Harry Redner: Failings in the Social Sciences and Humanities

From H. Redner The Ends of Science, Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1987 - Chapter 6, "Pathologies of Science"

Philosophy is strictly speaking neither a science nor a humanity. It is an august subject of great antiquity, one that has only since the nineteenth century been professionalised in an academic setting. Such an abstruse and other-worldly subject might be expected to be little affected by the pressures of academic politics. In fact, the very opposite has proved to be the case, for precisely because philosophy is not bound by scientific criteria of utility or by humanistic ones of cultural interest and relevance, it has become all the more readily subject to the determinants of disciplinary authority. Since philosophy is relatively unconstrained by any need to be accountable to other interests and is free to pursue whatever aims it sets for itself in its departmental fastness as a minor academic backwater, it has in fact lent itself all the more easily to the free play of internal academic politics. Thus, Richard Rorty, a prominent philosopher and critic of philosophy, who because of his criticisms is being treated [c. 1988] as something of an outcast, explains that the subject matter of philosophy has largely been determined by the outcome of political struggles within the discipline: "the topics and authors which fall under the care of philosophy departments form a largely accidental and quite temporary hodgepodge - determined mostly by the accidents of power struggles within universities and by current fashions" (Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, p. 30). In his account of current academic philosophy Rorty stresses the struggles between the reigning paradigm of the discipline in Anglo-Saxon universities, analytic philosophy, and the other brands challenging its dominance, collectively called continental philosophy. The history of contemporary philosophy is largely "a story of academic politics. . . one of struggles between kinds of professors" (ibid, p. 228). Rorty tends to be rather nonchalant about this because he believes that "problems created by academic politics can be solved by more academic politics" (ibid). But, as we shall see, it is not easy to reform a disciplinary paradigm, no matter how empty it has become, or to introduce another elsewhere in the university system, since the struggle for academic survival ensures that only one subject-species can fill the available academic niche.

Elsewhere in his work Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, pp. 132 - 36) explains how philosophy became a Fach (academic subject) or professionalised discipline, beginning with neo-Kantianism in the nineteenth century German university. The process was completed after WW2 in the American university system where philosophy acquired a professional organisation with journals, a peer review system, grants, PhD training and all the other paraphenalia of the sciences. The earlier preponderance of patronal authority - which is still more or less the norm on the continent - gave way within the Anglo-Saxon system to formal-professional authority with a strong collegial elite of elderly eminences grises. [NB Previous chapters of The Ends of Science have given a detailed typology of disciplinary authority, the patronal and formal-professional types being two among many. CS] This authority rules with a very strong hand, excluding and outlawing any philosophic perspective other than that which falls within the analytic spectrum. Occasional open rebellions against this draconian rule attest to this fact. Thus at the 76th annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association in New York in December 1979, a group of rebels, among them such prominent figures as William Barret and John Smith, "charged that the APA has become a monolith and intolerant, that its programmes neglected philosophic issues and that its leadership has lost contact with other philosophers". The academic political reasons for the dominance of analytic philosophy are openly acknowledged, and the upshot was "that the APA was dominated by people espousing analytic philosophy, preventing those with other perspectives from having an effective say in the organisation." As John Lachs puts it, in philosophy "power is an important and lucrative matter". "It was made clear that differences between the European Continental, historical position and the Anglo-Saxon Analytic position were not merely an abstract matter but touched on such practical matters as grants, government support, endowments, publishing and the placing of students and friends in faculty positions." It remains to be seen how this particular insurrection will fare, though one cannot be sanguine about one that seeks openly to assault an entrenched organisational position.

