Abstract
What is the task of the university and the role of the humanities at a time of economic and political crisis? This article attempts a response by turning to Socrates's Apology, a text that narrates the division of philosophy from politics and, by analogy, of the university from the polis. The historical context of the Apology symptomatically foreshadows the contemporary crisis in the humanities over the past two decades, the current debates about the future of the university (especially the public university in Europe) in the wake of the new educational policies implemented as a result of the Bologna Process, and the waning of democracy made worse by the current economic crisis. By drawing on the works of Hannah Arendt, Jacques Rancière, and Jacques Derrida and their respective readings of democracy and the polis, this article presents a case of how philosophy can make the university relevant to democracy and the polis which are in crisis. The article ends with the proposition that the university should promote interdisciplinarity and develop into a postnational and “trans-modern” (Mignolo) institution that resists the processes of corporatization that drain the university of one of its primary functions, to teach critical thinking and to contribute to the remaking of the democratic processes in the polis.
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Notes
See Giorgio Agamben's analysis of Tomas Hammar's use of “‘denizens’ for these noncitizen residents that has the merit of showing how the concept of ‘citizen’ is no longer adequate” (Agamben 2000, p. 22.3) as the defining line is disappearing and the concept of the citizen is also being transformed by an “increasing desertion of the codified instance of political participation” (22.3).
Published in English as Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2 (2004).
Spanos's text responds to the post-Vietnam war culture and the “knowledge industry” of the higher institutions of learning that co-opted and accommodated the students' movement in the 1960s in order to generate neo-humanist discourses of “sweetness and light” and preach the need to protect the university from politics by keeping it at a distance from the sphere of the polis. As a founding member of the Research Group on the Teaching of Philosophy, Derrida wrote his text in the process of the struggles to save philosophy programs and extended them into the secondary education system in the 1970s. Bill Readings portrays the ideology underlying the university of excellence that became the primary agenda of the 1990s, the decade during which the university was reformed as a “bureaucratic and corporate” university in North America and other places. Peggy Kamuf addresses the role of literary studies in the modern university, particularly in our times, and counters the thesis that deconstruction is responsible for the deterioration of literary studies in the North American universities.
The technocratic character of the Bologna Process with its emphasis on measurement criteria that are inappropriate to the humanities, and the indifference to the social and critical functions of the university and, in particular, to the specific cultural and political role it plays within various communities, has taken its toll. A number of European universities have had to shut down their philosophy, theory, and occasionally also their literature programs, which, arguably, form the core of the humanities. For more information about the Bologna Process, see the official website at http://www.ond.vlaanderen.be/hogeronderwijs/bologna/ and also Chris Lorenz's “Will the Universities Survive the European Integration?”, an exemplary critical analysis of the problems that the Bologna process has created in its implementation at http://dare.ubvu,vu.nl/bitstream/1871/11005/1/Sociologia%20Internationalis.pdf
See Bill Readings's “The Idea of Excellence,” in The University in Ruins, for an analysis of how the idea of excellence aligns the university with “the structure of corporate administration” (29) and turns the university into “a point of capital's self-knowledge, of capital's ability not just to manage risk or diversity but to extract a surplus value from that management” (40).
Here, I follow Jacques Rancière's analysis of democracy in Hatred of Democracy. See below.
In “World Systems and Trans-modernity,” Enrique Dussel redefines modernity away from what western discourses represented as its inferior, albeit constitutive, outside, the space of the colony, the bios of the native inhabitant, and the ontopolitical terrain of the rest of the world. Rather than representing this constitutive outside as a space to be decolonized, released from historical oblivion and distortion and, thus, included or better appropriated as extra knowledge or annexed facts, Dussel affirms it as the event and site of the “trans-modern world,” (Dussel 2002, p. 237), a “beyond” that “transcends Western modernity (since the West has never adopted it but, rather, has scorned it and valued it as “nothing”) and that will have a creative function of great significance in the twenty-first century” (Mignolo 2003, p. 221).
I expound on these ideas in the following section of the article.
I draw on Donald E. Pease's definition of the postnational as the “opening up” of the “gap within national narratives—in between state power and how to make sense of it” (Pease, “National Narratives, Postnational Narration,” 1997, p. 8), a praxis that requires the systematic deconstruction of the implication of the global in the neo-colonial and the reconfiguration of the “national” from the perspective of those constituencies, communities, and discourses that remained on its margins and were silenced or represented as the national order's undesirable alterities.
