So I think we have to ask: Does it make any sense to claim that knowledge is valuable in itself? This seems to me something that should have to be demonstrated, rather than taken for granted by academics (whose profession and whole way of life, admittedly, encourages them to take it for granted).

As a preface to this discussion, we have to acknowledge that the topic raises two major conceptual questions: what we mean by “knowledge,” and what we mean by “a value in itself.” Without undertaking a long philosophical investigation, I’ll just say that it’s not prima facie obvious to me that it makes much sense to talk about the value of human knowledge in general. Knowing the contents of my sock drawer and knowing the physical parameters of the center of the Milky Way are different kinds of knowledge with very different sorts of value; the former is of practical value to me (and pretty much no one else), while the latter is of no obvious practical value to me but is of considerable professional importance to astronomers. It’s true that basic practical, cultural, and linguistic knowledge is a prerequisite for being a socially viable human being: at some basic anthropological level, one just can’t be a person without having all the prerequisite knowledge for enacting personhood. It’s true, then, that insofar as being human is valuable, knowledge is necessary (and instrumentally valuable, at least).

But I think to go any farther we have to make a number of distinctions that tend to undermine the coherence of the original question. There are many kinds of value and, perhaps more importantly, many possible contexts for judging value. Philosophers have attempted to assess the value of knowledge in relation to other sorts of cognitive states (belief and true belief, for instance) as well as the place of wisdom in the good life. Economists have had a lot to say about the value of knowledge, which is thought to be shifting as new kinds of “intellectual property” develop (see arguments about whether knowledge is a “public good“). There is, for that matter, a whole school of sociology centered on the premise that we now live in a “knowledge society” in which knowledge has become central to the economy and polity in unprecedented ways. (I’m skeptical.) In short, we can’t assume that knowledge is just one thing or that having value is straightforward. What kind of knowledge are we talking about? And what kind of value are we ascribing to it?

Now, things get somewhat simpler once we realize that when academics talk about “knowledge” in general, they usually just mean “scholarly knowledge.” When academics defend knowledge in itself, often they’re saying that scholarship is an intrinsically valuable activity, and that scholarly knowledge is important and valuable for its own sake, regardless of its practical significance or lack thereof. I had a philosophy teacher in college who said that a culture without philosophy was an impoverished culture, which seems to be the extreme version of this view. (Of course, it’s uncertain whether ‘philosophy’ designates institutionalized academic philosophy or just any kind of organized reflection. In the latter case, every culture clearly “has philosophy” one way or another.)

It seems to me that when faculty argue for “knowledge as a value in itself,” that is, or easily enough becomes, an argument that in practical terms they should be paid to do whatever they want with no social benefit other than the ones they decide for themselves. Indeed, sometimes people even go so far as to believe (a) scholarly knowledge is intrinsically good for society and (b) that scholarly knowledge can only be evaluated by the community of scholars themselves, which amounts to saying, by unspoken implication, that (c) whatever ideas scholars happen to like, even if through the purest collective whimsy or delusion, are intrinsically good for society. It’s hard to separate the radically impersonal plea that knowledge matters for its own sake from the radically self-interested argument that academics should be paid to pursue whatever knowledge they see fit.

Now, I don’t want to deny the intuition that I have – that I think many academics have – that it’s quite simply a good thing to know. And more specifically to know about the world in the kinds of ways that academics make possible. It’s hard not to feel that it’s just a good thing in itself to know how the world is organized and where it came from and how a star is structured and how a poem is written and that birds’ bones are hollow and that there was a horrible massacre in El Mozote in 1981. Which, moreover, the US government turned a blind eye to. (Reading about that massacre, I have to tell you, was a memorable moment in my adolescent consciousness of the gruesomeness of politics and history. The value of knowledge is something that takes form in respect to particular historical and biographical moments.)

But we can’t be content to take for granted this unexamined intuition that knowledge is obviously a good thing. There are equally powerful intuitions in our culture that run in the other direction; knowledge can be misery, as Christian mythology about the Garden of Eden reminds us. Curiosity killed the cat. And so on.

Now I’m tempted to conclude by saying that, instead of a theory about the value of knowledge, we should instead propose a theory of what leads people to want to defend its value. Because what the contemporary French case indicates is that academcis defend the value of knowledge “in itself” mostly when they feel threatened with being instrumentalized by projects they don’t like. To claim that knowledge is valuable in itself is a very ambiguous positive claim, but a very strong negative claim. Above all, it says something like: you can’t reduce sociology (or whatever other liberal art) to a vocational skill or a policy research group. The claim that knowledge is a value in itself, in spite of its seemingly abstract and general nature, is actually something that seems to arise as a rejection of very concrete proposals that “instrumentalize” academic work.

But it seems to me that to say that knowledge is valuable in itself is, arguably, just shorthand for saying that one can’t enumerate everything it’s good for. It’s shorthand for saying that it’s good for society’s self-understanding as a whole, or for the good of human life, or for any number of other grandiose and general projects. To say that knowledge is valuable in itself is, arguably, just to announce that one is at an epistemological impasse: that one thinks it has larger values beyond itself but can’t spell them all out.

I hope to go farther in this line of thought soon, in future posts.

