of Science, in step with the forward movement of humanity. However, a captive Science that serves the State must necessarily be stagnant, and it can only be made so by the ruling elite’s ideological attack on the very notion of science.

The conference discussed the crisis in the natural sciences, where scientific practice hardly resembles conventional notions of scientific inquiry but rather rests on obsessive pursuits of career-building and bids for social acceptance into elite circles, with only a thin veneer of scientific concern. This veneer, however, requires a specific framework of thought, and the conference identified it in the epistemological framework of postmodernism. Postmodern ideas constitute the central body of thought that influences and dominates every aspect of knowledge production on which rests the legitimacy of the University. 

Postmodernism takes the question of how we know and centers it on who we are—not as a part of humanity produced by, and capable of changing, history, but as individuals with distinct and equally valid claims to our own truths. More than simply an attack on Truth, the real crime of postmodernism lies in its pretense as progressive thought: while claiming to “expand” the discourse and “complexify” the narrative, postmodernism actually attacks the human capacity to know the world in all its complexity, and therefore to act. In the natural sciences, this framework produces grotesque anomalies like string theory, which ultimately claims that the world is too complex for the human mind to comprehend. And for the world at large, it leads to the cultural phenomenon of “learned” pessimism and identity politics.

If the idea seems mediocre, it must be remembered that postmodernism owes its origins to a Europe devastated by war and left in intellectual and moral confusion. Past and contemporary postmodern thinkers have failed to confront the fact that the future of humanity will not forever be tied to the fate of Europe. As such, their supposed critique of the West ultimately coalesces into pessimism concerning human potential. If the arc of revolutionary science ended in the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels, if the socialist experiment of Western Europe was ultimately a failure, it is humanity that has “failed”: a notion that not only fails to learn from the entirety of human history, but also comforts inaction.

Thus, we are faced with questions that have reverberations for all humanity. What is the legacy of the revolutionary science of Europe, and is it still capable of taking humanity forward? If it is not, where must humanity look in search of new theory and ideas? A new revolutionary science cannot merely reject the achievements of the past, but understand its inadequacies, and seek a more complete understanding of the science of human action and human capacity. Ultimately, we must reach for new regions of thought and envision a path forward to genuine freedom. It is here that the conference asserted that the history of the United States, the supposed inheritor of European thought, in reality furnished an epistemic break from Europe through the presence and strivings of Black folk in America. 

Faced with the ultimate degradation of the auction block, the Black Freedom Tradition emerged as a fundamentally new philosophical and ideological framework to know the world. Faced with the most abject suffering and humiliation of man, the enslaved Black proletariat saw itself in the suffering and impoverished millions of the world, and saw its struggle against white supremacy as part of the world movement against imperialism and for Peace. Grasping the epistemology of the Black Freedom Tradition must begin with the correct understanding of the revolutionary chronology in America, which begins not with the class struggle of Europe but with the anti-slavery struggle and Reconstruction, the first experiment in genuine democracy by the formerly enslaved Black proletariat. Knowledge itself, therefore, is rooted in the democratic, emancipatory possibilities of humanity as a whole, and the freedom that knowledge serves is ecumenical, and not sectional.

Of crucial consequence to the revolutionary possibilities in America, is the lesson that it was the Black social system that advanced revolutionary struggles and knowledge at every point in this nation’s history. The Black Church, the Negro spirituals and Blues, and the lifeworld of the ordinary poor, have constituted a social system that produced and sustained a revolutionary capacity to remake America, along with what Martin Luther King Jr. called a revolution of values. This is seen concretely in the Harlem Renaissance, a time when artists and thinkers dedicated their body of work to the search for a more complete human being, heralding the Third American Revolution. The conference declared that the Black proletariat is the vanguard of colored modernity, which defies the European logic of progress and creates answers to questions that stymied European thought. It furnishes a new type of human being, human relationships, and thought, capable of advancing humanity and knowledge.

The revolutionary thinker James Baldwin is produced by this tradition, and his work must be recognized as a philosophical transgression against the logics and assumptions of European thought. Bearing witness to the Black Freedom Movement of the last century, Baldwin introduces the profound paradox that the most abject victim of white supremacy is white civilization itself. Baldwin writes as the Black witness to the white condition. Incapable of becoming a people in itself and an equal part of world humanity, white civilization has tormented itself by creating a self-image, a “way of life” and a “series of attitudes” which have nothing to do with reality, a condition incompatible with the human experience the world over and especially in the United States.

In other words, the presence of the enslaved, segregated, and oppressed is essential to white civilization’s self-conception. Baldwin further forces the recognition that the “myths” of white standards are unworthy of humanity. They least serve white people themselves, who are perpetually controlled by guilt and paranoia concerning the presence of the Black man, and blind themselves to the history that produces Black poverty as well as the white condition. Finally, Baldwin insists, history shall pass white civilization by, unless white America can free itself of whiteness, and thus become the last white nation. The price for that ticket: the liberation of Black people, and of world humanity. Writing as someone produced by the West, who yet rejects the standards of whiteness, Baldwin draws on centuries of Black resistance to crystallize an epistemology rooted in Love as a precondition for knowledge.

The conference probed new philosophical questions raised by Baldwin, which complement Du Bois’s profound discovery of the Black proletariat as a historically constituted and civilizational category, and as the principal agent of revolutionary change in America. Is white supremacy today simply a reactionary ideology derivative of capitalism? Or has it become a system capable of reproducing itself—a white supremacist social system that now determines economic and other relations? 

Moreover, does the conventional logic of class struggle in capitalist society best capture the revolutionary imperative for Americans today? Or is that revolutionary imperative better inscribed in the negation of whiteness and the ascension, by all Americans, to a state of consciousness approaching that of the Black proletariat? What kind of struggle is necessary to transform America, and, as Baldwin said, “change the history of the world”? These are questions that must live in our minds as we seek a new and more complete understanding of our moment.

For knowledge to be recentered to serve humanity, the conference proclaimed, James Baldwin must be studied as a theorist of crisis, a philosopher for the modern world who has a message for humanity. Baldwin’s conception of the self is rooted in the firm conviction that the future—be it unimaginable horrors of yet another world war, or the flowering of a Positive Peace—will be shared by us all. He reminds us, “There is nothing in the other, from the depths to the heights, which is not to be found in me.” For Baldwin, the question of identity can only find a resolution in the moral choice: Will we struggle to transform ourselves into agents of history, or will we abdicate our moral responsibility in exchange for safety?

In the ethos of the Year of James Baldwin, the conference also asserted that the greatest questions of philosophy are not the domain of elites and experts. Such questions must become the domain of the people to struggle for and resolve—not as abstract academic speculation, but recognizing that the future of humanity rests on such serious philosophical work. The conference called on all peace-loving people of Philadelphia and the world, to firmly hold the mantle of human knowledge, and to unceasingly strive toward moral and intellectual clarity, in search of new knowledge and theory worthy of the modern human being. Finally, the conference was dedicated to the men, women, and children of Palestine, whose moral courage and resilience has brought the world to the threshold of a new future.