Pedagogy

November was founded in Spring 2020 in response to a myriad of crises, principal among them being the shuttering of the art world’s traditional institutions during the COVID-19 pandemic and that same art world’s failure to participate in the uprisings that responded to the murder of George Floyd. If, as this essay will demonstrate, the pandemic and the coincident protests precipitated a Niagara of social, affective, and epistemic mutations that overwhelmed the art world’s lumbering institutions, then November arrived as a platform for conversations intended to offer clarity amidst that crop of changes. Still, we have yet to reflect on the ways in which art institutions have been warped by the summer of 2020 and its long wake. This volume seeks to remedy that blind spot. Similarly, while November was initially firmly rooted within or in response to this art world, over the past five years it has expanded its scope. As such, this volume seeks to make explicit the metonymic relationship between the art world and its broader container vis-à-vis pedagogy. While this volume’s interlocutors exist as agents of art (professors, practicing artists, theorists), their true investments lie in the expanded field. Arts pedagogy–both the teaching of art and the ways art educates us–makes apparent the unbreakable bond between art and the world.

In March of 2020, universities, answering to the imminent danger posed by the novel Coronavirus, closed for in-person learning. Dorms were emptied, students were sent home, and Zoom became the de facto medium of instruction. In turn, the seminar and the lecture—forms whose presentness and tenacity had made the processes of teaching and learning coherent for centuries—were supplanted by digital interfaces marked, which is really to say scarred, by a host of ugly affects: anonymity, inaudibility, fatigue, and asynchronicity, to name just a few. At Princeton, the University where both the editors of this volume completed their undergraduate education, in-person learning was suspended from Spring 2020 until Fall 2021, at which point students were welcomed back to campus—under the condition that they submit to a bi-weekly testing protocol, wear masks in common areas, and limit indoor gatherings to twenty students or less.

Art museums and galleries likewise closed to the public in Spring 2020. By November of that year, nearly one in three art museums in the United States remained closed—seven months after the first lockdown began. That same month, a third of museum directors reported that their museums were at risk of permanent closure if they did not find additional sources of funding within the next calendar year.¹ Just as universities had to rethink how teaching and learning would persist in the absence of in-person classes, museums and galleries were pressed to quickly reconceive how art might be experienced in the absence of in-person viewership. Was this the final knife in the proverbial back of the art object’s aura?

While it might seem tired to meditate on the year 2020, its persistent and totalizing effects cannot be overstated. As we just alluded, the lockdown had immediate material effects, with stay-at-home-orders eliminating, all at once, analogue social rituals, forms of cultural exchange, and communal practice. However, the legacy of the pandemic cannot be discussed solely with regard to the shift from the analogue to the virtual and back again. No; since 2020, it has become clear that the pandemic’s most enduring effects cohere around the ways the lockdown created conditions that allowed for the individually experienced here-and-now to supersede the collective experience of history as well as for voracious polarization of the public sphere.

On the one hand, the everyday of the pandemic was textured by a relay between the activities that made up our global domestic confinement—attend Zoom class, stream, scroll—and the mass demonstrations that filled the metropolis—Black Lives Matter, Stop Cop City, January 6th, #MeToo.² Accordingly, our experience of history was either behind closed doors–that is to say, through one’s phone–or necessarily precarious—anxious of the spread.³ This disjunction between private and public life conditioned a pathology that rendered it impossible to form a cohesive, retrospective account of what happened, when things happened, and how things happened since 2020. The last five years, in other words, have felt like a blur: simultaneously slow and fast, at once lethargic and arresting. Likewise, certain events hold enormous space in our collective memory, while others lack ontology. Did the Biden presidency even happen?

Compounding that feeling was the persistent replaying and recycling of the past, an operation played out on social media and therefore dictated by the algorithms that authorize the digital. During the lockdown, subjective experience of history became entirely dependent on the particular online echo chamber one found oneself in. What resulted was a voracious mutation and perversion of the public sphere. Whereas in the past, it was understood that political change could be affected when the discourse of a minoritarian public torqued the majority towards what was once seen as fringe, that style of political change seems to have fallen out of the realm of possibility.⁴ This is due to the fact that algorithms subtly and overtly shape the ways political subjects acquire, validate, and understand knowledge. We do not simply occupy different publics, but entirely different epistemes. Now, when two oppositional parties meet face to face (whether right and left, or Groyper and MAGA) discourse fails to transmit. Lacking a shared reality, public discourse tumbles into gaps between conflicting political subjects and the worlds upon which they stake their claims. This condition is perhaps best exemplified in debates surrounding “gender ideology” and has the force of preventing the shared recognition, elaboration, and institutionalization of history.⁵

The confluence of these factors—the slop of experience meeting the changing target of the COVID-19 crisis—inspired us to collect a volume of interviews that reflects how the last five years have affected the pedagogical enterprise. We prefaced that work by cataloguing the discrete events and long endurances of the last five years in the form of a timeline. This endeavor departed from a series of basic questions that follow from the observations above: What, exactly, has happened since 2020? What has happened in the university, around the university, and tangential to the university since 2020? What events of the last five years felt salient to students?

Our first pass at creating a timeline literalized an observation latent in the previous portion of this essay: the historical experience of the last five years is marred by a feeling of too muchness—a feeling that is poised to pull the carpet out from under a constitutive aspect of the teacher/student dynamic.⁶ To be a student, as Tina Campt notes in her interview in this volume, is to be a container for history. Indeed, conservative views of education demand that it stand in relation to tradition. A liberal arts education, then, involves a teacher passing on a canon to a receptive student. It is up ultimately to the student to accept it or throw it all away. To borrow Aliza Shvarts’s détournement (or, more specifically, feminizing and queering) of Harold Bloom’s dramaturgy of influence, this model places importance on “the necessity of intergenerational thought, the inevitability of influence, and the fact that we become ourselves in relation to others.” Here, the imminent threat to the pedagogical enterprise posed by the events of the last five years becomes clear: the impossibility of narrating our immediate past opens onto a continual questioning of pedagogy itself and of the institutions traditionally called upon to sustain it. The container no longer holds. Where does pedagogy go from here?

The interviews published in this volume endeavor to historicize the transformations of the past five years. There has always been a crisis in pedagogy. The enterprise is always changing, and its various offshoots and contingencies have both informed those changes and adapted to them. If the timeline charts the past five years in a form that is by definition closed, then the interviews importantly blast that sealed form both backwards and forwards, bringing into view a horizon of diverse possibilities.

Our Literal Speed reminds us that real education requires moments of strangeness, ecstasy, and non-linearity. Fred Moten presses toward a radical displacement of the virtuosic individual within the pedagogical enterprise. Howard Singerman takes us back to the moment of postmodernism’s naming, when signification’s apparent unmooring made the production of meaning impossible. Claire Bishop carries forth the importance of the standards and expectations of the pedagogical project. Mary Cappello elucidates the mechanics of the student-teacher dynamic. Anna Kornbluh sketches an etiology for our aesthetic culture of immediacy that lands on the failures of educational access. Juliana Huxtable elucidates the ugly consequences of the aesthetic culture of immediacy to which Kornbluh speaks. Tina Campt demonstrates the ways a pedagogical life has impacted her relationship to and life in language. Aliza Shvarts charts a method for the misuse of the canon. Rosalyn Deustche makes plain the intersections between feminism, sociality, and pedagogy. Barry Bergdoll walks us through the dynamics at play between the signal arts institutions of New York at the close of the last century and into the twenty-first century. Finally, D. Graham Burnett moves the target on the pedagogical enterprise from the production of positive knowledge to an exploration of the specificities of experience.