Author: J. Mohorcich
Hi, Oxy! Do you ever think about the metaphysics of your education – its reason for being, its ultimate goal?
Wow, that’s a bad intro! I guess what I mean is, do you ever think about the causes and implications of your educational experience here, the logic of its being? Its raison d’être?
Last Wednesday, Italian thinker Roberto Esposito spoke to a standing-room-only crowd of students and professors in Morrison Lounge. He dedicated the bulk of his talk to an understanding of the world that centers around community versus immunity.
He uses the Latin noun communitas to refer to engaged societies (they prize coming-togetherness – think of that I-don’t-give-shit-we’re-all-together-ahhhhhhh sensation that ripples in your chest when you, say, mosh or have sex: that feeling) and immunitas to disengaged ones (they prize safety, and clutch things like insurance and water wings and flu shots). Esposito argues that we (that is, Western nation-states coasting off the gentle buzz of modernity and late capitalism) are a society of immunitas. We immunize ourselves against (what we perceive as) the nightmare of the external world.
Here’s the interesting wrinkle: The process of immunization works pretty much the same way it works in our warm, squishy bodies: introduce handicapped forms of pathogenic elements, let the body become acquainted with these lamed dangers, let the body learn their foibles = hopefully the body doesn’t die later on when it meets the full-form danger.
(The room was poorly air-conditioned. A steely-haired woman stared out of her portrait from behind Esposito.)
What I’d like to suggest is that the Oxy bubble is, in fact, one of these products of late capital, one of these societies trying to immunize itself against, um, pretty much everything. But here at Oxy, we don’t call it immunization, obviously.
We give it a handle: Diversity. (The Latin, appropriately enough: diversitas.)That’s our inclusion, our consumption, our internalization of a world very much exterior to our own. Also, it’s pretty much impossible to overstate the exteriority of this world: the fucking, like, mind-blowing magnitude of its differences with the one we inhabit here. That’s the immunizing hypodermic beneath Oxy’s never-ending (Sisyphean) discourses on diversity – I guess this is what I’m suggesting.(Esposito’s words, their Neapolitan susurrus, slipped between the glottal crunch of complimentary sugar cookies. These descriptions are really just here to fill space.)
Oxy’s autoimmune response to the world – a world fundamentally different from the space between Herrick, Norris, Thorne – is to inoculate, in a sense, its student body against (what is sees as) the disease, the dis-ease, of the world. How? What’s the vaccine? Come on, this is on the back of your ID: an educational experience! Furthermore: one that prepares them (us!) for an increasingly complex, interdependent and pluralistic world. Oh my God you guys, are we being inoculated against the world? Is that, to some degree, the raison d’être? Well, yeah. I guess that’s what I’m suggesting.
And, of course, if vaccines carry a crippled version of whatever they’re introducing, what does that say about the diversity we inculcate here?
J. Mohor?ich is a senior Politics major. He can be reached at jmohorcich@oxy.edu.
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