(via the Guardian) Evidently, documents have surfaced that show that Israel offered to sell the Apartheid regime in South Africa the bomb in the mid 1970s.
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Save Middlesex Philosophy
In light of what's happening at Middlesex University in the UK (read about it here and here), I thought I would re-post the following. It's no less relevant now than it was a couple of months ago.
===
We must adapt universities (and perhaps thought itself) to the demands of contemporary capitalism. That's Mark C. Taylor's thesis, anyway, in his recent addition to the trash-heap of shoddy Op/Ed's published by the NyTimes.
Taylor's entire approach proceeds by uncritically (or worse, unknowingly) accepting the demands and coordinates of contemporary capitalism. Little is said explicitly about the role of the university in society or the way in which current university arrangements and departments are the sedimentation of past (and ongoing) economic and political struggles. It is entirely unclear whether Taylor even grasps that there really is this thing, capitalism, out there in the world and that the university is located within a society structured in this way. Yet, at every step in his essay, capitalism is there implicitly giving force to the demands and imperatives he puts forward.
The university, he warns in a moment of anti-intellectualism, is "producing products for which there are no markets." Let's pick this sentence apart. First of all, why should we accept that the aim of graduate education in universities is primarily to produce products, and moreover why should the goal or function of universities be to sculpt these sorts of products in a way that accords with the demands of multinational capitalism? Why not ask instead, as any critical intellectual must, what is it about our society (and the role of intellectuals and institutions of higher learning within them) such that there isn't a "high demand" for much of what intellectuals do? Why not critically 'deconstruct' the social/political functioning of the markets in question, rather than taking them as given? And where's the argument for why intellectuals must subordinate themselves to capitalist markets at all?
If critical thought brushes against the grain of the official justification of the dominant order, Taylor's approach is decidedly uncritical.
What's abundantly clear throughout Taylor's piece is that he has little grasp of how economic and political power is diffused throughout contemporary US universities or what place they have in society more broadly. Quoting an obscure bit from a minor Kant text, as he does in a particularly pedantic moment in the essay, isn't going to cut it. Since when is Kant (writing in 1789 in Taylor's example) the authority on 'mass' anything? Taylor lambastes his colleagues for studying Duns Scotus, but nonetheless cites a quote from Kant that's meant to pertain to the particulars of a topic about which Kant couldn't have said anything interesting since he died long before the coordinates of mass markets and multinational capitalism came to define social life. (I'm hardly saying we've nothing to learn from Kant in navigating contemporary states of affairs, but let's not pretend he got the last word on mass market culture or finance capital).
To be sure, it might sound as though Taylor really does have economic matters in focus since he often mentions the fact that colleges and universities are facing an economic crisis. But he offers no analysis of why there is a crisis. Nor does he ever consider the ways in which the sources of funding for universities might affect the way that they function. In short, he offers no analysis of the role institutions of higher learning play in contemporary capitalist societies.
It's a pity he doesn't inquire as to why his Religion department, for instance, has 10 measly faculty members while the economics department probably has 25-30. Or ask why does the business school get oodles of cash while the humanities wither? Contrary to Taylor's favored mode of explanation, the answer to these questions has little to do with the dispositions and predilections of academics, but rather with the place of intellectual life within contemporary societies ruled largely by the demands of profit margins. As far as I can tell, Taylor is either painfully ignorant of this relationship, or chooses to remain silent on the central problem of intellectual life today.
Why should Universities simply accept the cuts that are being implemented? Why not fight them? Taylor assumes they are as natural as the onset of spring weather, as when he asks "why not adapt?" But why should intellectuals, who are employed precisely to think outside of the boxes of balance sheets and quarterly dividends, adapt to such a state of affairs? Why should knowledge itself be subordinated to the narrow demands of a system that values everything instrumentally insofar as it produces profit?