Perhaps because of previous failures at open reform, there have been many attempts to infiltrate continental philosophy into Anglo-American university by the backdoor of other departments. Thus the so-called "deconstructive" movement in literary criticism is partly such an attempt to smuggle in continental thought - mainly that of Derrida and his predecessors such as Heidegger and Nietzsche - through departments of comparative literature, English, French and German. This tactic has caused an inordinate amount of confusion and bitterness among the older style literary critics who cannot understand how and why their theories are being outflanked by something that claims to be more sophisticated than mere criticism but which they see as less interested in literature than in literary philosophy. [one might add older style anthropologists, classicists, historians, political theorists and numerous others. CS]. The battle lines are being drawn, with the opposed literary camps organising in cliques and possibly to become rival professional bodies. [One sees a whole front of the contemporary culture wars opening out from this point. Sickening stuff. CS] If the deconstructionists succeed in taking over some departments completely, two kinds of philosophy will be taught in Anglo-Saxon universities which have nothing to do with each other. This is already the situation at Sydney University in Australia. Rorty's (1982, p.328) rather blase' view that all this is "not much more, in the long run, than a matter of what sort of professors come under which departmental budget" seems mistaken, because once departmental divisions are set up there is no way of breaking through them and the discipline becomes fragmented, narrowed and impoverished.

Analytic philosophy and continental philosophy are already narrow, puristic subjects, the one stemming largely from the ideas of Wittgenstein and his predecessors Russell and Frege, the other from those of Heidegger and his predecessor Husserl. Both versions have by now become highly abstruse and almost empty of substantive content. Both shun involvement with the sciences, the arts or politics or with any other extra-mural thought. Practitioners of analytic philosophy have even gone as far as to show a disinterest in history, including the history of philosophy itself, so that they have almost lost touch with the metaphysical traditions of philosophy. The younger practitioners are little interested in the classics and are almost solely preoccupied with the latest issues of the journals, as set out by the prestigious figures of the field. The result, as Rorty sees it, has been as follows:

"Analytic philosophy was thus left without a genealogy, a sense of mission, or a meta-philosophy. Training in philosophy turned into a sort of "casebook" procedure, of the sort found in law schools. Students' wits were sharpened by reading pre-prints of articles by current fashionable figures, and finding objections to them. The students so trained began to think of themselves neither as continuing a tradition nor as participating in the solution of the "outstanding problems" at the frontiers of science. Rather, they took their self-image from a style and quality of argumentation. They became quasi-lawyers rather than quasi-scientists - hoping an interesting new case would turn up (Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p. 227)"

Like philosophy, politics is a subject of great antiquity which was transformed beyond recognition to become present political science. A brief sketch of this metamorphosis is offered by Habermas:

“In Aristotle’s opus the Politics is part of the practical philosophy. Its tradition reaches even into the nineteenth century, till it is finally broken off by the critique of Historicism. And its course dries up even more completely the more its currents are diverted into the channels of the specific sciences. Thus, since the end of the eighteenth century, the newly emerging social sciences and the disciplines of jurisprudence have drawn off the waters of classical politics. This process of separation from the body of practical philosophy has ended for the time with the establishment of political science on the model of the modern experimental sciences, having little more than the name in common with the old politics. Wherever we still encounter the latter, it seems hopelessly old fashioned to us.”

The discipline of politics has also experienced an insurrection against its current reduction to the “science of political behaviour”. As long ago as 1967 a Caucus for a New Political Science was founded to work within the instituted discipline appeared subsequently in a representative publication by members of this new caucus. Once again the main burden of the criticism is against the organized conformity of the discipline and its attempt to institute the behaviouralist paradigm as the sole intellectual content and method of politics. This disciplinary prescription was frequently buttressed by reference to Kuhn’s idea of a single paradigm per science. Peter Euben sums up this approach:

“A paradigm must be ‘enforced’. To achieve a science of politics, we need enforcers, we need those whose authority in a community of political scientists would function in ways comparable to that in the community of science. Tolerance for diversity within such a community, as within the “normal political science[‘ it would be there to defend, would necessarily be limited in order to guarantee cumulative knowledge.”

Euben predicts that such a paradigm community would soon cease to have much to do with real politics and become an ivory tower discipline: “the community of political science will be fairly small, embrace the concept of professionalism maintained by one or two core journals and the key textbooks, provide opportunities for closeness, common purpose etc.” This course, however, has not been followed since the pull of real politics is too strong to resist, especially by leading professors called to political office or advisory capacities. The converse danger is that the discipline will be staffed by ready apologists for the regime and its policies.

