Traces 5: Universities in Translation: The Mental Labour of Globalization

The Conditions of Theory

The Conditions of Theory T R A C E S : 5 299 The condiTions oF Theory alberTo moreiras The dream of a critical theory without conditions is receding today in the university, and particularly in the North American university. Some of us thought for a time, and we may just still believe it, that everything thinkable is precisely thinkable, and that there are no conditions for our work that must or could be dogmatically excluded from reflection. Of course the moralists cannot understand this, since for the moralists the fundamental and unquestionable condition of thinking is their own self-affirmation, their own advantage.1 The confrontation with moralism in the university is or seems lost. And yet it was crucial for the post-1968 generation, whose very engagement with intellectuality was already at its inception critical of the political pieties that had deluded its mentors. It was a special militancy without gain, a radical militancy for intellectual freedom, and for the freedom of thought, without conditions. But academic corporatization and the re-hierarchization of academic space have thoroughly reduced the possibility of freedom. In the 1990s many private American universities embarked upon capital campaigns where what was nominally at stake was the very possibility of eluding the process of neoliberal corporatization regarding fundamental research. Given financial autonomy, it was argued, a university would not have to yield to market imperatives, and it would therefore have no need to orient its agenda for intellectual and scientific development towards a path dictated by state agencies, Alberto Moreiras 300 T R A C E S : 5 political constituencies, foundations, or other financing bodies. But the result for the humanities has been largely negative: public universities have been bitten by a sense of helplessness as the gap between private and public funding has increased. At the private universities the provosts and the deans are now sitting on top of hundreds of millions of dollars that they are free to distribute according to their own criteria. Many faculty members both at private and at public institutions — there are exceptions — have been reduced to a state of sycophancy, as they try to attract the administration’s gaze to their own presence. The struggle for resources in, comparatively speaking, already rich universities has paradoxically impoverished us all. The current generation of students must be formed against the background of that vicious distortion, presented as academic normality.They are all learning, or being asked to learn, that whatever is not economically viable has no importance whatsoever. It is, precisely, too expensive, even for the richest of all. Public universities must struggle with huge market demands in the humanities: they are asked to provide content for the multicultural structuration of the social through an almost exclusive attention to identity politics and other issues such as the relation between humanities and sciences, literature and technology, or art and human rights. Not to mention race and gender. It would all certainly be good and necessary were it not practiced tendentially to the forceful exclusion of almost everything else, which is being deprived not only of funding but also of symbolic prestige. As a consequence of this exclusion, the very specificity of the difference these practitioners of necessity pay lip service to, whether in the guise of race, gender, or identity, or whether as the very difference between the humanities and science discourse, gets irretrievably lost. In the meantime, in private universities, things are even worse: the new strength of the administration, based on money, is deeply undermining the principles of faculty governance and academic freedom that have for many generations constituted the main glory of the North American university institution. Deans craze into a longing for reform which is nothing but the will to dismantle everything not contemplated by whatever principles of productivity their ceaselessly renewed “strategic plans” almost always uncritically embody. The deans know better nowadays, they are the only ones who know, obviously from an inexhaustible well of conceit, what knowledge is acceptable and what must be discarded. As a faculty member in the North American university today, although there are exceptions, either you The Conditions of Theory T R A C E S : 5 301 submit to the sinisterly authoritarian plans that the administrative teams — with, of course, ample collaboration from the faculty sycophants — have laid out for you, or you will remain outside the distributive circle, which means, outside every possibility of decision, outside interlocution...