Of course, there are many nuanced points to make about the problematic (and arbitrary) nature of departmental distinctions and how they obscure the sort of interdisciplinary work that challenges prevailing assumptions rather than taking them as immovable starting points (e.g. try talking about commodity fetishism to an economics department in the US). But Taylor doesn't really have anything to say here that is interesting or helpful. Suggesting that we create a "Water Studies" program isn't anything but an exemplification of his ignorance of all the concrete, institutional and economic conditions that impact the university in contemporary societies. How will changed curricula impact the money that universities get? How will, for example, making all departments fair game for abolition not simply expose them to the punishing logic of neoliberalism (i.e. keep only those disciplines which are 'useful' or are amenable to capitalism and profit-maximization)? Also, who will get to decide what all of these 'problem-oriented' disciplines will be? State legislatures doing the 'regulating' that Taylor speaks so highly of (without filling out in concrete terms)? Back in the 1960s, those on the Left used to critically engage the University itself as an 'ideological state apparatus' and make radical calls for the democratic self-management of universities by faculty and students (i.e. not by a caste of administrative bureaucrats and ex-capitalists). But Taylor seems to be saying instead: "embrace the role of ideological state apparatus and don't ask too many pesky questions about this role."
An example of this tendency is when Taylor proposes that "consideration of real-life issues will prepare students for jobs at businesses". But why should we, as critical intellectuals, accept that 'real life' is merely a matter of adopting a post at any old business? Its only for the neoliberal that 'real life' consists of the fluctuations of finance markets and the demands of corporate capitalism. Taylor appears quite happy to enlist himself up with this way of proceeding. Why not, alternatively, challenge the existing order rather than lapping it up as given?
Taylor's pot-shots at tenure seem like little more than anti-intellectual posturing, a favorite hat of academics writing nonsense about academia in the NyTimes (see: Stanley Fish).
Consider his suggestions: Mandatory retirement and the abolishment of tenure. How about crushing what few graduate student unions there are as well! Let's subject all of those lazy academics to market forces! He seems to completely misunderstand the fact that tenure is primarily about the relationship of the intellectual to society, and its justification is largely political. What alternative does he offer that serves this purpose? None. He only takes shots at older academics who crowd out younger ones by maintaining their posts for a long time. This is a problem, to be sure, but it is completely unclear why the facile proposals of ending tenure and enforcing retirement are warranted as solutions. What about Eric Hobsbawm, for example, who is in his 80s but has been publishing important books like crazy for the last 10 years? Should he be forced into retirement and stripped of tenure? What about Habermas? Should he get booted from his university post in Frankfurt because he's quite old, even though he continues to write dense philosophical texts as well as teach and lecture?
Taylor's suggestions belong at a Religion departmental meeting, not in print. Certainly not in the NYTimes
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Nice article skewering decifit-hawking
Read the article here.
What's all this "we" when people talk about the deficit? It's not as though Goldman Sachs talks in terms of "we" when they're deciding how to divide up quarterly profits. As Joel Geier put it in a recent ISR article, "The debt bubble has not be solved, it has merely been transferred from private hands to the state... The state nationalized private capitalist debt". Large capitalist firms externalized the costs of their risky speculative behaviors by moving their toxic assets from their rolls to the state. But they sure aren't externalizing their profits any time soon.
It's not as though there isn't lots of wealth in this society: the annual amount spent "rescuing" ailing financial institutions on the one hand, and in useless foreign occupation and war on the other, is enough to fully fund, many times over, things lie single-payer, plug state budget shortfalls, etc.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Obama is the DLC Democrat Par Excellence
This was penned right after Obama won the election. It's incredible how closely his administration has followed the DLC line put forward by Galston.
It's almost as though they took Galston's advice and implemented it 100%.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
The Return of Eugenics
I'm only writing this post because my genes are configured in a particular way. At least that's the view of the social world that we get from crude, pseudo-scientific bullshit like the views pedaled in this article on marriage.