This evolution has been steadily taking place since the 1950’s, especially in American universities where politics is now frequently the study of what politicians are currently engaged in doing, mainly with the purpose of offering them acceptable academic advice and so making the scholars indispensable to the politicians – the example of Kissinger and Brzezinski looms large in the aspirations of political scientists. Long before he had assumed office, Brzezinski had already proffered such a programme for political studies:

“As engagement in the world is encouraging the appearance of a new breed of politicians-intellectuals, men who make it a point to mobilize and draw on the most expert, scientific, and academic advice in the development of political programmes . . . (so) the largely humanist-oriented, occasionally ideologically-minded intellectual-dissenter, who saw his role largely in terms of proffering social critiques, is rapidly being displaced either by experts and specialists, who become involved in special governmental undertakings, or by generalist-integrators, who become in effect house-ideologues for those in power, providing overall intellectual integration for disparate action.”

He has been as good as his word, both as academic and politician. Most other academic mandarins have followed suit. The result has been that foreign policy, diplomacy and international relations studied at present are mainly concerned with the balance of power in the period since the end of the war, with nuclear deterrence as a technical speciality and with the major power blocs as areas of specialization. The study of domestic policy, government and institutions has become focused on the current workings of corporatist representative democracy, concentrating on parties, pressure grops, administration, and the strategies and tactics of electioneering – the last even going to the ludicrous extreme of attempting to become established as a special science with the name of psephology. One-party systems are the preserve of specialists calling themselves Kremlinologists and China men. To this body of studies at the top of the status ladder are sometimes added bits and pieces derived from other sciences, such as political sociology or psychosocial politics, or the occasional subjects dealing with issues such as totalitarianism or Third World politics. An outline of the main modern ideologies is presented largely for undergraduate teaching purposes, though since the “end-of-ideology” thesis these are looked on more as historical curiosities. Only the ex-student radicals, with their influx of new Marxisms, have altered this development a little here and there. Political theory is frequently presented only for teaching purposes as a potted history of political philosophy. Political theorists have gone to the length of trying to establish a separate association called the Conference for the Study of Political Thought. But such secessions do not improve the discipline as a whole, which now suffers from an absence of integrating theories. There is usually nothing of what used to be considered the main staples of politics: no comprehensive theory of the State (Staatslehre), no theory of sovereignty, right or law, no ethical political philosophy or morality of power, no comprehensive theory of representation or power and authority, no utopian speculations, no comparative study of political systems in different countries and epochs, no political economy, no study of politics in relation to culture, no study of the “spirit” of politics, such as the classical concern with the civic virtue of citizens. In short, there is hardly anything left of what was thought worthy by classical political thinkers, as indeed Habermas declares.

Gilded Cage

"Neither the arts, the sciences nor the education system at large should be forced to run as businesses or managed as mere adjuncts to economic life. In the absence of philanthropic patronage, governments should sustain a level of funding for the arts, sciences and higher education systems which acknowledges their non-economic importance to the nation. The arts, sciences and higher education belong together as touchstones of an informed self-critical intellectually and aesthetically dynamic community of citizens. All those who support these and the following propositions are encouraged to join Gilded Cage."

The corporate regimentation of arts, science and education in Australia has been proceeding apace for more than two decades. In higher education, the process was initiated in the 1980’s with the ALP’s Dawkins reforms, which saw mass amalgamations of universities and vocational colleges and the introduction of HECS. Under Howard’s Liberals universities, arts organisations and scientific agencies were increasingly compelled to seek funding from private sources as Federal patronage entered a prolonged period of decline – with predictable results for all areas of intellectual and aesthetic life unsuited to operating in a mass market or unable to gear operations to the development of new products and technologies. The story continues under the present Labor government. Its latest instalment is the underwhelming response by governments to calls on behalf of the VCA as it struggles to avoid annexation by a rapidly corporatising Melbourne University.

Gilded Cage is a loose association of university students and staff, writers, artists, scientists and activists who see corporate culture, bureaucratic regimentation and top-down managerial practices as threats to institutions of many kinds. The group aims to raise awareness of the noxious effects of current institutional practices on Australian cultural life and combat them.