See Martha Nussbaum's Cultivating Humanity and her reading of the historical Socrates as the example of self-examination that “will help us fulfill our capacity for democratic self-governance” (Nussbaum 1997, p. 26).
All references are from Πλάτων, Απολογία Σωκράτους, were translated and edited by Thanasis Samaras (2003). All translations into English are mine, unless otherwise indicated.
Elenchus and maieutic are two terms that characterize the Socratic method of teaching; Socrates leads his interlocutors to question the truthfulness of their assumptions through a series of questions that probe their misconceptions or distortions. He thus painstakingly belabors their statements and views (maieutic refers to the process of midwifery) by forcing them to examine them with critical alertness (the process of elenchus as a process of self-examination as well as examination of others). For a more detailed analysis of the maieutic process, see Bowen (1972) and Cartledge (2009); for the significance of the Socratic self-examination in education, see Nussbaum (1997).
For a poetic reading of how Socrates always remains a stranger not only to the discourses of the court but also to the written philosophical discourses that disseminate his thinking across time by “subjugating” Socratic questioning, see Kostis Papagiorgis's Σωκράτης, Ο νομοθέτης που αυτοκτονεί (Socrates, The Legislator Who Commits Suicide, 1999). See also Gregory Vlastos's Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher (1991) for a persuasive and powerful reading of the historical Socrates.
In “The trial of Socrates, 399 BCE,” Paul Cartledge takes the “position that the Athenian jury of 399 BCE […] were indeed right to convict Socrates” for they “did so on the basis of the main charge, that of impiety” (Cartledge 2009, p. 77). Cartledge argues against the position that the religious charge was a smokescreen for the “often violent political infighting that had transfigured the streets as well as the formal political arenas of Athens for over a decade” (77), for in ancient Athens, religion was political (77). In 399 BCE, democracy was fragile and in need of “vigilance” (80); Athens was a polis in crisis, after the end of the Peloponnesian war (404) and the reign of the 20 tyrants only 5 years before the trial of Socrates (80). This historical context accentuates the political weight of the religious charge: the philosopher cannot examine the ways of the men in the polis unchecked. The jury found him guilty of a method of questioning that they think destabilizes the polis at a time of precarity. The philosopher is no good in “times out of joint,” at least not for the experts: the politicians, the poets, and the craftsmen.
See Samaras's comment, footnote 11, 257; as Samaras suggests, it is not clear why Socrates becomes a figure of mockery at this historical moment.
The reduction of alētheia, the process of what Heidegger calls “un-concealment” as a process constitutive of the ancient Greek polis, to veritas, the Roman translation of alētheia, is symptomatic of the transformation of the polis into an imperial center and characteristic of the cultural colonization of Greek thinking by the Romans. See Martin Heidegger's Parmenides and Spanos's reading of Heidegger's analysis of the Roman form of cultural imperialism that founds Western modernity in “The Ontological Origins of Occidental Imperialism” and “Culture and Colonization” in America's Shadow (2000).
Socrates's famous dictum is “one thing I know is that I know nothing” (en oida oti ouden oida).
In his explication of the method of his “genealogy of modern subjectivity” in “Subjectivity and Truth,” Michel Foucault refers to the transformation of “the ancient obligation of knowing oneself” into “the monastic precept ‘confess, to your spiritual guide, each of your thoughts’” (155–156) that early Christianity imposed as constitutive of the modern “technologies of the self.” This transformation that begins with early Christianity reduced the openness and tentativeness of the philosophical training of the “whole Greek and Hellenistic antiquity” (156), whose goal was to “equip the individual with a number of precepts which permit him to conduct himself in all circumstances of life without losing mastery of himself or without losing tranquility of spirit, purity of body and soul” (156) to techniques of confession that turn the subject into “the point of intersection between a set of memories which must be brought into the present and acts which have to be regulated” (160) through discipline and punishment. The political subjectification (Rancière 40) that a philosophical training should enable by training the subject to direct himself (“the autonomy of the directed”) (Foucault 157) becomes emptied of disagreement and dissent, that is, of its political orientation, as the modern subject is trained to consent by confessing a truth about himself he should have known and should have remembered. Hence, Foucault supplements Louis Althusser's concept of “interpellation” and Rancière's concept of the “police” with his analysis of the body disenfranchised from its own memory, its own affects.
This is Part Two of The Origins of Totalitarianism. See her last chapter, “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man.” For a critical analysis of Arendt and the precarity of the stateless in our times, and Agamben's concept of “nuda vita” (naked life), see Judith Butler's and Gayatri Spivak's Who Sings the Nation-State?