What is scientific about the suggestions and innuendo in this article? I'm not sure. Science proceeds by putting forward hypotheses, while attempting to show that the available evidence is explained well by these hypotheses. What reasons have we to think that immutable facts of our genetic makeup explain social phenomena? Very few. It's rather obvious to anyone doing serious work in social science or psychology that the pseudo-scientific speculation pedaled in books like The Selfish Gene is false. It is also worth pointing out that even the connection between behavior and "breed" in dogs is not well-understood by scientists. If pressed, any of the charlatans penning "pop-science" books on the tight connection between genes and social phenomena will concede that what they're saying is wild speculation.
But there are more important questions to ask here. In particular, what is it about our society that makes eugenic views so convenient and apparently plausible? We must keep in mind here that the current vogue of eugenics and genetic-determinist ideas about social/political phenomena has nothing to do with evidence or facts.
Genetic-determinist "theories" are simple and easy to state. They are free of the complications that, sorry to say, are in fact parts of social phenomena. But most importantly, these ideas fit neatly and cleanly into existing configurations of power. There is no friction between them and the status quo.
Thus we find these "theories" in popular outlets like the NYTimes because they are ways of making sense of the social world that suggest that things are as they should be. The message is clear: if we're hardwired to be racists... why struggle against such things? If certain "races" are genetically predisposed to behave in certain ways... why aim for political equality? If women are genetically hardwired such that they are deferential and conventionally "feminine", then why criticize existing gender norms and hierarchies? This could go on and on.
I don't think that therapists and psychoanalysts have been wrong to focus on family history and other contingent features of a life when interpreting drives, desires and neuroses. Nor have social theorists been wrong to focus on big structural features of societies when they think about institutions like marriage and how they change over time.
It is far from obvious to me that considerations of this sort should be alien to an examination of "marriage stability". Are we to think that, for example, severe economic hardship has no real implications for the stability of a marriage?
Moreover, political theorists and historians have not been wrong to examine the ways in which changes in societies, political configurations and so on often track political struggles directed towards changing them. The Womens' Movement of the 60s and 70s, for example, radically changed the way that Americans think about heterosexual marriage relations. Moreover, the black liberation struggles of the 1950s and 60s shattered a certain configuration of power in the South that was basically a form of apartheid. Of course, racism and sexual oppression still persist in potent forms, but it is undeniable that things have changed quite a bit since the suffocating conformism and patriarchy of the 1950s. And, most importantly, the reason they changed had to do with active political struggles on the part of the oppressed, NOT genetic configurations causing people to act in certain ways rather than others.
But if you accept the genetic-determinist story... why struggle? Why think that social relations could change? If the genetic-determinist account tries to say that can also explain why people struggle against certain configurations of power, then it just looks entirely ad hoc and incapable of being falsified. This brings out, I think, just how speculative and underspecified these approaches are and, thus, why they are so dangerous. They can give a "scientific" veneer of credibility to whatever you like: racism, sexism, you name it.
I'm not suggesting that there aren't any facts about human psychology or behavior that derive from natural features of our constitution. On the contrary- we have certain naturally given capacities in virtue of which we are human. But our faculties and capacities include the ability to reflect on reasons for which we act, and to choose whether or not to endorse such reasons.
Having a set of capacities and faculties that are natural in no way entails that our behavior must be regular and predictable, or worse, determined (without our knowing it) by our genetic makeup. On the contrary- human behaviors are malleable: we adapt to different environments and change as a result of those environments. That is, after all, what the content of evolutionary theory actually is: random mutations render certain organisms more fit in a particular environment, and if that environment changes, they may no longer be as fit, and hence, as favorably placed to reproduce. It is not as though the environment is "determined" by the genes themselves.
But again, I must stress the non-scientific character of the "sociobiology" or "genetic-determinist" phenomenon in recent years. It is not a full-fledged scientific research program: it is window-dressing for the status quo. It is a set of ideas that purport to show that all is well in the world and that it couldn't be otherwise. Ideology is at its strongest when it convinces people that contingent, malleable features of social life are inevitable and natural. Why think of resisting what could not be changed?
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Saturday, May 1, 2010
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