Gilded Cage calls for:
1. university students, university staff and the wider arts and science community to support suspension of the application of the “Melbourne Model” to the VCA;
2. immediate revision of the Federal funding arrangements that led to the VCA-Melbourne University merger;
3. university music students and staff to oppose the merger of VCA Music and the Conservatorium;
4. university students and staff to resist corporate regimentation by:
(a) disposing thoughtfully of university advertising material or undertaking spontaneous creative improvements to it
(b) publicising cost-cutting and re-structuring measures being undertaken by university faculties that are likely to affect teaching, learning or research;
(c) circulating flagrant examples of managerial language deployed in pursuit of inappropriate business models for academic life;
(d) discussing the impact of cost-cutting, re-structuring and managerial foul language with sympathetic parties beyond the university system;
5. artists, art teachers, arts workers and the members of arts funding bodies to undertake a similar campaign of consciousness-raising and resistance involving: (a) culture-jamming, (b) whistle-blowing, (c) circulation of examples of toxic managerial newspeak, (d) public discussion;
6. scientists (social and natural), science teachers, government researchers and members of scientific funding bodies to undertake a similar campaign of (a) to (d); and
7. all interested parties to join Gilded Cage in a show of support – with the aim of bringing together and informing all those with direct experience of systemic problems in the arts, science and higher education.

Gilded Cage believes that:
1. looking to the arts, sciences and education system exclusively as the source of export revenue has seriously impaired Australian public culture;
2. the introduction of inappropriate models of market competition has led to wasteful expenditure on advertising and consultancy and an institutional culture whose relation to students and to the general public is blinkered and manipulative;
3. new forms of managerial control demoralise all who seek to sustain and benefit from arts, science and higher education
4. university life is increasingly anonymous and educational experiences increasingly impoverished; and
5. current modes of operating arts organisations and scientific agencies have led to similarly impoverished aesthetic experiences for artists and their audiences and to the socially questionable dissemination and use of science.

Neither the arts, the sciences nor the education system at large should be forced to run as businesses or managed as mere adjuncts to economic life. In the absence of philanthropic patronage, governments should sustain a level of funding for the arts, sciences and higher education systems which acknowledges their non-economic importance to the nation. The arts, sciences and higher education belong together as touchstones of an informed self-critical intellectually and aesthetically dynamic community of citizens. All those who support these and the above propositions are encouraged to join via:

the gilded cage facebook enclosure

Russell Jacoby: The Last Intellectuals

Russell Jacoby's The Last Intellectuals (1987) runs the argument that post-war America down to the late 1980's saw a notable decline in intellectual life, the near-total extinction of the figure of the public intellectual. "The disappearance of general intellectuals into professions" diagnosed in the book is, however, no one-dimensional decline and fall - it reflects a much wider fracturing of the public domain, though it also follows an institutional logic of its own; unique to the story for Jacoby is a loss of political and intellectual nerve on the part of a whole generation of writers, thinkers and scholars located in and around cities and university campuses.

The argument may call for an update in view of 25 years of further developments - firstly in light of the growth of technology as an agent of radical social change - though equally in light of the by now almost totally residual presence within universities of the New Left - that generation of politically motivated students-cum-professors who, according to Jacoby, had by the late 80's taken decisive steps to accommodate themselves to routinised hyper-specialist academic life. Perhaps the thesis of The Last Intellectuals also calls for some adjustment to Australian conditions - though as it happens surprisingly little, since it was precisely from the late 80's that extensive technical, financial and administrative constraints were imposed on educational institutions by Australian governments - a rationalisation of the nation's universities that, coupled with rapid expansion, has since had so many irrational, demoralising effects analogous to those detailed by Jacoby - not least among them a decline in the public meaning of critical rationality itself.

From the point of view of 2010, Jacoby's 25 year-old book would seem to give pointers to an Australian future that is now a past - a past that many will agree has been far from salutary but that will only cease to show itself in the deceptive guise of unquestionable present necessities if younger generations of students, writers, thinkers and scholars turn squarely to face it. (CS)

***

Academic freedom itself was fragile, its principles often ignored. Nor were violations confined to meddling trustees and outside investigators. The threat emerged, perhaps increasingly, from within; academic careers undermined academic freedom. This may be a paradox, but it recalls an inner contradiction of academic freedom - the institution neutralises the freedom it guarantees.

