Collective Imagination Against the Given: A Conversation with Noah De Lissovoy

JR: I’m in Berlin. Germany is again under lockdown. You’re in Austin. Texas has recently experienced mass blackouts, water and food shortages. We’re over one year into a pandemic that has shaped a large part of our lived reality. I believe it’s even more relevant under these conditions to explore what a critical pedagogy might look like today. I’d like to do this through revisiting theses regarding education in neoliberalism that you have developed in your recent work. In particular, in an essay you published in 2018, “Pedagogy of the Anxious: Rethinking Critical Pedagogy in the Context of Neoliberal Autonomy and Responsibilization,” you lay out how “the challenges posed to Paulo Freire’s conceptualization of the subject under neoliberalism have not been fully addressed,” how “we must seek to reinvent this in the context of conditions that he was not able to fully foresee,” and how this has reshaped the struggle for emancipation in terms of the “narrow autonomy that is offered by neoliberal education.” I’m very keen to have more depth or detail around the terms of critical pedagogy in the neoliberal context, and to do this I’d like to put a series of questions to you related to each of these terms, and to your arguments in this article, even if it means that sometimes I’m asking a similar type question from a slightly different angle. Before I do this, I want to begin with a short outline of the methodology course at the heart of the work we do at Goldsmiths. This is site and context-specific in how it connects the classroom to what’s beyond the classroom and how it connects the work students do to the world this inhabits. In other words, while the work we do in Goldsmiths is specific to a particular academic context, we understand this context to be contingent and permeable and to speak to other contexts within and beyond academia. The methodology brings a reflexive gaze to this work and to how it is embedded in and engages with what you describe as “neoliberalism’s logic of scarcity” or the “relentless competition for symbolic capital and self-driven human capital development.” In developing this