The whole terrain through which we are now struggling is a hotbed of subjectivism, a splendid terrain for the airing of national conceits. For all that, there are a large number of international agreements in opinion as to the salient cultural characteristics of various peoples. No one who has even superficially concerned himself with French culture can have failed to be impressed by the qualities of clarity, lucid systematization, balance, care in choice of means, and good taste, that permeate so many aspects of the national civilization. These qualities have their weaker side. We are familiar with the overmechanization, the emotional timidity or shallowness (quite a different thing from emotional restraint), the exaggeration of manner at the expense of content, that are revealed in some of the manifestations of the French spirit. Those elements of French civilization that give characteristic evidence of the qualities of its genius may be said, in our present limited sense [of culture not as high culture nor as all of a people's traditions but as the practiced 'genius' of a civilization], to constitute the culture of France; or, to put it somewhat differently, the cultural significance of any element in the civilization of France is the light it sheds on the French genius.

From this standpoint we can evaluate culturally such traits in French civilization as the formalism of French classical drama,  the insistence in French education on the study of the mother-tongue and of its classics, the prevalcence of epigram in French life and letters, the intellectualist cast so often given to aesthetic movements in France, the lack of turgidity in modern French music, the relative absence of the ecstatic note in religion, the strong tendency to bureaucracy in French administration. Each and all of these and hundreds of other traits could be readily paralleled from the civilization of England. Nonetheless their relative cultural significance, I venture to think, is a lesser one in England  than in France. In France they seem to lie more deeply in the grooves of the cultural mold of its civilization. Their study would yield something like a rapid bird’s-eye view of the spirit of French culture.

One notes that some of this theoretical advice is still being learned today, as when people take pains to demonstrate that some cross-cultural cultural phenomenon (say, the global presence of McDonald’s chain restaurants) varies radically in local significance. As Sapir points out, the same ‘trait’ can take on very different significances in different places.

If one were to give a more systematic reading, this essay would deserve further note for its hostility to cultural comparison, for its hostility to radical social change (cultures must be taken for what they are, and change slowly, he argues), for its theory of the value of history, for its dialectic between ‘collective’ and ‘individual’ culture, for its quasi-Frankfurt School critique of cultural standardization, and for its lament of a contemporary loss of access to meaningful, valuable forms of activity. David Graeber has recently argued that “American society is better conceived as a battle over access to the right to behave altruistically [than as a site of pure market rationality],” claiming furthermore that liberals have monopolized access to ‘doing good in the world’ by largely monopolizing the culture industries (and alienating the working class in the process). Sapir long before had already written: “The vast majority of us, deprived of any but an insignificant and culturally abortive share in the satisfaction of the immediate wants of mankind, are further deprived of both opportunity and stimulation to share in the production of non-utilitarian values.” Admittedly, the class and political analysis is less developed by Sapir, but the fundamental observation is strikingly similar.

Now, as you might guess from its title, the real thrust of the essay has to do with evaluating cultures not in relation to each other, but in relation to a highly un-politically-correct ideal of ‘genuine’ culture, which, to simplify in the extreme, involves having the possibility for meaningful, creative life in an organically developed cultural landscape that endows everyday social action with some more-than-instrumental significance. By this criterion, Sapir takes pains to point out, the most technically advanced ‘civilizations’ are not necessarily the most genuine cultures; indeed, he suggests that primitive societies, everything else being equal, are more likely to be genuine cultures on account of their lesser degree of social differentiation and division of labor.

But this isn’t a good time for an exposition of Sapirian culture theory: the purpose of this post is simply to remind us all that even famous anthropologists can and do serve as merchants of cultural stereotypes. To offer my own ethnographic perspective, I have yet to encounter a surfeit of epigrams here in France, and to judge by the university system, it is far from obvious that ‘balance’ or ‘clarity’ are indeed the dominant French cultural values. However, if by chance you find yourself entertained by Sapir’s schematic view of French culture, I do recommend that you also look up what he has to say about the existentialist Russians, or again about the Americans — “where a chronic state of cultural maladjustment has for so long a period reduced our higher life to sterile externality.”

Let me pause for a moment and say that this topic is somewhat new for me, since for years I’ve felt somewhat skeptical about ‘neoliberalism’ as a concept. I remember when I had no idea what it referred to and felt that it was some kind of meaningless sign that signified primarily that someone (probably someone academic) really didn’t like something. Then, later on as I did classroom ethnography, I began to feel that neoliberalism was part of broader metanarratives about universities that were abstract and often irrelevant to ordinary academic life. Now, though, as I slowly get a better comparative sense of national university histories, I’ve changed my mind about neoliberalism, because it seems that the term, in the context of university reforms, really does designate a historical process that’s happening worldwide. As far as I can see, ‘university neoliberalism’ designates the process that brings together many of the following phenomena (not necessarily all at once, but as a set of loosely linked processes with clear common themes):

• Newly hierarchical, bottom-line, market-oriented academic management. Universities look more like corporations in their organizational and behavioral structure. Corresponding decline in faculty governance, pedagogical and disciplinary autonomy.
• Withdrawal of public (i.e., state or governmental) money and a turn towards private sector funding.
• Casualization (sometimes also taylorization) of academic labor.
• Decline of the idea that education is a public good or a right; and a corresponding rise of ideologies of education as a commodity, and universities as an investment.
• Privatization and branding of universities. Increasing provision of consumer services to students.
• Development of systems of competition, ranking, evaluation and audit within and across academic institutions.
• A shift from universities as small, elite institutions to mass institutions deeply involved in vocational reproduction and “economically useful” knowledge (one could take this as a particular ideology about what role universities should play in mass social reproduction). New ideas about the relation between education and job-related skill-building.
• Increased organizational intimacy between universities and business enterprises – business-funded research, corporate partnerships, and the like.
• Rise of the international and global context as the relevant context in which universities should be evaluated.

