Nəhj | Curriculum and Ethos

The Nəhj curriculum is built around a diagnosis of our present in terms of structural transformations shaping our lifeworlds today. A palindrome of Jəhān, word Nəhj (نَهْج in Arabic) means approach, path, way, process, method, norm, or tactic.

CURRICULUM | STRUCTURES, RELATIONS, TRANSFORMATIONS

Usual criticisms of the neoliberal university often end up affirming and unwittingly reconciling with neoliberal transformations of the public sphere: where access overwrites authority and authorisation, where “communities” are produced without addressing questions of authority (largely because of the fearful consensus,  among those who have something to lose, that authority and ownership are the same). At our most radical, we seem content to plead for a commons which is imagined as a space merely of equal access, based on the idea of something lost to be recovered, and stop short of demanding the ownership and production of something that never existed in the form it needs now, and so must yet be built from the glimpses we have seen (in eighth-century Medina, twelfth-century Bologna, the undercommons, and elsewhere). The question of the production of knowledge within the university is often severed from and privileged over the question of education, i.e., the question of ontologies, epistemologies, phenomenologies, and the production of subjects and objects of desire and knowledge. The outcome of that sundering and evacuation, however tactical it might have been on part of those fighting against neoliberal institutions, is today in plain sight, where in- and outside of classrooms, the subject cannot even mourn itself.

We have learnt the lesson that there can be no tactical, or temporary, evacuation of politics that does not end badly. A critique of the neoliberal university thus must always also be a critique of neoliberal subjects and their cultivated antipolitics. 

We are not the first, and nor are we alone, in making demands to encounter differently, recast, or even abandon the institution, on terms other than the logistical imperatives of racial capitalism and neoliberal postcoloniality.  Enter: Edward Said. Enter: Fred Moten and Stefano Harney. Enter: Roderick Ferguson. Enter: Sandy Grande. Enter: Hortense Spillers. Enter: Stuart Hall. Enter: Gayatri Spivak. Enter: Jacques Rancière. There are, indeed, other ways of going around the question of ownership, which do not require sublating it with the question of access on the one hand, or ceding any inquiry into the changing nature of the subject that occupies or evacuates politics, on the other. 

The Nəhj curriculum is built around a diagnosis of our present in terms of structural transformations shaping our lifeworlds today. Using Habermas’ language of  “structural transformations” in order to think about the social, cultural, ideological, philosophical and political developments that foster these occupations and evacuations, by way of the academy and the political economics of the production and distribution of knowledge and affect, and building on Jason Read’s initial provocation to think of the “technological, political, and economic transformations which can, and have, for particular people become objects of specialized study,” we are working with the following set of transformations to address the demands of knowledge production as well as of pedagogy in the present. 

• The transformation of the aesthetic sensibility of the individual generalisable as the unit of analysis for the social sciences and the humanities—insofar as it configures a relation between knowledge, truth, feeling, and belief.
• The transformation in the global production and distribution of culture, and the networks and crossings between producers and audiences of art, literature, media, science, etc., that affirms a new form of the universalisable subject. 
• A particular postcolonial neoliberal subject with certain affect and character, certain tendencies toward the individual and the collective, and the state and society, normalised across divides of country, nation, ethnos, who has a particular relation to violence, to speech and utterance, to desire and its gratification, including but not limited to the desire for truth, belief, justice, knowledge, and their availability. (In other words, the subjects of terror, anxiety, and post-truth politics). 
• The transformation of social, psychic, and political life by the ubiquity of social media and the attendant discourses on the human, the non-human, and the post-human that necessarily inform and are informed by struggles for recognition and equality.   
• The anti-political pathologisation of the individual that has surrendered the subject to the self and made imaginations of collectivity difficult.
• The transformation of capital by processes of automation and communication that displace wage labour and entire populations, and operationalise existing colonial structures in order to do so.
• The transformation in structures of identity and identification, and understandings of solidarity, justice, and social practice, that comes from the virtual technological erasure of borders and boundaries, as well as the heightened surveillance that coincides with it. 
• The transformation in understanding of ecological time that comes with the impact of work, re/production,  and technological processes on the natural world. (And what is often now called the “anthropocene.”)
• The transformation in the domains of politics and society that comes with the reversal of the illusory post-state open borders championed by globalisation from above and below, and a newly emergent state politics, even when liberal democratic, that is unabashedly settler-colonialist, nationalistic, market-driven, with a pronounced emphasis on racialisation and on religion as a racial category.   
• The transformation in the relations within which various issues must be mapped in order to be solved. The shifting meanings of justice, freedom, and equality, that shape a post-multicultural politics in the west, and the forms of social, political, affective, and economic organisation and institutionalities they affirm, sponsor, or desire. 
• The transformation that brings the post-war state full circle from its attempts at the secular nation-state that is exposed as having formulated economy, nation, and religion as separate spheres which were mimicked in the methods of study and knowledge production of the globalised university.
• The exposure and sharpening of all of these challenges during the pandemic, and the mandate to radically revise the global biopolitical economy if life has to be affirmed or allowed to matter in any way.
• If a student seeks to follow the Nəhj Curriculum, GCAS-Jəhān helps assemble the activities, events, seminars, independent projects, and studios that fit into the student’s vision of their educational journey within and outside GCAS. This plan also provides the basis for a rootedness and accountability between GCAS-Jəhān, its students, and other partner institutions and organizations. However, a student may opt to use it to frame one-time or non-credit participation in GCAS-Jəhān activities, in a way that feels beneficial to them. 

*Jason Read, “Unwritten: On Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine,” 13 June 2019.
** Asma Abbas, “To Be Beholden to Something Yet to be Made: Points of Departure for an Education in the Arts of the Present,” Early College Folio, Vol. 1, Iss. 1. February 2021. 

ETHOS | PRACTICES, PEDAGOGIES, CULTURES