Notes on Praxis for the RGS Panel on the Co-Production of Urban Contestation, London, August 2014
Richard Pithouse
Rigorous ongoing reflection on praxis is an essential practice for all participants in any struggle. There can be no effective emancipatory political action on a sustained basis without this reflexivity. It is simultaneously ethical and strategic work. It is necessary to strive to ensure that this is a collective practice within struggles as well as taking it on as an individual obligation.
An Element of the Contradiction
It is not unusual for academics in popular struggles, or linked to popular struggles, to fail to take full measure of the political weight of their own location. One of the common reasons for this is that academic engagement with popular struggles is often mediated through NGOs, or NGO like formations in the university. Contemporary liberal ideology presents NGO based ‘civil society’ as a democratic and representative space when it is plainly not. In fact civil society is often an acutely raced and entirely undemocratic space that has a far less credible claim to representivity than, say, the African National Congress which, despite all its flaws, is elected. Nonetheless despite the often striking degree to which civil society is a space of (often raced) elite power the ideology that presents civil society as, by definition, enlightened and representative is often strong enough, and sufficiently normalised, to inhibit the development of a sufficiently critical attitude to the NGO form. Academics are also often seduced by fantasies, sometimes acutely narcissistic and driven by a will to their own power, that enable the academic to imagine him or herself as part of an enlightened vanguard – be it socialist, feminist, anarchist, autonomist or nationalist – that has an a priori right to lead, and in some instances, to dominate others in the name of their own emancipation. When this fantasy is materially sustained via privileged access to donor funding rather than popular consent it frequently reinscribes what Jacques Rancière describes as the ‘stultification’ that is consequence to any situation where “one intelligence is subordinated to another”. It can become an instance of the sort of domination that Paulo Freire describes as “Manipulation, sloganizing, ‘depositing’, regimentation, and prescription”. In South Africa it can take the form of a set of practices in which, to borrow a phrase from Steve Biko, there is the sort of “stratification that makes whites perpetual teachers and blacks perpetual pupils”. Continue reading →