These things are global: I’ve read about neoliberalisms of this ilk in, for instance, the U.S., Canada, Britain, France, Austria, Mexico, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Sweden, New Zealand, Australia and Cameroon — just to take the list that spontaneously comes to my head.

However, the first thing to learn from this week’s set of readings, as Zach points out, is that “such convergences [in what we call neoliberalism] are always historically and geographically specific, [and] that ‘neoliberalization’ can have wildly different effects and discursive articulations.” To give a thumbnail summary of this variation: in New Zealand, neoliberal reforms since the 1980s have introduced new forms of auditing, benchmarking, consumerization, and generally quantitative forms of management; according to Larner and Le Heron, this was partly embraced by academics themselves, and at any rate does not seem to have generated large opposition. There was a general consensus among academics that reform was needed, they say.

In Mexico, on the other hand, neoliberalism provoked violent reactions. An effort to charge tuition (at the relatively low rate, to US eyes, of $90/semester) provoked a student strike that shut down the National Autonomous University from April 20, 1999 to February 6, 2000. Ultimately, the strike foundered on internal differences between its “radical left wing” and more “moderate” students, and was shut down in the end by a raid of 2,400 police, without having achieved its political goals. Political discourse centered on a conflict between populist, social-justice-motivated students, who claimed the constitutional right to free higher education for all, and “market-driven philosophies,” related to the Mexican government’s desire to better integrate the country into the global economy.

This conflict was, of course, framed differently by different sides. Some conservatives claimed that “politics had no place in an academic institution” (quoting Imanol Ordorika, p.352) — a political move in the guise of an antipolitical move. Among the leftist students, on the other hand, an interesting variety of nationalist universalism surfaced.

“This is not only a national problem but an international problem,” one student commented; “The imperialist politics that have been planted in Mexico and abroad have driven privatization not only in education but in all public sectors. For the most part, and in the near future, all that is the common people or nation will no longer be. We will be in foreign hands, the hands of the United States” (343-4).

As if the international were the locus of capital and imperial force, while the national remains the locus of the people and the common. As Rhoads and Mina put it, “antiglobalization and proautonomy rhetoric characterized the student strikers” (336). And indeed, a specific national role for the university was invoked by students, who said things like: “The university is the cradle of culture for the country.” I call it a nationalist universalism because it associates the nation, Mexico in this case, with seemingly universal goods like culture, justice, and democracy. Recall that in Bill Readings’ influential 1996 book, The University in Ruins, he argued that the university as bearer of national culture was dead. We can see here that this conclusion, drawn half a decade before the UNAM strike, was premature. (My guess is that Readings over-generalized from the North American case he knew.)

And to make matters still more complicated, it isn’t only the opponents of neoliberalism who lay claim to national values. The proponents of neoliberal reforms themselves are nationalists, of a sort: nationalists who (claim to) believe that the nation’s best interests lie in an embrace of the global economy, in a new merger between education and market, in the embrace of international standards and institutional forms. The New Zealand case illustrates this well: as Larner and Le Heron say themselves,

“[The] role of the university [has changed] from that of an institution premised on, and constitutive of, a national economy and a national society, to that focused on a particular understanding of international competitiveness in which the aspiration is to identify points of difference and areas of strength through which national institutions can be linked into global flows and networks.” (845-6)

Is neoliberalism therefore a new sort of national strategy? Or is the nation slowly being restructured by transnational neoliberalism? Paradoxically, it would seem to be both at once. (I’m dimly aware that scholars have quarreled about this for decades, but it’s not my field.) And as we examine the clash in Mexico between neoliberal reforms and social justice protesters, we can observe universities becoming the scene of a clash of different kinds of universalisms: a universalism of the market, of economic exigency, opposed to a universalism of transcendental values and of political emancipation. This is too abstract and schematic to be worth much, I realize, but it reminds me of a pair of opposed political slogans from May 1968 in France.

1. “Soyons réalistes, demandons l’impossible.” (Be realists, demand the impossible.) It’s a slogan which makes a famous appeal to a radical and transcendental political role for academic protest.
2. “Soyons réalistes : pour bouffer, il faut de l’argent.” (Be realists: to eat, you need some money.) This slogan, a parody of the first, makes a bluntly practical appeal to the economic necessities of survival.

Anyway, I wish I had more time to develop this peculiar ongoing link between university and national, political and economic logics… and I also wanted to write more about sub-national identifications with universities. In Cameroon, there were years of violent ethnic clashes over the universities, based in part on an ethnic and linguistic identification between the Beti and “their” university. Konings says: “The self-styled Direct Action group… openly declared that the University of Yaounde was on Beti land and thus should fall under Beti control. It often declared that the Anglo-Bami students should either recognize Beti control or ‘go home’ ” (188). This should remind us that there are very common, quite deep identifications between peoples, places, and universities, often at scales other than national — state universities in the U.S., for instance, are located in their state, named for their state, and intended to educate the people of that state, for instance. But this species of university totemism, for lack of a better word, will have to wait for further elaboration.

Next week we’ll be reading from a special issue of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies on neoliberal knowledge in Asian universities. Stay tuned.

