John Higgins

Critical literacies: English studies beyond the canon

Summary In this essay, Higgins argues for a rethinking of English studies away from canon‐bound definitions and around the notion of the acquisition of critical literacy, a notion which is defined in terms of the persuasive properties of language. Two brief examples of critical literacy in practice are then examined: a scene from Shakespeares Othello, and a Cape Times editorial.

Managing Meaning: the constitutive contradictions of institutional culture

Abstract This essay seeks to defamiliarise the currently dominant sense of institutional culture in South Africa. It does so first by examining the history of the emergence of the term in U.S. business studies in the late 1970s, and second, its translation/transposition into higher educational discourse in the 1980s. A third section examines the developing scepticism around the term in the 1990s, and the essay as a whole argues that the idea of institutional culture is based on a constitutive contradiction between instrumental and constitutive understandings of social process. The essay frames the debate around the ways in which the creation of new vocabulary responds either openly or in concealed ways to larger social trends and tensions, and notes the ways in which the current emphasis on institutional culture in South Africa curiously works to marginalise the dominant elements in the neo-liberal transformation of higher education.

Paying lip-service to academic freedom

G iving a version of this paper at a rhetoric conference in Johannesburg last year, I said that one of the characteristics of any idea that becomes a received idea is that it threatens, when used, to identify the speakers position in advance, and so lead to neglect of the substance or content of what is actually said. Received ideas are important because they signal the end of thinking; that is why they are likely to be of some ideological significance and that is also why, though in his own terms, Flaubert was so fascinated and repelled by them, and hence the interest of his extraordinary project for a Dictionary of received ideas for any rhetorician. What else was Roland Barthess Mythologies (1957) if not a critically and politically conscious version of Flauberts great Dictionary?

Resisting the Restoration: response to Premesh Lalu

I would imagine that most humanist scholars shared Premesh Lalu’s sense of dismay at the outcome of the current crop of research chairs. Sixty new chairs, but not a single one of them awarded to the humanities proper! Can this be the way to promote the excellence necessary in both teaching and research for the humanities in South Africa if they are to achieve the global levels of recognition integral to the university project? No wonder that Lalu’s initial response was ‘we in the humanities might as well pack our bags and go home’, and that the Dean of Humanities at UWC, Duncan Brown, should register the allocation of chairs as a ‘palpable snub’. Lalu suggests that this outcome ‘reveals both the priorities of a developmental state and the broader understanding of the place of the humanities in society’, and asserts that the main reason for the absence of the humanities proper from the awards ‘may be explained to the extent that [they] produce a concept of the human condition not merely as an inheritance of underdevelopment, but as one specifically marked by a history of race, ethnicity, gender and class’. Against the one-dimensional focus on underdevelopment as an economic phenomenon, Lalu points correctly to the need for a more sophisticated and multidimensional analysis of underdevelopment, one that definitely includes the integral social, psychic and ideological aspects which are marginalised or ignored in and by the current economistic focus. For Lalu, the most urgent task of the humanities – and one totally ignored in the current form of the research chairs initiative – is to enable our students ‘to discover for themselves a concept of the human couched in a specifically South African idiom’. Such work – summed up as the ‘struggle to unravel racism’s deep structural and unconscious legacies’ – would have much to contribute to that ‘remaking of the university and its research priorities in South Africa’ which must, he insists, be an aspect of any ‘post-apartheid’ higher education policy which sees itself as ethically and politically engaged with social transformation. I am in complete agreement with much of this analysis, and certainly support the kind of research project that Lalu envisages, embodied as it is in the work of the admirable Centre for Humanities at the University of the Western Cape; but I do have some demurs and differences which may be worth raising for the sake of promoting further reflection at a particularly challenging moment for the humanities, both locally and globally. In the first instance, I simply want to point out the difference between support and advocacy for a particular research project, or set of research projects in the

Academic freedom and the university

Abstract A review article of Louis Menand (ed) 1996: The Future of Academic Freedom. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press and Bill Readings 1996: The University in Ruins. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press.

