The Institutional Unconscious; or, The Prison House of Academia

The Paradox of Intellectual/Official Linkages in an Asian Context

In this era of late modernity, it appears that academia has evolved to a stage where one might question whether its institutional practices and everyday regimes have actually produced a significant advancement in “knowledge.” The underside of what Stanley Aronowitz once called “the last good job in America” is what others, in a very different prise de conscience, have called “the academic sweatshop,” “academic apartheid,” and “the new internal colonialism.”¹ While anthropologists in particular have become sensitive to “authorial” subjectivity,² few have explored how the form and content of knowledge have been “subjected” directly to or bound by institutional forces that define and regulate academia, not to mention its implicit relationship to the public sphere.³ This is worth special attention, in light of the modernizing-cum-professionalizing forces that have transformed academia in recent decades, to which one may now add, its increasing accountability, either for reasons of research productivity or pure economic rationale. Underlying the institution of tenure review is not just the expectation of something better in terms of quality but also the introduction of a whole panoply of micropractices that necessitates various routines of everyday conduct by invoking norms of etiquette, rites of professional performance, moral obligations, strategies of writing, and political maneuvering that cannot easily be deduced by a pure pursuit of knowledge. Results are sequentially ordered and appropriately packaged. Truth may not exist in content, but such micropractices have, without doubt, effectively relegated it to an even lesser place than its form.

Whether tenure guarantees academic freedom or, in the process, advances the production of knowledge more than its absence may be worth scrutiny, but this deflects from more meaningful questions of how the institutional policing of knowledge limits as well as engenders possibilities for paradigmatic innovation and critical thought. Moreover, the possibility of discursive freedom is distinct from the question of academia’s institutional autonomy in the public sphere, on which the force of its “authority” is based. In academia’s creation of the tenured “subject,” one is, in fact, never free, except in the confines of existing institutional parameters and fields of operation. In a public domain, such authority is limited even more, especially if academia occupies a marginal niche or plays an external role within the institutional mainstream. Thus underlying the fantasia of the ivory tower is not so much its presumed discursive freedom as its stratified existence in real institutions of power that shape the ongoing relevance and dialectics of knowledge to society. In an institutional setting of the public, academia is never really free. Its degree of authority is a function of its relative autonomy or embeddedness vis-à-vis other institutions of power or society at large.

Sociopolitical settings differ markedly, and, in effect, they constitute a more appropriate point of departure for understanding the flow of knowledge than the academy itself. In the same vein, the institution of tenure may be a manifestation of modernity’s professionalization, but its degree of purity and flexibility is, to a great extent, a response to the influence of other institutional or societal factors. Academia’s evolution as a regime of practice (in a Foucauldian sense), which has most recently created an academic underclass, is a function in part of its existence as a corporate entity that depends on ties to business and state. The kind of corporate restructuring that affects its internal constitution also parallels the complex relationships that drive its research and teaching industry. The collusive bonding of the university and business that has shifted the focus to applied research over teaching per se not only has heightened the intrinsic prestige of research in tenure but has also turned the university into a corporation, prompting Sheila Slaughter and Larry Leslie to call this “academic capitalism.”⁴ As Elliot Negi first noted, “Once universities become a business, the objective is not education for...