1. Introduction: Clashing futures in university politics
What is the future of French universities in a globalized world? According to the Magna Charta Universitatum, signed by a number of rectors of European universities in 1988, “the future of humankind depends largely on cultural, scientific and technical development; and this is built up in centers of culture, knowledge and research as represented by true universities” (Rectors 2003:6). But not everyone in Europe shares this utopian view of universities as the salvation of the human species. In the midst of French protests against university reforms in 2007, the Department of Philosophy at the University of Paris-VIII held a meeting to discuss the campus strikes. According to the minutes: “Questions were raised about concerns over finding work. That one would worry about one’s future – to say the least – doesn’t mean that one wants one’s concerns instrumentalized by and for projects that will make the future even darker still” (Paris8philo 2007). In other words, in the thick of the political fray, these philosophers viewed academic knowledge not as the future of humankind, but rather as an uncertain defense against a world of scarce employment and darkening futures.

What, then, is the relationship between academic knowledge, politics and the future in contemporary France? In the “knowledge society,” how does the future come to mediate knowledge-making and politics alike; and how do knowledge and the university come to be central to political futures in France and across Europe? Along with several other scholars (Fuller 2003; Meyer, et al. 2006; Nassehi 2004), I reject the view that the “knowledge society” constitutes a radically new society or economy. Rather, I see the “knowledge society” as a new cultural schema and political discourse, one whose cultural metamorphoses and political dynamics demand anthropological analysis. This project will thus examine the academic production and politics of knowledge via an ethnographic study of contemporary French philosophy, and of the political struggles that surround contemporary French universities. This is not the only site where knowledge society politics have become significant (cf. Rabinow 1999), but it is a good one, insofar as universities are among the knowledge society’s key institutions.

French philosophy in particular appears to be an especially good place to examine the relationship between academic life and national knowledge politics, since philosophy has long been central to the French Republican project (Douailler 1988). To gain a comparative understanding of contemporary philosophical practice, I plan to study two philosophy departments: I will spend a semester each at the University of Paris-VIII (St-Denis) and the University of Provence (Aix-en-Provence). Within these two departments, I will examine philosophical knowledge-making and political engagement. Beyond the departments, I will scrutinize policy, media and activist discourses dealing with the national university system. In particular, I will focus on the different futures that are imagined, feared, longed for, and put in question in these sites. The French university is often said to be “in crisis,” and its future has often been debated, as has the future of philosophy as a discipline. I hypothesize that, by scrutinizing the cultural production of futures, we will be better able to understand how philosophical knowledge-making is related to the politics of French universities and of the “knowledge society” at large.

The underlying theoretical agenda of this project is organized around four related questions. First, how is philosophical knowledge understood, made and learned? Second, how is philosophical knowledge-making changing in the context of French university politics? Third, how does this philosophical knowledge, in turn, find its place within its broader political situation; how does philosophy become politically or publicly engaged? And finally, what sorts of future-making projects connect or differentiate philosophical knowledge-making and university politics; what common futures bring structure to the cultural scene of universities in the “knowledge society”? I draw these questions from research traditions in anthropology and sociology of knowledge; from studies of the semiotics and politics of academic institutions, particularly from recent studies on the sociology of French philosophy and the transnational politics of the Bologna process; and from recent anthropological research on futures in other contexts. In bringing these disciplinary traditions together, I hope to contribute a new, anthropological perspective on the politics of the future to a growing interdisciplinary scholarship on knowledge and academic cultures. Such a perspective is badly needed in a moment when most scholarship on higher education, critical or not, tends to see universities as ruined or threatened institutions (Readings 1996, Slaughter and Leslie 1997). Rather than seeing universities as sites of organizational conflict and disarray (Kerr 2001) or functionalist reproduction of neoliberal capitalism (Shumar 1997), I will propose we view them as vehicles for cultural projects of “knowledge” and future-making that deserve further attention.

2. Theoretical context: Anthropology of knowledge and the future
The theoretical foundation of this project lies in anthropology and sociology of knowledge (Barth 2002; Crick 1982; Swidler and Arditi 1994), a tradition which has evolved from its Marxian, Nietzschean and Durkheimian origins to encompass studies of contested knowledge in social fields (Bourdieu 1977), of large-scale formations of knowledge and power (Foucault 1972; Foucault 1995), and of the micro-social workings of semiosis and concept formation (Silverstein 2004). Much recent ethnographic research has focused specifically on knowledge workers and expert cultures (Glaeser 2003; Knorr Cetina and Bruegger 2000; Mazzarella 2003; Riles 2000). Here, in examining how French philosophy is involved with French politics, I draw particularly on studies that demonstrate a reciprocal relationship between experts and their surrounding social orders. That is, while experts shape public knowledge and national culture, they are themselves constituted and limited by the national knowledge they help produce (Boyer 2000; Masco 2004; Verdery 1991). I am also influnced by research on what has been termed the “politics of knowledge” (cf. Pels 1997), which encompasses struggles over the state’s involvement in science and higher education (Delanty 2002; Fuller 2000; Weiler 2005), the negotiation of competing claims of expertise (Bloor 2000; Epstein 1996; Wayland 2003), and the involvement of academics and academic knowledge in the political realm (Lagasnerie 2007). All of these issues are indeed central to the analysis of my chosen ethnographic case. However, in this project, I also hope to substantiate two major critiques of this literature.

