The five feelings that govern the preceding chapters showcase some of the various ways that theories never exist apart from histories and contexts, events and debates—just as theorists never think, and students never read, entirely apart from their own experiences and desires, actions and foibles. Affect theorists may concentrate on thinking things about feeling, but all of us inescapably feel things about thinking—despite, or perhaps due to, the vast range of things that could count as either thinking or feeling.
But, as I said in the beginning, contexts have a way of shifting. There’s no doubt that the university is a major context for student learning, and at present much more than in the Nineties, the university’s precipitating crises—ballooning tuition, adjunctification of faculty, assaults on academic freedom, and national student-loan debt topping $1.5 trillion as of 2018—too are coming to bear on the study of theory. I’m not saying, of course, that anyone needs political crisis to dignify their theoretical investigations. Instead, it’s been the argument of the preceding chapters that the value of engaging with theory can be exploratory, open-ended, experimental. And it’s in that spirit that—now that certain kinds of political crisis are unmistakably here—there might be value in regarding some of the ways that theory creatively weaves through, against, and beyond this context.
In 2009, when the University of California, the largest public university in the world, announced that it would undergo massive budget cuts and no longer serve its mission of admitting the top ten percent of graduating high school seniors in the state, students responded with a manifesto. Called “Communiqué from an Absent Future” and published online, it offered a withering assessment of the social, political, and economic value of university education in the present time. Echoing Marx’s rhetoric and Foucault’s analyses of power, the manifesto invited people to think and dream and demand alternatives.
This use of theory as an engine for student demand is not new. In 1969, for example, a radical collective at UC San Diego, whose members included Herbert Marcuse and Angela Davis, issued demands for a new residential college that would employ both theory and practice to transform education. The collective lobbied to name the college in honor of the Congolese Independence leader Patrice Lumumba and the Zapatista revolutionary Emiliano Zapata and to organize its curriculum around the theory of political revolutions, economic systems, and the study of whiteness. Though their bid was ultimately unsuccessful, its focus on the legacy of whiteness and colonialism on college campuses, in the names of buildings, and in the curriculum proved remarkably forward-thinking.
Elsewhere in the world, political actions that followed from events like those of May ’68 looked not only forward but also backward, to the activities of the Resistance during the German occupation. Resistance tactics were taken up by the abolitionist Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons (GIP), which staged a number of demonstrations outside and even inside prisons in the early Seventies and whose participants included multiple generations of intellectuals like Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Daniel Defert, Hélène Cixous, Jacques Donzelot, Jean Genet, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Historical resistance and avant-garde thought stood and fought a common enemy, in the name of a better world.
These brief examples suggest that political feelings do theoretical work whether they’re extemporaneous or citational or both at once. It was as inheritors of such varied uses for political feelings that I understood the students at the University of Missouri, at Yale, at Ithaca College, and then all over the country in the fall of 2015 who began to sound loud objections to what was euphemistically called the “racial climate” of their universities. These students protested against the naming of buildings around their institutions after racist and sometimes slaveholding individuals (including John C. Calhoun at Yale and Woodrow Wilson at Princeton). They demanded that universities not simply treat diversity as an admissions game but instead grant vital educational, psychological, and financial support to all students who come to learn, no matter where from. Students also made bold demands that curricula be decolonized, so that whiteness not be the default identity of the authors and thinkers taught in universities. They wanted the complicated economic ties that many older universities have to slavery and the native lands on which campuses were built to be acknowledged, assessed, identified, and reckoned with. These students didn’t claim to know the endgame of these discussions, but, hearteningly, not knowing did not and does not stop them from making demands for a different world. They are trying to follow a theory and see where it goes. Like the rest of us, they are feeling their way.