The necessary conjunction

ABSTRACT Current discussion of Science and the Humanities in the South African academy tends to pose these two fields of study in oppositional and exclusionary terms: Science or the Humanities. In this paper we argue that the proper and necessary conjunction for discussion of science and the humanities should be an “and” rather than an “or” and suggest that the question of this conjunction has now become of critical importance for all those involved in the humanities.Tracing the opposition back to its roots in CP Snows Two cultures, we argue that this received idea is outdated in terms of contemporary developments both in the history of science and in the practices in the humanities. In the unpredictable world of post-normal science, we argue, the application of historical, theoretical and textual interpretation to the world represents a key skill for the citizen in the information age.

State of urgency

William Faulkner’s appalled recognition – ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ – sets the scene for many of the animating concerns of this Special Issue. This is focused on work in and debates around the humanities in South Africa, where many artists and academics appear to be wrestling with a particularly strong version of Faulkner’s dilemma. For just over 20 years after the formal dismantling of apartheid embodied in the adoption of South Africa’s new Constitution, what we are witnessing is a living on of the past, a startled recognition that the past is not even past. For the structural persistence of forms of racialized inequality at every level of society and of the economy is now becoming increasingly expressed and articulated in and through the deeply polarising debates around higher education which are largely taking place within the humanities. This persistence of the past, combined with the dictates of a national higher education policy cloned from a global template indifferent or even hostile to the humanities and the qualitative social sciences, exerts both globally familiar and locally specific pressures on the possibilities and potentials for humanist study and critical reflection. In these pages we cannot pretend to cover or fully represent the totality of work in the arts and humanities in South Africa. However, we hope that this assemblage of snapshots, glimpses and fragments of work will nonetheless work to yield some insight into the South African academy, and offer some sense of its uneasy relation to the larger forces and conflicts of the nation and the state. All of these conflicts are now rapidly coming to a head in the university system, where as we write, campuses across the country are closed due to student protests. #FeesMustFall follows on the #RhodesMustFall protests at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in March 2015. Here, a student in a well-publicized demonstration stirred up students across the country (and beyond) by throwing a bottle of human waste over the statue – centrally placed at UCT – of the great symbol of colonialism, Cecil John Rhodes, resulting in the at least temporary and perhaps

Living out our differences: Reflections on Mandela, Marx and my country: An interview with Jakes Gerwel

This article takes the form of an exchange between Cape Town academic John Higgins and Jakes Gerwel, respected South African citizen and formerly chief aide to the country’s first democratically-elected president, Nelson Mandela. The conversation covers a wide canvas which ranges from Gerwel’s rural childhood to his recollection of working for Mandela. But there is also an exploration of the role played by South African Marxism in the struggle to end apartheid; on the place of education (and its failure) in the post-apartheid years; on the role of universities both prior and after the ending of apartheid. The important role of the humanities in educating is considered and the rise of technically-inclined forms of education are analysed; in this context, the idea that the citizen has been replaced by the entrepreneur is also raised. The issues of race and class in the context of South Africa’s past and present are also discussed.

Turning Readers into Spectators: Pope's ‘Ode on Solitude’ and the Frame of Representation

‘A signe is not a signe to him that giveth it, but to him to whom it is made: that is, to the spectator.’ (Hobbes Leviathan 1651) ‘The use, the force, and the excellence of language, certainly consists in raising clear, complete and circumstantial images, and in turning readers into spectators.’ (Joseph Wharton An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope 1782) ‘Henry was a silent and astonished spectator of the scene.’ (Mrs Radcliffe The Mysteries of Udulpho 1794)

A missed encounter: Raymond Williams and psychoanalysis

Summary Raymond Williams was perhaps the foremost cultural critic in Britain of the post‐war period. Yet his work retained a consistent hostility towards what has become a central component of our understanding of the social construction of the subject ‐ the theory of psychoanalysis. This essay traces the terms of Williams hostility towards psychoanalysis and argues that most of this was the product of a missed encounter with psychoanalysis. It is argued that this missed encounter is all the more surprising given the interest in psychoanalysis shown by predecessors of Williams such as Herbert Read, Alick West and Christopher Caudwell.