More thoughts on the importance of universities

In my last posting I ended by talking of the beneficial ‘enlightenment’ effects of a certain approach to scientific disciplines. There I used the term ‘enlightenment’ advisedly, and what I had in mind is its historico–philosophical meaning, especially in light of the so–called postmodern temperament of the present era.

As everyone should know, the historical Enlightenment was characterized by the emphasis on reason as the common denominator for all human beings, regardless of social class. Admittedly, it has taken a few centuries for the implications of this insight to work its way through the fabric of society –- in the 18th century slavery was still alive and well, and women could not have been said to be ‘free’ (and many women would claim the same for today).

But the point is that ‘enlightenment’ with a small letter e is a process, and never reaches a stage of development where it may be taken for granted that society at large is thoroughly and irreversibly enlightened. As Adorno and Horkheimer showed in ‘Dialectic of enlightenment’, reason may well function in an emancipatory capacity at one given time, but in the course of its historical development new embodiments of reason, such as science, technology and a bureaucratic public administration, may well (and according to them have) become the source of new forms of enslavement.

But what does the ‘process’ of enlightenment amount to, and what would its significance be in the context of a multi–cultural, heteromorphic postmodernity? Immanuel Kant, the most famous of Enlightenment philosophers, described it as follows in his essay on the question, ‘What is enlightenment?’:

‘Enlightenment is man’s release from his self–incurred tutelage. Tutelage…is man’s inability to make use of his understanding…without direction from another. It is self–incurred when its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! “Have courage to exercise your own understanding!” – that is the motto of enlightenment.’

That Kant was familiar with an 18th century (administrative) counterpart of today’s technical training manuals, is apparent from his remark, a little further in the text, that ‘Statutes and formulas, those mechanical tools of the rational employment or rather mis–employment of his natural gifts, are the fetters of an everlasting tutelage’. The lesson that his words impart to us today, is that humankind would be infinitely better off when each and every member of a society is capable and willing to think independently for him– or herself. That, after all, is what a modern democracy is supposed to be based on -– the ability of all citizens to think and decide independently, instead of relying on what others have devised for them, or dictated to them, or set forth in training manuals for them.

That is why people need universities –- not technical colleges masquerading as universities, but the real McCoy, where they are encouraged to think for themselves. (Given the continued sway of organized religion in the world today, it is a secular kind of miracle that there are a fair number of individuals who do show such independence of mind!)

And if the social situation in Kant’s day was complex, and in need of the kind of thinking exemplified by the author of the three famous Critiques, it is all the more so today, given the differences between modernity and postmodernity. While the modernist representatives of the former believed in the possibility of formulating some universalistic metalanguage or metanarrative, such as logical positivism or Marxism, to cure the ills of the world once and for all, postmodernist thinkers need only point to the failure of the project of modernity at different levels to justify their rejection of such attempts -– whether it is in politics (apartheid was, after all, a modernist political project of exclusion) or in the sciences (where theoretical dissensus, not consensus, marks the opportunity for progress).

The belief in the possibility of getting everyone ‘on the same page’, as Walter Anderson puts it, has waned to the point of being adhered to only by fanatics and fundamentalists (who would reserve the ‘page’ only for those who can say ‘shibboleth’, anyway). That is why universities –- in the guise of what one could perhaps call ‘multiversities’ –- are more necessary than ever: now that modern ideologies of exclusion and ethnic superiority no longer stand in the way of recognizing that the human, that is, the cultural, as well as the natural world is irrevocably marked by diversity, heterogeneity and polymorphism, ways of understanding such a complex state of affairs, and of getting along with one another, have to be found or devised. And this can be messy, unless it is done in such a way that both the universality of the human condition and the specificity of cultural differences (not to mention the particularity of individuals) are recognized.

Those thinkers known as poststructuralists -– Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Irigaray, Caputo, Deleuze, Kristeva, Ulrich Beck; to mention some –- mark themselves as such by their insistence on and ingenuity in thinking according to what Caputo has called an ‘exorbitant’ (out of the ‘usual’ orbit) manner. Instead of adhering to the old ‘either/or’ logic that has held sway in traditional western thought since Aristotle, these daring thinkers pursue a ‘both/and’ logic in virtually every area of research, with creatively liberating consequences.