(1) It suffers from a lack of interest in epistemic structure and system, topics which were best developed methodologically by an earlier era’s cognitive and structuralist anthropology (Berlin, et al. 1968; D’Andrade and Romney 1966; Frake 1964; Lévi-Strauss 1963; Lévi-Strauss 1966; Sahlins 1976). For example, Dominic Boyer’s recent study in anthropology of knowledge (Boyer 2005) traces the tropes of “system” and “spirit” through German journalistic practice without giving more than an impressionistic sketch of the general system of everyday forms of knowing in which these tropes take their place. Karin Knorr-Cetina’s research on “epistemic cultures” (Knorr Cetina 1999), a capstone work of laboratory studies of science, never really systematizes the systems of knowing that she examines. As a corrective to this tendency for practice to displace structure in anthropology of knowledge, I will propose that we theorize knowledge not just as a semiotic outcome of social interaction and negotation (Latour 1987), but also as a system of epistemic forms, analogous to the general system of communicative forms theorized long ago by Hymes (1964) in linguistic anthropology. Of course, this system of forms is reshaped and reproduced in social practice, and, following on studies of science laboratories (Gusterson 2001; Knorr Cetina 1979; Latour and Woolgar 1986 [1979]; Sims 2005; Traweek 1988), I will also attend to the practices of knowledge making through which this knowledge system is produced.

(2) An unresolved tension lingers in this literature between theorizing knowledge as a universal aspect of human society (Barth 2002), and theorizing “knowledge” as a culturally specific phenomenon, even as an ideological project. In theorizing the “knowledge society,” Stehr comments that while knowledge is an “anthropological constant,” the knowledge society is unique because of the unprecedented degree to which knowledge becomes central to economic production (Stehr 1994:93-99). But while anthropologists of knowledge typically assume that “knowledge” is a universally applicable analytic category, the “knowledge society” affords a very clear case in which the very category of “knowledge” becomes a locally politicized symbol. To study the “knowledge society” is to study the ideological processes that constitute “knowledge” as a key stake of political struggle — which is obviously not a culturally universal scenario. I hope to shift the emphasis, that is, away from a universalistic study of knowledge and towards a particular analysis of “knowledge” as a “lexical totem” (Boyer 2005:60) of a certain European cultural and political order.

These theoretical concerns take on more specificity when brought into studies of French academic culture, which have, in fact, not always taken “knowledge” as a central theoretical object. Pierre Bourdieu has produced the most substantial and well-known body of research on French higher education, offering analyses of class reproduction among students, of professional struggle among faculty, of the types of capital displayed in academic discourse, and so on (Bourdieu 1988; Bourdieu 1990; Bourdieu 1996; Bourdieu, et al. 1994; Bourdieu and Passeron 1979). In fact, the most empirically relevant prior literature for my own project derives from a Bourdieuan school of sociologists, who have produced a detailed set of studies of French philosophy, dealing with such things as the academic book market, the representation of foreign philosophers, the reproduction of the philosophical profession, and the structural situation of the avant-garde (Boltanski 1975; Fabiani 1983; Fabiani 1988; Godechot 1999; Lepenies 1983; Pinto 1983; Pinto 1994; Pinto 2000; Pinto 2007; Soulié 1995; Soulié 1997; Soulié 2002; Verdes-Leroux 1975). But there are two problems with this literature. First, on an empirical level, the sociologists are too quick to delimit their research object, assuming prematurely that the social field of philosophy is identical to the academic discipline (cf. Lagasnerie 2007). Here, on the contrary, I hope to show that in France the social field of philosophical action goes beyond the narrow confines of the discipline, becoming substantially entangled with the field of university politics. This result, once substantiated, will also be an important corrective to the substantial literature on French university governance (Chevaillier 1998; Musselin 1997; Musselin 2004; Tavernier 2004; Weisz 1983), which tends to over-privilege the top-down policy perspective in analyzing university politics, and hence overlook less official forms of public and political engagement.

Second, I would emphasize that the ultimate result of Bourdieu’s theory of practice, in which the habitus is always more or less well adjusted to the objective social and cultural structures in which it finds itself, is one in which knowledge always ends up being ultimately instrumental to social reproduction (Sewell 1992). It seems to me that this formula could be usefully reversed: rather than viewing knowledge as an instrument of social reproduction, as in Bourdieu, we could view social reproduction as the process by which culturally given knowledge projects are realized (see Sahlins 1976). Departing from Foucauldian and Bourdieuian paradigms in which, other differences aside, knowledge-making is seen as an instrument of social reproduction and political power, I will suggest, as mentioned above that we view politics and social practice as, among other things, vehicles for culturally arbitrary knowledge projects — the “knowledge society” being the most recent. This should both invert and complement the traditional Bourdieuian and Foucauldian view.

