"When philosophy paints its grey in grey then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk." -- G.W.F. Hegel, 'Preface', Philosophy of Right.
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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
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the dialogic humanities
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May 5, 2011
In this work post at Defend the Arts and Humanities blog David McCallam says that the common perception is that students don’t do ‘work’ at university, they ‘study’. (And study at university is itself often a stark departure from a school system that betrays its roots in the nineteenth-century mills and manufactures).
So work at university, especially in the arts and humanities, is not at all recognizable as work. It clearly isn’t manual labour, it doesn’t produce material goods like a factory, it doesn’t generate profits like a company, and it doesn’t offer a service to customers.
McCallam comments:
The arts seminar affords a very different order of productivity to those familiarly deployed by the market or indeed the state; for its primary mode of production is not economic but dialogic. It produces above all meanings, interpretations, theories, propositions, anecdotes, stories, chat, dissent, wit and questions. It is not utilitarian but value-based, that is, it is less concerned with quantities than with qualities. It can’t be calculated in terms of labour, since it is the fruit of unforeseeable elaborations. When text and class meet, what they produce is inimical to econometric measurement. And as such it is both an enigma and a threat to the prevailing socio-economic orders of work and production.
He says that the current attack on the humanities by the Cameron Government in the UK is founded either on a similarly philistine arrogance or, more chillingly, an astute ideological demolition of a radically alternative model to their competition theory and market mantra.
He adds that:
The reason for this lies in its very means of production: language not labour. In generating discourse, that is, language at work, each of us contributes to discursive production to a unpredictably fluctuating degree, but none of us ever owns, appropriates or expropriates it completely or indefinitely. Discourse makes sense only insofar as it is shared, constituted by a given language community, as a given language community, for a given language community. It is the original ‘common wealth’, and as such, it manifestly fails to fit the capitalist mould. It is similarly anti-hierarchical and anti-authoritarian.
McCallum says that it is precisely by taking part in this common enrichment via language that each of us simultaneously acquires the means to define ourselves more clearly, to deepen or enrich our own sense of self and gain in discursive autonomy. Giving ourselves over to this collective turns out to be the best way to affirm our individuality.
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| | Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 3:35 PM | Permalink |
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