An Interview with Lisa Guenther

Michael Giesbrecht

Michael Giesbrecht: In a society and culture that increasingly subjects post-secondary education to calculative economic reasoning, thereby emphasizing the exchange value of a degree in the labour market while downplaying the potential benefit of academia and pedagogy, what do you believe is the value of studying philosophy at the undergraduate level? Lisa Guenther: Audre Lorde says that poetry is not a luxury, and I think this is also true of philosophy. But what is philosophy? Is it the same thing as a degree in philosophy at the postsecondary level? Does it coincide with the canonical texts of Western philosophy? Lorde contrasts the philosophical claim of white fathers I think therefore I am with the poetic whisper of black mothers: I feel therefore I can be free.1 She calls poetry the revelation or distillation of experienceit forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.2 Philoso1 Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (New York: Ten Speed Press, 2007), 38. 2 Ibid., 37.

phy can do this too, I think, but sometimes we philosophers rush too quickly through language to the idea and forget the more tangible action. An education in philosophy, or in the humanities more generally, ought to create a time and a space for exploring the poetic dimensions in Audre Lordes sense of the word poetry of existence, experience, and praxis. Some people find this space in university, and others find it elsewhere. I stumbled into a space like this in a Plato reading group during my undergraduate education at Bishops University. We would meet every Friday afternoon to read the dialogues aloud and discuss them pageby-page, line-by-line, or word-by-word whatever it took to make sense of the text. Now, Plato is most definitely a white father, and he had some rather uncharitable things to say about poetry, narrowly conceived. But the shared practice of engaging with ancient texts and letting them resonate in our own time and place, was a form of liberation from the utilitarian logic of the market, and even from the credit system of the university. The Plato group is still my ideal model of philosophical education. MG: In your recent work on the California prison hunger strikes, you employed Hannah Arendts notion of a world-destroying violence, which threatens not only individual life, but also the interpersonal bounds that constitute public, social life, or what Arendt names the common world, to describe the social and psychological situation of prisoners living under solitary confinement in Californias prison system. In an era of world-destroying violence such as this, what hope can pedagogical practices offer, and how can education be redeployed as an avenue for liberation or resistance?

LG: This is a great question! To respond to it, we first need to reflect on the meaning of the world for Arendt. The world is more than the totality of things on planet earth; it is the shared space of mutual appearance and, as such, it is the site of political action. Its not clear that we still live in a world when a significant number of our fellow human beings spend years, even decades, locked up in concrete boxes. Its not just that they have been excluded from our world, but the sense of the world as a place where people encounter one another, tell their stories, and even argue over the meaning of things, has been foreclosed. What hope can pedagogical practices offer in a situation of mass incarceration and normalized solitary confinement? We can learn a lot from incarcerated intellectuals and revolutionaries in response to this question. Russell Maroon Shoatz has spent over 20 years in solitary confinement and a total of over 30 years in prison in Pennsylvania. But he has never given up on the possibility of a common world and on the power of conversation to hold open this possibility. Even in extreme isolation, Maroon has found ways to share words with other people and, in so doing, to (re)create the space of mutual appearance that is necessary for political action. As long as their cells had open bars at the front, Maroon and his fellow prisoners would hold regular seminars along the tier, teaching each other African history, economics, and other subjects. When the open cell fronts were replaced by solid steel doors, Maroon kept in touch with a community of people on the outside by writing essays and letters about issues that were meaningful to him, such as revolutionary politics, feminism, and the history of slave rebellions. You can read his collected writings in Maroon the Implacable (2013).

MG: Finally, it is evident that our common understanding of pedagogy is oriented towards an open future and a horizon of opportunity; however, in light of your experience working with inmates on Tennessees death row, and your above-mentioned analysis of the worlddestroying violence of the penitentiary system what, in your mind, is the telos of pedagogical practice in the shadow of social and physical death when such horizons are radically foreclosed? In particular, how do you view your own pedagogical practices in light of this work? LG: My conversations with people on death row in Tennessee have been a turning point in my life as a teacher, a philosopher, and a person. I first got involved at Riverbend Maximum Security Prison after volunteering to facilitate a reading group in a minimum security prison. From one day to the next, the Tennessee Department of Corrections decided to shut down the prison where I was going to volunteer, and so I was offered a choice: continue with the group on death row, or wait for another opportunity to arise. I plunged in, knowing that I was out of my depth but hoping that we would find some way to stay afloat. What would someone on death row want to read or talk about? How should one even greet them? Hey, hows it going? See you later? In the abstract, it seemed unthinkable that we could share anything in common, or that we could orient ourselves collectively towards an open future. But in one of our first meetings, someone said to me: You know, we still have to live on death row. In spite of being condemned to death and locked away for, in some cases, more than 25 years, these men still get up in the morning, face the daily routine of prison life, form friendships and get drawn into petty squabbles. Some become jailhouse lawyers, working on their cases and help-

ing other people to navigate the tangle of post-conviction litigation. Others become artists or writers, creating work that gives others a sense of how prison shapes their lives but does not fully determine them. None of the men I have met on death row has accepted their structural position of social death or state execution. They all work very hard every day to hold open the possibility of a common world, even if that means just a simple, unnecessary act of kindness to their fellow prisoner. What does pedagogy mean in such a space? This is the statement we came up with to describe what we do: REACH Coalition is an organization for reciprocal education led by insiders on Tennessees death row. Reciprocal education is based on the idea that everyone has something to teach and to learn; by sharing our experience and ideas with others, we grow as individuals and as a community. I think it took us three hours to come up with those two sentences. But it was a good way to spend three hours! We try to organize our meetings in a way that lets everyones voice be heard and that calls on everyone to respond to others in a thoughtful, respectful way. We begin with a quick question to which everyone responds; this could be anything from Whats your favourite movie? to Whats a moment in your life that you would like to repeat, exactly as it happened? Then we come up with 3 or 4 discussion questions about the readings and break into small groups to discuss these questions. Each group nominates a reporter to explain one interesting idea that came up in their small group discussion to the class as a whole. Then we spend the last half hour of class hearing reports from each group and seeing where the conversation leads us. I have found that this way of engaging with a text, and with each other, has affected the way I teach my university classes. Rather than feeling like I should be the expert

who guides students in the acquisition of (what I take to be the appropriate) knowledge of a text, I aspire to create a space in which we can encounter the text and give shape to our singular and collective experience. To me, this is poetry, and it is politics, and it is a collective act of making and re-making the world.

Bibliography
Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. New York: Ten Speed Press, 2007.

Dr. Lisa Guenther is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Dr. Guenther specializes in phenomenology, feminism, and prison issues. Her recent publications include Beyond Dehumanization: A Post-Humanist Critique of Intensive Confinement (Journal for Critical Animal Studies), Resisting Agamben: The Biopolitics of Shame and Humiliation (Philosophy and Social Criticism), and The Most Dangerous Place: Pro-Life Politics and the Rhetoric of Slavery (Postmodern Culture). Michael Giesbrecht is an undergraduate student of philosophy and religion attending Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec. Michaels primary area of interest is in continental philosophy broadly construed, particularly focusing on the wake of phenomenology and the philosophies of Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Lvinas, Friedrich Nietzsche and Gilles Deleuze. Outside the world of academia, Michael is a music enthusiast with an accentuated affection for experimental electronic and dance music in its multifarious forms.