Thomas Docherty

For the university : democracy and the future of the institution

For the University is a book both about and for the university in an age of mass and globalized education. Thomas Docherty analyses the current problems facing the university as an institution, and also offers some positive arguments for a revived and vibrant set of institutional arrangements and governing principles. The book considers the place of the university as an important global institution, now in a charged political and international public sphere. Docherty places current debates within their wider economic and political context, focusing on the relationship of the university to current and emerging models of democracy. The question of what the university will be -- rather than it is, was, or might be -- is at the heart of this book, and Docherty ably traces its history and present condition in order to offer us a vision for the future.

Books briefly noted

Guardian of Dialogue. Max Schelers Phenomenology, Sociology of Knowledge and Philosophy of Love By Michael D. Barber, Bucknell University Press 1993. Pp. 205. ISBN 0–8387–5228. n.p. The Bodies of Women: Ethics, Embodiment and Sexual Difference By Rosalyn Diprose, Routledge, 1994. Pp. xi + 148. ISBN 0–415–09783–5. £35.00. Gottlob Freges Politisches Tagebuch Edited by Gottfried Gabriel and Wolfgang Kienzler, Deutsche Zeitschrift fur Philosophie Vol. 42, No. 6 (1994), pp. 1057–98. The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language, and Understanding By Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr., Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. x + 527. ISBN 0–521–41965–4. £59.95. Woman of Reason: Feminism, Humanism and Political Thought By Karen Green, Polity Press, 1995. Pp. 220. ISBN 0–7456–1448–5. £39.50. The Nature of True Minds By John Heil, Cambridge University Press, 1992. Pp. xi + 248. ISBN 0–521–41337–0. £35. Gilles Deleuze ou le systeme du multiple By Philippe Mengue, Editions Kime, Collection ‘Philosophie‐epistemologie’, 1995. P...

The Privatization of Human Interests or, How Transparency Breeds Conformity

This chapter argues that in ‘modernity’, transparency is a mechanism through which we eviscerate politics of content and substance, replacing it with the policing of behaviors that constitute social conformity as a normative ideal. Such modernity sees its task as the proper regulation of the claims of the personal and also of the political on human identity. Can one derive a private self from a political act; and to what extent do the demands of the private sphere drive political action? Modernity resolves this dialectical tension by the privatization of ecology: the withdrawal from the political world itself to “cultiver son jardin.” The demand for transparency is complicit with the acceptance of a normative surveillance society, where “deviant” behavior must be eradicated.

The Logic of ‘But’: Quarrels, Literature and Democracy

This paper looks at intrinsic disputation within proposition, and specifically within propositions that offer a moderated version of the freedom of speech and expression. It begins from a considera...

The boiled frog and the dodo

In his excellent ‘What’s happening to our universities?’ proposition paper, Ben R. Martin cogently and persuasively outlines some of the key changes that have happened in the last few decades to the higher education sector worldwide. These changes, he rightly argues, have had a cumulatively corrosive effect. Had they been proposed all at once, as a single ‘reform’, they would have been rejected, for it would have been obvious that their effect would be damaging, and perhaps even terminal, for the form and function of higher education. Any government that proposed such a revolution would surely have been ridiculed, its authority shot to pieces. Stefan Collini has been clear on this. In October 2013, he argued that:

The University: A Matter of Theoretical Importance

‘Material Theory’ addresses what we might think of as ‘worldliness’ in literary, cultural, and other aesthetic forms. Specifically, it addresses the relation between an allegedly ‘globalized’ form of mass higher education and the legacies of the so-called ‘theory wars’ and of late twentieth-century ‘high theory’.

John Higgins on Academic Freedom

This review article considers the work of John Higgins on academic freedom. It reveals that Higgins offers an account that eschews any fundamental relation between academic freedom and the market. Rather, he offers a more nuanced view that takes academic freedom out of the academy and into a wider political and social domain, while simultaneously avoiding the trap of offering a transcendent or metaphysical ‘idea’ of academic freedom. This depends upon what Higgins calls ‘critical literacy’, which requires that we develop an understanding of specific issues textually, theoretically, and historically. In this way, Higgins attends to historically specific occasions when social freedom is under threat, and demonstrates how our freedoms within the academy can intervene to redeem that social freedom and extend it. The piece argues that academic freedom is more than merely academic, but social and political.

Criticism, history, Foucault

Foucault has had an enormous influence on criticism in recent times, most especially in the development of the ‘New Historicism’, partly theorised by Hayden White and practised by critics such as Greenblatt, Davis, Tennenhouse and many others.’ This kind of criticism has now begun to supercede Derridean deconstruction as a kind of radical and theoretical mode of critique. Edward Said offers a rationale for this ‘conflict of the faculties between philosophy and history’ when he argues that the crucial difference between Derrida and Foucault is that ‘Derrida’s criticism moves us into the text, Foucault’s in and o~t’.~ In both cases, there is a radical critique in the sense that both are concerned to produce hitherto unsuspected knowledges, knowledges which will not sit comfortably with any of our received ideas of what constitutes truth, history and so on. But while Derridean deconstruction produces a radical kind of hermeneutic, Foucault has always been at pains to suggest that his work is not interpretation.3 Rather, Foucault has tried to find ways of, as Said put it, moving back out of the text after reading it from within its own interstices. What he moves back out to is an analysis of discursive formations and the power invested in discourses, the powers invested or inscribed in what discourse allows to be understood or validated as epistemologically to the point. In short, deconstruction is thought, generally, to offer the possibility of criticism; but whereas left-minded critics have appreciated the radical unsettling potential of deconstruction, its ability to disturb received, bourgeois ideas, those same critics have appreciated Foucauldian archaeology more, on the grounds that it is not simply critical but it also offers a way back into history. Many marxists have now begun to feel more at home with Foucault, despite his own reiterated statements of position denying his marxist allegiances.4 But what I want to question in the present article is precisely this relation of criticism to history in Foucault. For while neo-marxisant historians appreciate the fact that Foucault is interested in history in ways that are familiar to a Marxist (while Derrida’s historical interests are much less recognisable), arguing that Foucauldian criticism offers a better way of analysing and thus knowing the past while also writing the history of the present, 5 1 shall argue that the logic of Foucault’s positions makes it virtually impossible to engage in epistemological criticism at all. His position comes closer to those of Deleuze and Lyotard, two other much misunderstood philosophers attacked by the left, in which criticism is less an epistemological and more an ontological matter.6 This is to say that Foucault’s opening up onto history is simply too much for criticism; criticism as it stands cannot accommodate historicity. This is the problem to be addressed here. There are three stages to the argument. In the first, I indicate the