Conflicting Humanities

Rosi Braidotti, Paul Gilroy, Rosi Braidotti, Paul Gilroy

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781474237567
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Education
• Categoría: Education Theory & Practice

How might we reinvent the humanities? This is the question at the heart of this provocative volume. It is a difficult mission and definitely one which needs to be addressed with increasing urgency. There is no better cast to confront and problematize this question than the contributors to Conflicting Humanities. They are world-renowned thinkers who can tackle the problem as researchers and teachers but also as prominent public intellectuals. Taking the intellectual and political legacies of Edward Said as a point of departure and frame of reference, the contributors – working in a range of disciplinary settings – consider the current condition of humanism and the humanities. Said's definition of the core task of the Humanities as the pursuit of democratic criticism remains more urgent than ever, though it needs to be supplemented by gender, environmental, and anti-racist perspectives as well as by detailed analysis of the necro-political governmentality of our time. An innovative piece of scholarship, this volume is committed to the refusal of a world riven by new kinds of warcraft, injustice and exploitation.

CHAPTER ONE

The Contested Posthumanities

Rosi Braidotti

To reintegrate himself with worldly actuality, the critic of texts ought to be investigating the system of discourse by which the ‘world’ is divided, administered, plundered, by which humanity is thrust into pigeon-holes, by which ‘we’ are ‘human’ and ‘they’ are not.

EDWARD SAID (2001: 26)

Introduction

In response to complex social, environmental and academic climate changes, this chapter adopts an affirmative position. I want to defend the productivity of a posthuman future for the humanities, accounting for the tensions of our times in a grounded manner without being reductive and critical while avoiding negativity. To achieve this, I will develop the following argument: starting from the legacy and the limitations of the debate on humanism between Said and Foucault, I will provide a cartography of the critical humanities in the contemporary university. Then I will proceed to map out some of the ways in which the posthumanities are currently being developed in response to and in dialogue with our globally linked and technologically mediated societies that are marked by increasing polarizations in terms of access to economic, technological and environmental resources.

What is human about the humanities?

Michel Foucault’s distinction between universal, organic and specific intellectuals (Foucault and Deleuze 1977), modelled respectively on the Hegelian–Marxist scheme, on Gramsci’s thought and on his own insights, reformulated the task of intellectuals as critical thinkers after Sartre’s and Fanon’s generation. As Edward Said (in Viswanathan 2001: 335) pointed out, the distinction between these categories is not fixed but porous, and the cyclical nature of these different positions allows them to cross over each other, adapting to changing historical circumstances. The common denominator for both the organic and the specific intellectual is the ethical-political commitment to provide adequate and reasoned cartographies of power in its immanent and situated historical formations, as well as in the production of discourse. As Said put it: ‘part of intellectual work is understanding how authority is formed’ (Said in Viswanathan 2001: 384), and especially for critical theorists working in the university, to represent the powerless and the dispossessed.

Loyal to this legacy, my generation of academics based our work on the politics of location (Rich 1987, 2001), the production of theoretical cartographies as diagrams of power and the creation of new concepts, combining philosophical critiques with feminist, post-colonial and anti-racist reconstructions of both knowledge and social relations (Braidotti 2014). The specific or situated intellectuals’ practice rests on the rejection of universalism as both idea and representation, in favour of embedded and embodied relational forms of knowledge production. For my generation, this re-definition of the responsibilities of intellectuals went hand-in-hand with the rejection of European exceptionalism and its vehement and often belligerent universal pretensions (Said 1978, 2004). The critique of humanism formulated by poststructuralism – notably in Foucault’s diagnosis of the death of ‘Man’ (1970) – targeted specifically the assumption about the ‘Human’ that is implied in the theory and practice of the academic humanities. That is to say the humanist idea of the ‘Man of reason’ (Lloyd 1984) as coinciding with masculinity, transcendental reason, rational consciousness and European civilization. Irigaray’s critique of the Enlightenment-based project of emancipation, pointedly called ‘Equal to whom?’ (1994), expanded the same critique to social and discursive constructions of ‘Woman’, radicalizing feminist theory and practice. Anti-humanism emerges as the nodal point.

It is poignant to note, however, how fast the term ‘intellectual’ was phased out throughout the 1990s, becoming disconnected from its social vocation, till it came to be replaced by a new class of ‘content-providers’ (Anderson 1997). Also known as the regime of experts and consultants, in a context of increased privatization of research following the official end of the Cold War in 1989, this shift coincided with the ‘theory wars’ (Arthur and Shapiro 1995) and rising criticism of French philosophy. The impact of a new techno-scientific culture based on information technologies and bio-genetics was also a crucial factor in demystifying the role of intellectuals. Globalized information networks, the flows of data and capital and the speed and heterogeneity of digital access, induced multiple dislocations of the image and practice of academic ‘knowing subjects’.

By the end of the 1990s it was obvious to all that the only ‘content-provider’ that really mattered was the Internet itself, which relocated the former intellectuals to the market-oriented position of ‘ideas brokers’ and, in the best case scenario, ‘ideas leaders’. As Williams lucidly put it (2014: 166), ‘now we are entrepreneurs of the mind and it wears us down’. By the end of the millennium the mutation of capitalism into a cognitive differential machine (Deleuze and Guattari 1977, 1987; Moulier-Boutang 2012) was in full swing, just as criticism of the humanities became dominant in a neoliberal university ruled by quantified economics and the profit motive. Critical theory was dismissed as an ideologically-biased activity and declared outdated (Fukuyama 1989), its intellectuals dismissed as ‘tenured radicals’ (Kimball 1990), while the humanities became down-graded as a glorified finishing school. Academic publishing went into a downward spiral, but seemed to be compensated by the rise of a new class of academic stars, who were both commercially successful and media-savvy, their visibility concealing the real impoverishment of the field (Collini 2013; Williams 2014). A mood of ‘post-theoretical malaise’ (Cohen, Colebrook and Miller 2012) resulted in critical theorists being contested in both the academy and society.