The future, and temporality in general, become important here because knowledge-making projects, particularly those examined here, are structured centrally around differently imagined futures, hopes and expectations (Miyazaki 2004). The future has attracted much recent attention from ethnographers (Boyer 2006; Escobar 1995; Guyer 2007; Peebles 2008; Rosenberg and Harding 2005; Weiss 2004), who have explored how futures are both discursively formulated and tacitly enacted. But although a number of studies have examined the temporal structure of academic cultures (Bourdieu 1988; Goffman 1981; Millet 2003; Moffatt 1989; Sabin 2007), they have remained primarily descriptive, and aside from a few brief remarks about class reproduction and vocational orientation (Bourdieu 1979:63; Nathan 2005:151-2), the future has not come into question there. Here, I hope to advance our theoretical understanding of futures in academic contexts by drawing on Jean-Paul Sartre’s notion of futurity and Nancy Munn’s analysis of intersubjective spacetime. In Sartre’s existentialist philosophy, a future is always projected as the horizon of an actor’s practical activity, and every practical project is oriented towards an implied future (Sartre 1992[1943]:180-187). In a more sociocentric version, I would argue that we can view social practice as necessarily embodying future-making projects, whether at an individual, institutional or societal level. Hence, we can analyze the implied or explicit future horizon towards which social practices are oriented. Such a perspective is essentially consistent with Munn’s more recent anthropology of time and value, which showed that, in Gawa, the processes of expanding “intersubjective spacetime” are means by which “[the] community seeks to create the value it regards as essential to its communal viability” (Munn 1986:3, my emphasis). While Munn did not specifically examine futures, I expect to find that, along these lines, the future becomes a form of value in my fieldsites. In other words, I will ultimately advance a theory of the cultural production of futures, not only as a mode of representation and experience, but as a medium of social and political value, and as a tacit dimension of knowledge-making projects.

3. Historical context and site selection: French philosophy and the European knowledge society
The national political role of French philosophy dates at least to post-revolutionary debates about education in the 1790s (Douailler 1988). By the early 19th century, philosophy was instituted as an obligatory lycée course, viewed as both the intellectual pinnacle of secondary education and as a form of political education for enlightened citizens. In this way, philosophy was at once intellectually and politically central to the French Republic. This view persists to this day: according to Mark Sherringham, currently Inspector General of National Education, “The Republic surpasses the teaching of philosophy, but its content and its conditions of possibility remain at the same time fully philosophical” (Sherringham 2006:62). In keeping with this disciplinary commitment to the Republic, a number of French philosophers have served as high government officials, notably Victor Cousin (Goldstein 1968) and Louis Liard (Greenberg 1981; Weisz 1983) in the 19th century, Alexandre Kojeve in the post-war period (Price 2000), and recently Luc Ferry (Pinto 2007:141-154) and Blandine Kriegel (Bowen 2007:13-16). At the same time, philosophy has harbored deeply oppositional political projects, notably those of twentieth-century Marxist philosophers like Kojève, Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, and unorthodox intellectuals like Sartre and Michel Foucault (Foucault 1980; Roth 1985; Schalk 1979; Sprinker 1985). In short, scholastic traditions and outright political dissent have been brought together within a discipline that has, at least at moments, also become the legitimate intellectual discourse of national, Republican ideals (Mathy 2000:ch. 3; Wolin 2000).

But the relation of academic knowledge to politics has changed in France, as Europe has become increasingly economically and institutionally integrated (Borneman and Fowler 1997), and as universities have become increasingly central to mass social reproduction (Schofer and Meyer 2005). This new “politics of knowledge” has its roots in the 1960s and ’70s, when social scientists like Daniel Bell (Bell 1973) and Alvin Gouldner (Gouldner 1979) foretold the coming of a “post-industrial” or “knowledge” society, run by a “new class” of technocrats and intellectuals and newly centered on knowledge production and management (Stehr 1994). By the end of the century, these prophecies, whatever their flaws, had moved into the political and policy arena. In the last twenty years, an extensive discourse on the “knowledge society” has developed in European higher education policy, politics, and rhetoric. From the 1988 Magna Charta Universitatum quoted above, to the European Commission’s 1997 declaration of a “Europe of Knowledge” and the international Bologna Process (1999-2010), the basic premise of university policy has been that knowledge is central to society’s existence in a new way. An accompanying series of international reforms has aimed to “harmonize,” rationalize and improve university education, under the banner of “developing European cultural dimensions, … citizens’ mobility and employability and the Continent’s overall development” (European Ministers of Education 1999:7).

In France, however, the government policies implementing these reforms have met with major opposition. As I mentioned earlier, students at dozens of universities have protested university reforms, notably in 2003 and 2007. Faculty have organized collectives like “Save the University” and “Save Research,” and produced a growing critical discourse on the Bologna Process and French university policy (Charle, et al. 2004; Charle and Soulié 2007; Faure, et al. 2006; Oblin and Vassort 2005; Schultheis, et al. 2008). Yet as I indicated above, the future figures as a central concern across all sides of these political struggles. While continental “knowledge society” discourse has its utopian faith that universities are crucial to the European future, the futures of French universities are constantly cast in question. Troubled by low funding, low prestige, and questionable vocational relevance, they are constantly described as “in crisis,” “mediocre,” “a field of ruins,” even “dead.”

Philosophy serves as a good barometer of the changing politics of the “knowledge society,” because philosophy’s status has changed in the post-war period. Philosophy, considered the “queen of the sciences” in the 19th century (Fabiani 1988), has lost its pre-eminence as natural and social sciences have become increasingly prominent, and has had long-standing rivalries with other disciplines, notably history, sociology and psychology (Bourdieu and Passeron 1967; Chimisso 2000). After 1968, the political engagements of the discipline shifted back towards a less-radicalized Republican liberalism (Mathy 2000; Pavel 1989), and today the discipline itself has an uncertain future. While some, like Sherringham, portray philosophy as a centerpiece of secondary education, others fear a world of declining resources (Bourgeois and Menasseyre 2008). While the likes of Alain Badiou (2004) and Dominique Lecourt (2001) lament the lost radicalism of the past and accuse the present of mediocrity, others, such as Pascal Engel (2004) and Luc Ferry (Ferry and Renaut 1990), reject the past to advocate a depoliticized future of “modesty” and “humanism.” These debates about the discipline’s future, crucially, have taken the form of a debate over its relationship with politics. Philosophy’s future, I suspect, is put in doubt by European knowledge politics in which science and technical advances serve to guarantee national viability in the international marketplace, and philosophy is less central to French Republican legitimacy.