The New Left sprang into life around and against universities; its revulsion seemed visceral. Yet New Left intellectuals became professors who neither looked backward nor sideways; they kept their eyes on professional journals, monographs, and conferences. Perhaps because their lives had unfolded almost entirely on campuses they were unable or unwilling to challenge academic imperatives.

In several areas the accomplishments of the New Left intellectuals are irrevocable. Yet [their sizeable contribution to scholarship] is extraordinary for another reason; it is largely technical, unreadable and - except by specialists - unread. While New Left intellectuals obtain secure positions in central institutions, the deepest irony marks their achievement. Their scholarship looks more and more like the work it sought to subvert. A great surprise of the last twenty-five years is both the appearance of New Left professors and their virtual disappearance. In the end it was not the New Left intellectuals who invaded the universities but the reverse: the academic idiom, concepts, and concerns occupied, and finally preoccupied, young left intellectuals.

"Professors Woods, Perry and Hocking are moderately talented and enterprising young men with whom philosophy is merely a means for getting on in the world," declared Professor E.B.Holt of several younger teachers in his department. "I do not respect them; I will not cooperate with them; and I am happy to be in a position now to wipe out the stigma of being even nominally one of their colleagues." With this statement Holt in 1918 resigned from Harvard University and moved to an island off the Maine coast. . .

The latest research invention, footnote citation "indexes", encourages deferential and toothless scholarship. The Social Science Citation Index, a massive volume appearing three times a year, draws from thousands of journals the footnote references to particular articles and books. By looking up a specific author, say C. Wright Mills or Daniel Bell, one finds a list of the journal articles where Mills or Bell has been cited. In principle this allows a researcher to find material where Mills or Bell, or related matters, are discussed - or at least footnoted. However, this index is increasingly touted as a scientific method for identifying scholars who have impact in their field; it is also being used as a guide for promotion and awards. Presumably the more references to a professor, the greater the stature. Many citations to an individual's work indicates he or she is important; conversely few or no references implies someone is unknown and irrelevant. "If citation indexing becomes a basis for promotion and tenure, for grants and fellowships," comments Jon Wiener, "the implications for one's own footnotes are clear. In the marketplace of ideas, the footnote is the unit of currency. . . One should definitely footnote friends. . . and do what is possible to see that they footnote you in return. . . " Like any quantitative study of reputation, the index is circular. It measures not the quality of work but clout and connections. If used to evaluate careers, however, the lessons for the striving professor are clear: cast a wide net, establish as many relations as possible, do not isolate yourself from the mainstream. It pays not simply to footnote but to design research to mesh smoothly with the contributions of others; they refer to you as you refer to them. Everyone prospers from the saccharine scholarship.

The study of professions is itself an occupation; but inquiries into academic professionalisation [often] fail to guage [an] essential cultural dimension. It is frequently missed or understated: professionalisation leads to privatisation or depoliticisation, a withdrawal of intellectual energy from a larger domain to a narrower discipline. Leftists who entered the university hardly invented the process, but they accepted, even accelerated it. Marxism itself has not been immune; in recent years it has become a professional "field" plowed by specialists.

"The monastic cell has become a professional lecture hall; an endless mass of 'authorities' have taken the place of Aristotle," wrote John Dewey in one of his earliest essays. "Jahresberichte, monographs, journals without end occupy the void. . . .If the older Scholastic spent his laborious time in erasing the writing from old manuscripts. . . the new Scholastic . . . criticises the criticisms with which some other Scholastic has criticised other criticisms. . . "

Philosophy has proved almost immune to reform. Of course, the self-examination of every discipline proceeds at its own speed. Philosophic self-scrutiny, however, may well be the weakest, because American philosophy has promoted a technical expertese that repels critical thinking; its fetish of logic and language has barred all but a few who might rethink philosophy, an endeavour sometimes pursued by colleagues in political science, sociology, or history.

What is The Great Stage?

