End Of Education: Toward Posthumanism

Introduction

INTRODUCTION Thus the "they" maintains itself factically in the averageness of that which belongs to it, of that which it regards as valid and that which it does not, and of that which it grants success and that to which it denies it. In this averageness with which it prescribes what can and may be ventured, it keeps watch over everything exceptional that thrusts itself to the fore. Every kind of priority gets noiselessly suppressed. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time [The regime of disciplinary power] measures in quantitative terms and hierarchies in terms of value the abilities, the level, the "nature" of individuals. It introduces, through this "value­ giving" measure, the constraint of a conformity that must be achieved. Lastly, it traces the limit that will define difference in relation to all other differences, the external frontier of the abnormal. . . . The perpetual penalty that traverses all points and supervises every instant in the disciplinaryinstitutions compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, excludes. In short, it normalizes. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish The basic claim of this book is that the crisis of contemporary higher education is a symptom of what Martin Heidegger has called "the end of philosophy."To be more historically specific, myargument holds that the events culminatingin the Vietnam War revealed the essential contradiction inhering in the discourse and institutionalpractices of humanism: that its principle of disinterested inquiryis in fact an agency of disguised power. As a synecdochical instance of this disclosure, I wish to invoke the testimonyof the protest movement of the late 1960s, when students representing blacks, women, ethnic minorities, and other hitherto disenfranchised constituencies refused their spontaneous consent to the "benign" practice ofthe humanist university in response to its overt complicitywith a war of aggression in Vietnamcarried out in the name of the "free world." XIII In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, a massive educational reform movement was initiated in 1979 by Harvard University (marked by the adoption of the Harvard Core Curriculum Report). Such reform was theorized by prominent American humanists, by conservatives such as William Bennett, WalterJackson Bate, and Allan Bloom, and by liberals such as E. D. Hirsch and Wayne Booth. This reform movement has as its pur­ pose the recuperation of not only the humanist curriculum that was "shattered" by the protest movement in the 1960s but also the discourse of disinterestedness now called into question by the theoretical discourses that have come to be called "postmodern" or "poststructuralist," but which this book prefers to call "posthumanist." The domi­ nant liberal humanist wing of this reform movement by and large passes over the his­ torically specific moment that precipitated the crisis of higher education: exposure by various student constituencies of the complicity of the university with the relay of power structures conducting the war in Vietnam. Rather, it concentrates on the dis­ abling "randomness" of higher education: what the Harvard Core Curriculum Report called "the proliferation of courses" that, in the name of relevance, had "eroded" the traditional general education program. The reform projects of E. D. Hirsch, Wayne Booth, and Gerald Graff, among others, distinguish themselves from the narrow ped­ agogical authoritarianism and political conservativism of humanists such as Bennett, Bate, Kramer, Bloom, and more recently Roger Kimball, Dinesh D'Souza, and David Lehman. But this opposition is only—and conveniently—apparent. Despite the radical problematization of the enabling principles of the humanist university, the dominantlib­ eral discourse of the reform movement is at one with the conservative wing in its re­ affirmation of the humanist tradition—of the anthropologos—as the point of departure for its pluralist curricular reform initiative. To put it another way, the reformers' com­ mitment to the sovereign subject and the principle of disinterestedness (that truth is external to and is the adversary of power) obscures what the Vietnam decade dis­ closed: the complicity of truth and power, of knowledge production and the dominant sociopolitical order. Indeed, the so­called liberal reform initiative renders its opposition to the conservative humanists' overt call for the imposition of a curriculum consonant with the state's goals a disarming hegemonic strategy. My purpose is to demonstrate this complicity between the liberal and conservative reform initiatives, and the complicity of both with what Althusser has called the (re­ pressive) state apparatuses. I argue that the benign pluralism of contemporary liberal humanism constitutes a strategy of incorporation that, whatever its explicit intentions, operates to reduce the subversive threat of the emergent differential constituencies (whether bodies of marginalized texts or marginalized social groups...