Deleuze and Guattari’s anatomy of advanced capitalism as schizophrenia (1977, 1987) taught us that the global economy is a spinning machine that perverts global nature as well as global culture (Franklin, Lury and Stacey 2000) and subsumes all living materials – human and non-human – to a logic of commodification and consumption (Rose 2007; Cooper 2008). It functions as a deterritorializing flow of images without imagination (Braidotti 1994), organs without bodies (Braidotti 1989; Žižek 2004) and growth without progress. The manic-depressive proliferation of commodified differences and quantified selves makes for an unsustainable system – a ‘future eater’ (Flannery 1994) – that erodes its own foundations as it axiomatically shifts ground and sabotages the future (Patton 2000; Braidotti 2002; Protevi 2009, 2013; Toscano 2005). At the same time, as feminist and post-colonial theories (Grewal and Kaplan 1994) pointed out, global consumerism, while promoting an ideology of ‘no borders’, implements a highly controlled system of hyper-mobility of consumer goods, information bytes, data and capital (Braidotti 2002, 2006), whereas people do not circulate nearly as freely.

This political economy of controlled mobility produces dramatically different nomadic subject positions (Braidotti 1994, 2011a): registered and unregistered migrant workers, refugees, VIP frequent flyers, daily commuters, tourists, pilgrims and others. The violence of capitalist de-territorializations also induces evictions, homelessness and destitution, as well as the exodus of populations on an unprecedented planetary scale (Sassen 2012). As a result of such devastations, a global diaspora (Brah 1996) has replaced the exemplary condition of ‘exile’ (Said 2003) while structural injustices including increasing poverty and indebtedness (Deleuze and Guattari 1977; Lazzarato 2012) have condemned large portions of the world population to substandard life-conditions. A ‘necro-political’ governmentality (Mbembe 2003) is at work through technologically mediated wars and counterterrorism strategies. Security concerns have accordingly become paramount by now, also in the academic humanities and social sciences. I will return to this point.

In this context, the mood of the humanities is undefinable. It is as if, after the great explosion of theoretical creativity of the 1970s and 1980s, theoretical practice stalled in philosophy, but exploded with renewed energy in other quarters. On the right of the political spectrum the ruling philosophical idea became the ‘end’ of ideological time (Fukuyama 1989) after the official end of the Cold War, and the inevitability of civilizational crusades (Huntington 1996) after 9/11. The political left on the other hand expressed its sense of theoretical fatigue, both by manifest resentment against the previous intellectual generations (Badiou and Žižek 2009) and by self-declared impotence (Badiou 2013), while the centre faltered into self-doubt (Latour 2004). Peter Galison (2004), echoing Lyotard’s idea of the decline of master narratives (1979), struck a more balanced note, welcoming the end of grand systems in favour of ‘specific theory’. This pragmatic approach stands between universalistic pretensions on the one hand and narrow empiricism on the other, embracing ‘just enough theory’ to sustain socially relevant practice. In a critical analysis, Jeffrey Williams argues that today we are experiencing a double movement: on the one hand what was blasphemy in the 1980s has by now become banality. Foucault and Derrida, ‘once discursive bomb-throwers and banes of traditionalists, are now standard authorities to be cited in due course’ (Williams 2014: 25). On the other hand, we are also witnessing the shrinking of public support for the humanities. As a result of this conjuncture, our theoretical mood has become ‘retrospective’ (Williams 2014: 25), reflecting on its own history and conditions of possibility in an often autobiographical tone, much as I am doing in this essay.

But this crisis is far from universal. For instance, Matthew Fuller1 argues that, ‘in discussions of cyber-cultures, or new media, which then moved on to become software studies (Fuller 2008), the 1990s was a period of theoretical and practical exuberance that spread into the early years of the new millennium – marked in particular by a coming together of generations emerging from the Cold War’. It is significant that this upbeat account of both the side-effects of the end of Communism and the general health of the humanities is expressed from the discursive location of new media studies, whose object of enquiry is networks, codes and systems, that is to say non-anthropomorphic objects. This shift of perspective engenders renewed energy and optimism. I shall return to this point in the next section.

The idea of ‘crisis’ may not quite cover the institutional status of the contemporary humanities, given that this field operates through self-reflection and adaptation to changing historical circumstances. So much so that the ‘crisis’ may be taken as the humanities’ modus operandi, as Gayatri Spivak astutely suggested in response to Foucault’s analysis of the ‘death of Man’ (1988). Whether in a strong and self-assertive posture, or as ‘weak thought’ (Vattimo and Rovatti 2012), the theoretical humanities is the field that posits itself as a perennially open question, constitutionally Socratic, so to speak. Considering the concerted attacks moved against the humanities by Western governments of late, however, it is undeniable that its practitioners are investing disproportionate amounts of time defending themselves in the public sphere.

For instance, literature and the literary critic nowadays are perceived – by management, policy-makers and a large section of the media – as a luxury, not as a necessity, a trend that Marina Warner describes (2014: 42) as ‘new brutalism in academia’. The pride Edward Said could take in the great tradition of literature, music and culture is no longer a point of consensus in a globalized and technologically mediated world. Moreover, a shared sensibility based on the knowledge of the canonical literary texts cannot be assumed or taken for granted, either in the West or in the rest of the world. Warner’s trenchant comment (2015: 10) says it all: ‘Faith in the value of a humanist education is beginning to look like an antique romance’. This general shift of sensibility is enough to make...