Instead of, for instance, arguing for the abolition of disciplines, they demonstrate their ‘porousness’, which allows previously ‘autonomous’ disciplines to ‘leak into’ one another, thus forming fecund new constellations without ceasing to be disciplines. In other words, paradoxically, they are and they are not the disciplines they used to be. Literature has thus been shown to contain philosophical elements or ‘traces’ while philosophy demonstrably contains figural ‘literary’ moments that it cannot shed at will. This exorbitant logic of poststructuralism has given inter– as well as ‘post’–disciplinary research understandable impetus.

Such a poststructuralist approach to two areas of current interest -– the notion of a socially engaged university and the fashionable talk of skills versus content — yields interesting results. In the first case, if one thinks of a ‘socially engaged university’ in terms of the old binary logic of either/or, it appears to be the opposite of the obsolete idea of a university as a proverbial ‘ivory tower’, isolated from the social world and wrapped up in its own abstruse and irrelevant intellectual pursuits. According to such a way of thinking, the university then appears to be involved with its social environment to the extent that every activity within its walls is measured for its legitimacy solely by means of its ‘relevance’, where such relevance is increasingly determined by the community, to the point of the university losing its traditional ‘autonomy’ and ‘academic freedom’.

A poststructuralist approach to the university, however, would affirm the need for and importance of social engagement, but not at the cost of its autonomy. To become exclusively socially engaged would mean that universities have to be heteronomous, that is, relinquish their constitutive role of critical pursuit and dissemination of knowledge at the most advanced level, because society (as represented by university councils, for example) would dictate the academic agenda of universities. And society at large is, as everyone should know, notoriously shortsighted. (Witness the historical examples of fascism and apartheid, which could ‘happen’ because the critical voices of universities and independent intellectuals were effectively silenced or ignored.)

Universities would cease being universities if they only and exclusively trained future professionals according to present economic needs -– they could do so too, but not if it means relinquishing their distinctive task of criticizing certain (reactionary or misguided) social or political practices (such as racism, fascism, sexism or oligarchic tendencies within a democracy) in society at large, whenever these manifest themselves. And fundamental, independent research in all the sciences would be seriously hampered if only research that seemed relevant in terms of present economic and political imperatives were countenanced and funded. Imagine the loss for scientific understanding of the universe if Stephen Hawking’s cosmological research on black holes had been stonewalled because it was deemed irrelevant, or if Saussure’s structuralist understanding of language had been dismissed as too abstract to help us at the pragmatic level of everyday communication. (For one thing, Levi-Strauss’s work on myth would have been unthinkable without Saussure, as would be a host of other world-shattering insights that took his structural linguistics as their point of departure.)

Fundamental, critical research and thought have a way of slowly but surely working through the fabric of society. The poststructuralist alternative, therefore, allows one to think social engagement and critical, academic autonomy and freedom on the part of universities ‘together’, instead of regarding these qualities as being mutually exclusive.

The second example, that of skills/content, may be treated in a similar manner. In the present educational climate, skills are all the rage -– so much so that people are running the risk of forgetting what the sense or purpose of skills is, namely to enable a social and economic agent to practice these skills upon a certain material, or ‘content’ as one used to say. Without the indispensable relation to such ‘material’, anyone in the process of acquiring skills of a certain kind would be in the position of the man who endlessly went through the arm– and leg–motions supposedly appropriate to swimming, but on dry land, and when asked why he did not enter the water, replied that he wanted to learn to swim first.

Similarly, to become skilled in the flexible, clear, effective (and eventually creative) use of a language, the endless repetition of mere ‘grammatical’ sentences, or the study of techniques concerning second–language acquisition would not suffice by themselves (although, to a certain degree, they could form part of an encompassing approach to the study of language, because they are part of a language). This is where literature, history and philosophy -– to mention only a few of the most important disciplines — could (and should) perform the role of immersing students in the vast fabric of cultural meanings that have the effect of what in German is called Bildung (cultivation) of the individual.

