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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

it used to be different once « Previous | |Next »
March 16, 2004

One would expect the universities to stand in resolute opposition to rationalization, instrumental reason and quantitative-technical thinking. Since they stood for older and different values then they could do the job that Weber's responsible individual could not do. They stood individual subjectivity or experience, knowledge for its own sake, truth, scholarship, critical thinking, non-vocational education, local particularity and so on.

In the last chapter of Death Sentence Don Watson turns to the universities and their resposnse to the decay of public language and the public sphere. He asks: 'Did they stand firm against manageralism and international corporate speak?' Watson says it was not to be. The universities embraced the world of business and public relations with enthusiasm. Watson writes:


"In institutions where we might expect the most resistance capitulation was complete. Managerialism came to the universities as the German army came to Poland. .....Those who insist that words should mean something can take the redundancy package and motor off in their Wolseleys. They can sit out their lives reading Plato and drinking cask claret while the real academics get on with teaching customers and strategising at retreats...What is truth? Bah! Socrates or Plato? Kant or Nietzsche? Does it really matter? The debates at the centre of Western civilization are now truely academic because they cannot be conducted in the language of managerialism or taught under managerial criteria in universities."

Watching their adverts on television we realize that they are now about public relations, marketing and spin. Truth is long gone. They sell their courses as if they were patented medicines.

Now Watson acknolwedges the implicit nostalgia about he good old days. He says:


"It is possible to acknoweldge, as this refugee from academia does, that universities were barely half what they claimed to be and badly needed dragging towards the realities of the late-twenetieth century life, yet see no reason why they should give the language of an institution of learning and take up international management speak."

So what do we do? Mock them, says Watson. Never stop mocking them for using this impoverished language. Challenge the use of this language. Well, the universities did and they defended the older values. But the state used the market as a solution to its imposed financial squeeze to turn the universities into corporations.

The process of rationalization continued apace. it has been quickened with globalization. So we have justification to look at how Schmitt responded to this process and assess his attempts to use Hegel to find a way to think otherwise.

We can ask: What did the Catholic turn open up on the pathway of concrete being and local particularity?

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:13 PM | | Comments (0)
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