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PHILOSOPHY - PROFESSIONS OF POWER |
| 'I have never been a
militant.' Simone de Beauvoir made this claim in a 1979 documentary
about her life. Yet that film shows her on the streets of Paris in 1970
selling La Cause du peuple, a proscribed publication of which she
was nominal co-editor. So when she said she had never been a militant,
did she mean that she had never been a full-time revolutionary? In
Australia de Beauvoir's degree of involvement would have marked her down
as a militant. 1 Jean-Paul Sartre claimed that the
activists who produced La Cause du peuple represented the coming
intellectual who, by following Lenin's command to provide militants with
a more complete comprehension of capitalism, would fulfil Marx's call to
change the world and not just interpret it. Sartre denied that he could
become one of the new type, and so persisted with his 2500-page study of
Flaubert. 2 Expectations about intellectuals are now
different in the USA. In late 1995 Oxford University Press promoted Professional
Correctness, a set of lectures from the literary critic and law
professor at Duke University, Stanley Fish. Fish had advised his
literary colleagues that if they want 'to send a message that will be
heard beyond the academy, get out of it'. Since he cannot believe that a
reinterpretation of Paradise Lost will be of interest to more
than 300 other scholars he hopes that this severance will produce two
results. First, the good causes of feminism and anti-racism will be
advanced by professional political advocates, and secondly that
university literature departments will secure their professionalism. 3
This division of labour contrasts with the reaction apparent in the
establishment in September 1994 of the Association of Literary Scholars
and Critics as an alternative to the Modern Languages Association and
through the beat-ups against political correctness. 4 An injunction against scholars doing
'work that resounds beyond the academy' cannot be an absolute principle.
Academics are not above and beyond the public domains, whether corporate
or governmental. Objections to a scholar's voice resounding beyond the
academy are conceivable only from within practices directly serving
neither finance capital, oligopolized industry nor its military clients,
in what Noam Chomsky calls the national security state. One task is to
contrast the penalty for subversion in the marginal area of literary
studies with the subservience to corporate governance that is the normal
public life of universities. This hegemony appears in topics not
tackled. When Alan D. Gilbert, now Vice-Chancellor of the University of
Melbourne, delivered a public lecture on 'Defending Freedom' in 1995,
not only did he add 'The Balanced and Liberal Approach' as a subtitle
but he spent his time attacking political correctness. That a handful of
dissenters in such arcane fields as cultural studies can provoke so much
alarm among the managerial circles of that power bloc is a measure of
the conformity taken for granted. Gilbert's focus turned inwards to the
academy and ignored the ways in which Mass Murdoch presents a far graver
threat to freedom. But to criticise monopolizing by News Corporation
would be unbalanced, even insane, for vice-chancellors for whom public
responsibility manifests itself as public relations. 5 Academics are public, reliant upon taxes
or profits for their salaries and research funds in return for their
training of other professionals and the refinement of techniques to
manage human and natural resources. Yet these links are not what are
usually taken as 'public'. One presumption is that a 'public
intellectual' will be a statistical abnormality. A free association of
public with dissident or popularizing voice 6 indicates how conformist
and immured the bulk of academics are in their public roles as teachers
or researchers. Conformity is not just a matter of moral choice but an
expression of the place that the full range of knowledges occupies in
the reproduction of capitalism's political, cultural or economic
domains. John Mulvaney now realizes that he once
mistook the term 'public history' for a belated willingness by
historians to involve themselves in public debates, 7 whereas it was
being promoted as yet another specialist course to get jobs for
graduates. Public history is not the same as people's history. For
instance, public historians may or may not speak out against
environmental degradation. Once employed to write the history of a
polluter, their innoculation with professional objectivity - Gilbert's
balance - will help them to discover arguments with which to mitigate
any offence. Although not all intellectuals are
academics, all academics are public intellectuals in that they are
employed to service corporations and governments. Medical, commerce and
law faculties are exceptional, inasmuch as they combine service to
conglomerates with opportunities for personal enrichment. For decades,
universities trained foresters to chop down more trees than they
planted, and taught geologists to quarry the land but not how to restore
a mine site, or even to control its effluent. In the early 1970s
Macquarie University sported a postgraduate degree in real estate
science, co-funded by the Real Estate Institute. 8 . . . Was it always thus? In the broadest sense
the answer is Yes, although the enduring service of scholarship to
power, beginning with that of monks to the church, is less pertinent to
our purpose than are the changes that have gathered speed and intensity
during the past two centuries. One indicator of the historical
illiteracy of academics is the forlklore that the subservience of
tertiary institutions to business and the state came with the Dawkins
agenda of 1988. The Dawkins changes codified biases towards capital and
government and also extended managerial regimes devised for science into
the arts. In a slip of redistributive justice the reporting procedures
that social scientists had devised to control workers or welfare
recipients were imposed on their creators. Extracted with permission from Prehistory
to Politics, John Mulvaney, the Humanities and the Public Intellectual,
Tim Bonyhady and Tom Griffiths (Eds.) Melbourne University Press. If you wish to read further critical
debate about the university, science and scholarship the new journal, The
Australian Journal of Academic Dissent, is now available. References |