"A review of the reviewers might at long last yield an idea or two about art and writing. For wouldn't such a meta-review make clear one or two authentic feelings of distress about Art's pitiful condition in this an-aesthetic era of artistic over-production? The poetry, novels, essays and anthologies themselves have nothing to say. They refer, if they refer to anything, to a lost time in which these forms of literary art had form, when Time itself had time and made a present of it to Art, which can manifestly not arise in a world that no longer believes in Eternity, when no one with the ability to write could have faith that the future would grant him readers that are any different from those he sees around him: those infernal writer-readers who are all just about to drop the pose of readerly attention and begin to shout into the latest digitised megaphone of egotism. You seek in vain amid the literature of today for world-views. You look up from your book and find tvs and billboards and inadvertently come across the closest you can get to Weltanschauungen nowadays: Anschauungen, which is to say – rapaciously multiplying percepts."

- or so I thought three years ago.

The Great Stage is turning out to be something more than than the open-ended exercise in criticism it was originally intended as. Still, for the sake of partial self-definition, here's a draft of the answer to the question "What is the Great Stage?" that dates from the early days.

"The Great Stage is a response to a three-fold critical malaise:

1. Print media in Australia is visibly faltering. At present the only dynamic aspect of Australian newspaper culture would seem to be the interaction between the business models of the supermarket managers in command and the tabloid-cum-glossy fare they judge can be sold to the largest number of readers. Under such conditions, the public function of revieweing and criticism is becoming harder to sustain as the culture pages of major broadsheets fill up with monster-sized pictures, interview-pieces, endless food and wine tips and the diary-like musings of celebrity columnists. The 800-word book review – already of limited use for the purposes of the critic – is itself coming to seem a luxury; for a long time it has formed part of the penumbra of a life-style journalism with most of the qualities of advertising (even if it appears above the line separating paid publicity from what claims the reader's attention on other grounds).

2. Universities have ceased to offer critics meaningful points of intellectual contact, much less places of refuge. Our educational institutions were once one of two indispensable reference points of critical activity: in the person of the critic, the relatively heady world of academic scholarship remained connected with the everyday reality of the theatre, the studio and the writer’s corner. By contrast, today universities’ very intellectual function is under threat as "serious scholarship is replaced by an entrepreneurial striving for research money and media attention." (Harry Redner) In short, criticism and academic life until recently belonged together as part of the same cultural manifold – both offered something to the artist, because both sought to give shape to free intellectual perspectives. In an era like our own when university education is subject to the equally sterile logic of bureaucratic control and free market economics, that ceases to be the case in a radical sense. Free critical activity and routinised academic life have come to mutually exclude each other; the social sciences and humanities in particular have increasingly become the haunt of radical academic conformists who dish up their sensibilities for the book market, shuffle their specialities between journals and conferences, deliver up their mechanical models of mind and society to a passively assenting public or join the ranks of administrative power-brokers and let fly with that disgraceful mixture of bombast and blandness with which our universities are expected to procedurally justify themselves.

3. The net poses a range of very different problems, though as the social domain freest of political constraints it remains the obvious place to launch a venture in general criticism. Yet the dilemmas of specialisation which present an obstacle to general criticism in the world-beyond-the-net are often reproduced online at a higher level of complexity; the generalism required to interpret art in relation to the social and cultural problematics of our day is even less likely to emerge in a virtual world where every fragment of an idea generates its own authoritative-looking pronouncements within its own teeming online enclosure. And that’s not even getting started on the raft of further problems the web generates for the critic. Foremost among them is the problem of.taking critical responsibility: in a medium where too many writers let fly with their opinions from behind a veil of anonymity, criticism either fails to develop or degenerates into self-important snark; where speech acts take on the quality of sound-bites for quasi-technical reasons – where the sheer volume of speech determines the speaker’s visibility – two essential aspects of criticism, analysis and interpretation, fall away and a third, evaluation, is radically abbreviated. . . So if yours truly is going to get a spot of criticism going, he might have to take evasive action against all sorts of things – against the purveyors of cheap ironies – against the army of sub-commentators for whom being online means first and foremost giving up on self-control - against all who spare themselves the labour of the concept, in order to be ready with the snappiest instantaneous assessments of everything the world of art and writing have to offer." 

Truly,

CS