The question, then, is how philosophers manage their changing political fates in practice, and how that impinges on their daily academic knowledge-making. The two field sites I have selected are designed to show two quite contrasting forms of political engagement within the discipline. Philosophy at the University of Paris-VIII (Vincennes–St.-Denis), in an unpretentious Parisian suburb, was formed in 1970 in response to the educational crisis of the ’60s, and originally the department was comprised almost entirely of Marxist philosophers (Soulié 1998). Although it later become less radical, its chief priority remains “the analysis of the historical contexts and political implications of philosophies.” Its students also remain very politically active, supporting undocumented immigrants’ right to education, and proposing a “day of reflection on the future of the university” during the blockades of 2007. On the other hand, philosophy at the University of Provence, in the small provincial city of Aix-en-Provence, is known as a center of the American-influenced, less politicized “analytic” philosophy. The department offers a master’s in “argument and social influence,” the only such program in France, which they view as relevant to public activism and private enterprise alike. Its students wrote in their first annual newsletter that they were “allergic to militantisms of all stripes” (AsPhiX 2003). In short, while Paris-VIII exhibits a more direct form of philosophical engagement with politics, Aix-en-Provence is a place where new currents within the discipline and non-politicized forms of public engagement are more prominent.

4. Methods: Comparative departmental studies in context
As indicated above, primary fieldwork for this project will be divided between the two chosen departments. I plan to spend Autumn 2009 at the University of Paris-VIII, and Spring 2010 at the University of Provence. In choosing the university department as my primary unit of analysis, I hope to move beyond studies that focus exclusively on students or on faculty and hence fail to scrutinize the general social system of the university (Bourdieu 1988; Bourdieu and Passeron 1979; Felouzis 2001; Millet 2003; Moffatt 1989; Nathan 2005). Unlike a study of a classroom or a laboratory (Latour and Woolgar 1986 [1979]; Thorkelson 2008), a study of a university department affords a site in which the functionally differentiated activities of teaching, research, extra-academic interaction and organizational work are brought together. Yet university departments per se have not often been the primary objects of social-scientific or ethnographic inquiry. The limited number of extant studies has focused on internal conflicts and the department’s relation with its broader discipline (Camic 1995; Jennings 1997; Small 1999; Tuunainen 2005), on disciplinary “moral orders” (Ylijoki 2000), on research management (Morris 2002; Walton 1986) and on the teaching-research relation (Snell 2001). These studies tend to conceptualize the department as a social and organizational unit rather than as a site of knowledge-making, and tend to be oriented inwards towards the institution or the discipline. I would argue that we need to analyze departments more rigorously as “epistemic cultures” (Knorr Cetina 1999), and that we need to expand our analysis outwards to see how departments orient themselves towards external and extra-academic publics and political circumstances.

Hence, in this project I conceive of the department as a heterogeneous site of knowledge-making and public/political engagement, oriented at once inwards around its own bureaucratic and social structures, and outwards towards its broader institutional and political contexts. To explore these multiple facets of departmental structure, I envision multiple forms of data collection. I plan to conduct (a) observation of philosophical events such as lectures, seminars, colloquia, conferences, and meetings (building on my own ethnography of literary theory classrooms, Thorkelson 2008); (b) interviews with university professors, university students, and administrators; (c) observation of normally private philosophical activities like reading and writing, particularly when informants can be persuaded to narrate these activities to me (following on Bazerman 1985); and (d) examination of official documents, published papers, website activities, and secondary sources on the departments.

I plan to select two or three classrooms for intensive semester-long observation, at both license (undergraduate) and master levels, in order to gain a cross-section of knowledge-making practices. I will choose courses on the history of philosophy, on epistemology (a speciality of Aix-en-Provence), and on politics (a speciality of Paris-VIII), since these are the courses most likely to yield metadiscourse on philosophy, knowledge-making, and political engagement. Within these classrooms, and in other public philosophical settings, I will primarily be making a record of discourse and social practice, but will take preliminary notes about how philosophical knowledge-claims are made, how metadiscourse emerges around these knowledge claims (Hyland 1998; Silverstein 2003), how disciplinary and university politics are invoked or impinge on the situation, and how futures are enacted or discursively constructed. In interviews, I plan to pursue the same sorts of questions more directly, asking more specifically for actors’ views on the mechanics of philosophical knowledge-making, the relationship between ordinary academic life and university politics, and about individual views of the future. I intend to select informants and interviewees through a general request for all students, staff and faculty to speak to me; while this will not yield a 100% response rate, it will avoid the tendencies of snowball sampling to reproduce the existing lines of social association and dissociation within the departments.

