Education as the practice of freedom: towards a decolonisation of desire

This paper reflects an effort to speculate at the nexus between a collective consciousness in a capitalist society in the wake of apartheid, and the operations of a predominant pedagogy. I pose several questions in terms of the political imagination and its regulation by capitalist realism: what is the relation between the university, ideological reproduction, and the political imagination? Politically speaking, what can we claim in the name of the commons? I am interested in the theoretical nature of the State that is being contested, as well as the state of mind, where the word state implies a mental or emotional condition. Thinking with Lauren Berlant's work on cruel optimistic relations, as well as the educational philosophy of Paulo Freire and W.E.B. Du Bois, I speculate on the South African university's shared ideological complicities. I argue against its emphasis on the production of a subject that is in synch with the reproduction of capital, and well suited for insertion into its structures. This is evidence of the role universities plays in sustaining the enduring fantasy of "the good life." What magnetises the university's desire and fidelity to a certain mode of production, even when that mode proves painfully unsustainable?