See Ancient Greek Democracy and its Significance for Us Today by Καστοριάδης, for a beautiful and relevant reading of democracy and the polis.
For an analysis of the end of history rhetoric and its relation to the amnesiac narratives of the Vietnam War and the Cold War, see William V. Spanos “The Question of Philosophy and Poiesis in the Posthistorical Age: Thinking/Imagining the Shadow of Metaphysics”; Spanos persuasively demonstrates that the end rhetoric is a neo-metaphysical discourse which, in celebrating neoliberal democracy, aligns itself with the metaphysical tradition that poststructuralist and postmodern discourses, drawing on Martin Heidegger's analysis of metaphysical thinking, systematically deconstruct.
See especially “The Changing Bases of Humanistic Study and Practice” and “The Return to Philology” for Said's insistence on a kind of “worldly humanism” which the humanities can invigorate through a “philological practice” whose main democratic goal and method is to “offer resistance to the great reductive and vulgarizing us-versus-them thought patterns of our time” (Said 2004, p. 59). Such a philological practice will have to reinvent humanism from the perspective of “marginalized peoples outside as well as inside the maw of the metropolitan center [who] can survive the grinding down and flattening out and displacement that are such prominent features of globalization” (Said 2004, p. 82). However, this process of “excavation” cannot be accomplished without the systematic analysis and deconstruction of the metaphysical heritage of humanism and its discourses. For an analysis of the problematic in Said's return to humanism, see William V. Spanos The Legacy of Edward W. Said, and especially his chapter “Said's Humanism and Exceptionalism,” and R. Radhakrishnan's “Edward Said” and “The Worlding of the World” in History, the Human and the World Between. See also R. Radhakrishnan's Edward Said: Keywords which succinctly introduces the contingencies of an anti-poststructuralist return to humanism.
Kamuf builds a polemical and persuasive defense of deconstruction and literary studies in The University in Deconstruction.
What is the historical context of interculturality? With this concept, I seek to address the history of the present, a history marked by another concept, the concept of community that needs to be reconfigured from the perspective of “those who do not have a community” (Bataille in Blanchot 1968, p. 1). The events that the concepts of interculturality and community speak to are: the disintegration of the nation-state, the waning of democracy at the hands of transnational capitalism, new forms of expropriation and exappropriation, and new forms of exceptionalism. This does not mean the end of the nation but the waning of the control of the nation by the state and vice versa: the ideological center that the nation-state once provided as the concrete and solid point of reference is now replaced by supra-state and supranational policies. On the ground level of politics, people form their identities by multiple attachments not only to national but also transnational public spheres, whether virtual (like the Internet), social (the Indignados, the insurgency of peoples in the public spaces all around Europe), cultural (global exchange of commodities and ideas), and political. Interculturality refers to modernity as a world of dependency, affiliation, and other, subaltern, minority, or “border knowledges” (Mignolo 2000). The history of origins is being revised as a counter-memory of the narrative that begins like a fairy tale, “once there was the West…” But we need to be wary of the neoliberal tone of another form of multiculturality that merely centers on a politics of tolerance (for an analysis of intercultural politics and pedagogy in Europe, see Interculturality and Gender). See, for example, Scholte's analysis of interculturality in “Reconstructing Contemporary Democracy” as “a politics of recognition that acknowledges and indeed emphasizes the diversity of modes of being and belonging within a single society. Strangeness is received with openness and indeed hospitality. Difference is tolerated and indeed embraced. The other is urged to speak and the self is indeed keen to listen” (Schotte 2008, pp. 345–346).
Walter Mignolo's analysis of Ecuador’s Universidad Intercultural de las Nacionalidades y los Pueblos Indígenas is a case in point of a university whose mission “is precisely to ground itself in that knowledge tradition that was marginalized and disrupted by the installation of the colonial-Renaissance university in the New World. But, of course, the mission of the Universidad Intercultural is not a recuperation of ancient knowledge but its reactivation in the process of appropriating Western technical contributions, although not Western values of education that are increasingly complicit with capitalism” (Mignolo 2003, p. 105).
“He [Jude] saw that his destiny lay not with these [‘the unrivaled panorama’ of the university], but among the manual toilers in the shabby purlieu which he himself occupied, unrecognized as part of the city at all by its visitors and panegyrists, yet without whose denizens the hard readers could not read nor the high thinkers think” (Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 116; emphasis and parenthetical comments mine).
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Karavanta, A. The Right to University: the Question of Democracy in the Polis at a Time of Crisis. J Knowl Econ 4, 45–62 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13132-012-0118-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13132-012-0118-3