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The Discourse of the University: Modern and Postmodern
- Hong Kong University Press, HKU
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The Discourse of the University T R A C E S : 5 279 The discourse oF The universiTy: modern and PosTmodern eric cheyFiTz Ifirst gave a version of this paper under the title “The Discourse of the University: The Critical Place of Language in Social Action” at a conference titled After Postcolonialism, Beyond Minority Discourse: Postcolonial, Ethnic, and American Studies, held at Cornell University in November of 1999, four years before I became a member of the Cornell faculty. In retrospect, the date is striking, for me in any event, because it evokes a world before the threat of terror became the central ideological tool of the Western nation-state, and in particular the United States, for rationalizing the subversion of democratic institutions in the name of democracy. Writing at that pre-terror moment, as a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania, which had undergone over the previous six years a major transformation based on a corporate model of downsizing and outsourcing, I felt free to view the Western university (the university to which I refer in this paper, particularly the university in the United States) as a particular manifestation or translation of the corporate state, without considering to any great extent the ways in which it might also be in opposition to that state. Writing in a moment of terror, however, at a time when dissent is increasingly in jeopardy in the U.S. public sphere, I am reminded that since 9/11/2001, it has occurred to me more than once that while I still understand the university as imbricated in the corporate state in specific ways, it also strikes me as perhaps the Eric Cheyfitz 280 T R A C E S : 5 last institutional space where a critique of that state is occurring at all, however contained.1 This essay, then as now, is part of a virtual project, which might be titled An Analysis of the Historical Occlusion of Critical Discourses in the Interlocking Public Spheres of the United States. The university is the particular public sphere on which the following fragment focuses.2 The implied question throughout this essay is how does one develop a language to criticize the institutions within which one works (from which one draws one’s paycheck), to which one owes a certain allegiance (a certain patriotism if you will) and from which one takes one’s critical languages themselves, not to mention at least a part of one’s identity. To raise this question I turn to two generative critiques of theWestern university: Thorstein Veblen’s remarkable 1918 study of the modern university, The Higher Learning in America, and Bill Readings’ The University in Ruins, his influential 1996 study of the postmodern or what he prefers to call the “posthistorical” (6) “University” ( a term he capitalizes throughout giving it a kind of metaphysical valence). In his study, Veblen remarks: “An institution is, after all, a prevalent habit of thought, and as such it is subject to the conditions and limitations that surround any change in the habitual frame of mind prevalent in the community” (25). Elaborating this definition, we could say that an institution is a particular habit of speaking or writing, a mode of speech or script or, following Foucault, a particular form of discourse. The question might be, then: what is the current form of discourse that is the university; what does this habit of thinking enable as well as inhibit or prohibit; and what form of discourse do we want the university to inhabit or, more precisely, what form of discourse is it possible for the university to inhabit in the present moment? This question, or, more precisely, series of questions, entails at least two others: Can we institutionalize or even develop from within the university a form of discourse that is critical of the form of discourse that is the university? Do we even want to develop such a discourse or, perhaps wanting to, have the will to do it? For Veblen “the one characteristic trait without which no establishment can claim rank as a university” is “the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake” (27). For while the university is a community institution with “the collective cultural purpose” (154) of serving the community, such service is predicated on the activity of scholarly inquiry. Let us say, then, that what marks the discourse of the modern [3.227.239.160] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 23:06 GMT) The Discourse of the University T...