Imagine the difference between being taught by someone who can impart to students a rudimentary, pragmatic ability to communicate in a certain language, and, on the other hand, having as one’s teacher someone steeped in the disciplines mentioned above, and is able to guide students through the reading of classics such as the Iliad, The Republic or The Prince, and connecting their significance for human life through other, more recent and contemporary literary or philosophical prisms such as Nervous Conditions, Being and Time or The Inhuman, and perhaps initiating a fruitful dialogue between these texts and films such as Bad Timing, Harold and Maud, or the Star Wars saga. Not only would such students be exposed to a situation where they would assimilate valuable cultural and intercultural knowledge, but they would, in addition, learn to traverse a complex linguistic terrain, where their ‘grammaticality’ would not be technically unidimensional, but semiotically and culturally multidimensional.

To put it differently, in terms derived from Wittgenstein, these fortunate students (who, incidentally, would have to be willing to be students in the true sense) would be initiated into a plurality of ‘language games’, instead of being restricted to the merely pragmatic language game of the technically useful.

To be sure, not every teacher or lecturer possesses such disciplinary and interdisciplinary depth and breadth of knowledge and skill, but most are sufficiently familiar with cultural narratives and other practices to be capable of connecting ‘skills’ and cultural (scientific, literary, historical, mythological, philosophical, sociological, psychological) knowledge or ‘content’ in different ways. There is no true demonstration of skills unless they have a purchase on something, which could range from the human body (in the case of nursing or medical skills), through literature (in the case of reading or literary criticism) to logic or rhetoric (where argumentative or oratory skills are concerned), to mention but a few instances.

I recently tried to show students the continued relevance, today, of the place of rhetoric in ancient Greek philosophy by offering a reading of the film, Thank you for Smoking, through Plato’s critique of sophism, and it seemed to me to work well — the students learned something about Greek philosophy, as well as of the manner in which rhetoric, as opposed to truth-seeking discourse, still functions in today’s society.

Moreover, how could one be expected to navigate a world which has become culturally complex without some intellectual grasp of cultural differences in a diachronic as well as a synchronic sense? Some of the theoretical fields which are indispensable for the understanding or conceptualization of culturally diverse practices and ‘discourses’ (where language and power converge), are cultural studies, gender studies, discourse theory, critical theory, comparative literature, philosophy, history, classical studies and film studies. These disciplines are traditionally taught at universities, and although they are also encountered at community college level in the United States, and in a variety of specialized institutions such as film schools, they feature at a more advanced level in the context of a university.

Which (as intimated earlier) is not to say, of course, that the theoretical strengths of a university cannot be combined with the technical or pragmatic strengths of a technikon. To substantiate this claim I may point to my experience of teaching semiotics and the philosophy of art to Art and Design students at the PE Technikon before it merged with UPE and Vista PE (for some of that time together with Andrea Hurst), in addition to teaching UPE students philosophy, film studies and theory (or philosophy) of architecture. At the time, lecturers at the Technikon’s Faculty of Art and Design remarked on several occasions that the difference this had made to their students was noticeable in the facility with which the students are able to ‘talk about their work’.

They had been given a theoretical vocabulary (for example the semiotic vocabulary of structuralism and poststructuralism, and that of a phenomenological philosophy of art) which had a transformative effect on their grasp of what they are doing when they paint, sculpt, produce videos or multi–media designs. Without this vocabulary a critical evaluation of the products of their ‘technical’ skills would be much more difficult. Theory and practice cannot be separated.

Besides, one of the cardinal features of postmodernity is its combination of practices and domains which were kept strictly apart in the culture of modernity, such as theory and practice, ‘high art’ and ‘low art’, ‘high culture’ and popular culture, as well as the various disciplines that comprise the social, human and natural sciences. Today it is nothing unusual to find a work of popular art addressing serious philosophical questions (like Beineix’s ‘Diva’, which is a nail-biting cinematic thriller at one level, while at another, it addresses the serious Benjaminian question of the ontological status of the work of art in the age of mechanical and electronic reproduction.) This is why ‘postmodern’ people need universities (at least those who take their postmodernity seriously, albeit with a suitable sense of irony, as Umberto Eco has so wittily shown). Without universities, they would live in the midst of a major cultural transformation at all levels, without the means readily at hand for knowing or understanding it.