To supplement this departmental research, I plan to conduct additional fieldwork on the political life of the French university system at large. First, I will assemble an archive of media coverage, official documents, and critical commentary on the university system and the broader discourse of the European “knowledge society.” Second, I will conduct a series of interviews with university and government officials, education researchers, and journalists who are involved in public discourse on universities. I will be asking primarily about the workings of university politics, and about individual views of the university’s future. Third, I will observe the organizational practices of three recently-formed groups that focus on university politics: ARESER (Association for reflection on higher education and research), Save the university, and Save Research. I will also examine philosophical organizations, such as the French Society of Philosophy, the Society of Analytic Philosophy, and the Association of Philosophy Students in Aix-En-Provence (AsPhiX), especially inasmuch as these become engaged with changing university politics. I envision attending these organizations’ public meetings, collecting documents, and analyzing the resulting discourse for its structures of political engagement and mobilizations of academic knowledge. This additional research, which I plan to conduct alongside the more focused departmental work, will be aimed at gaining a more global view of the political and intellectual world of French universities beyond the departmental situation.

All this data collection is intended to enable four avenues of analysis, which correspond to the theoretical topics listed above and which I will elaborate below. First, I intend an analysis of the forms and practices of philosophical knowing; second, an analysis of the political organization of French university reforms as they impinge on the departments I’ve chosen; third, an analysis of the modes of political or public engagement that I observe; finally, and most importantly, an analysis of future-making projects across all these sites. I envision the first three analytical topics as necessary foundations for an analysis of futures; while I view the analysis of futures as a way of grasping the underlying cultural conditions of the other three analyses. So these are not four totally separate types of analysis, but will rather, ideally, be reciprocally informing.

My analytic approach to philosophical knowledge as such is primarily inspired by the methodology of contemporary linguistic anthropology. I am interested both in the practiced system of knowledge-making (Frake 1964; Hymes 1964) and in the system of local ideologies about knowledge that regiment this system (Silverstein 2003; Thorkelson 2007). Therefore, drawing on transcripts of my observed situations, I will begin by constructing a taxonomy of philosophical knowledge forms, such as a “dissertation,” an “argument,” a “thesis,” a “distinction,” an “oeuvre,” and any other local forms that emerge in the field. I will then expand my analysis to include the practices through which knowledge forms are created, circulated and reworked, and in which knowledge claims are introduced and negotiated. In particular, I will examine the production of knowledge in social and symbolic interaction (Goffman 1974); its use and reception; its media of transmission (Barth 2002); its affective structure (e.g., what kinds of knowledge are considered “exciting” or “interesting,” cf. Davis 1971); and its relationship to politics (politically significant? apolitical?). Drawing on semiotic studies of texts and textuality (Brenneis 1999; Mertz 2007; Silverstein and Urban 1996; Urciuoli 1999), I will particularly scrutinize the way that knowledge-making is textually mediated in books, essays, websites, lectures, and other genres, which serve technical instruments of philosophical knowledge in something of the way that particle detectors do in physics (Galison 1997). I will also examine ideologies about knowledge, noting what counts as valid or legitimate knowledge; who is a legitimate knower; what forms of knowledge are considered sound and unsound, and so on. The analytic aim is to assemble a holistic picture of departmental knowledge production systems, and to be able to compare knowledge-making across my two chosen departments.

My approach to political organization and political engagement, on the other hand, is mainly influenced by Pierre Bourdieu’s prior research on academic institutions (Bourdieu 1988; Bourdieu and Passeron 1979), and by Jacques Rancière’s research on politics (Ranciere 1992). I will begin by assembling an analysis of the social field on which the maneuvers of university politics take place. This will draw on my broader background research on public discourse and official governmental interventions on universities, as well as on focused interviews in which I hope to explore personal views and experiences of university politics. The idea is simply to assemble a map of the policy actors, governance systems, political maneuvers, and debates within French universities. I will pay particular attention to how these are affected by transnational European reforms. Having thus gained a general picture of the political situation, I will follow political events as they happen during my fieldwork, focusing on the following analytical questions: (a) what counts as “political”; (b) who is recognized as a legitimate political actor, such as politicians, officials, student organizations, unions, and the like; (c) how academic knowledge, particularly philosophy, becomes politically significant; and (d) what is recognized as valid or successful political engagement.

In tandem with these analyses of politics and knowledge-making, I hope to develop my analysis of futures and future-making projects. Drawing on the concept of the future that I derive from Sartre and Munn, as described above, I will be interested in observing tacit futures in philosophical practice; I will also inquire about people’s plans, projects, and thoughts about the future, as well as examining public rhetorics of the future. Again, I will look for these in both collected documents and transcribed social situations. (The frequent semiotic invocations of “crisis” in French universities, and of “fear of the future,” will be especially important to investigate, as they indicate a perceived lack of a stable future.) I plan to examine futures at four analytical levels: (a) the futures of individuals, particularly their career or vocational prospects; (b) the collective futures of philosophy departments and academic associations; (c) the future of philosophy in France; and (d) the mass futures of French and European universities at large. Then, having assembled this array of futures, I will attempt to ascertain which ones are unique to particular sites, which ones spread across contexts, and how this whole array of futures fits together or falls into contradiction. The aim, ultimately, will be to discern how different futures underlie the interlocking but quite different projects of philosophical knowledge-making and university political action. The choice of the two philosophy departments, moreover, should open up two different perspectives on the future of philosophy in France, since Paris-VIII and Aix-en-Provence differ greatly in their trajectories within the discipline, and can be hypothesized to have quite different future orientations. Finally, I will compare the local and institutional futures I observe with the futures projected in broader European discourses on the knowledge society, which will offer at least one datum on how the “knowledge society” is contested and lived.

6. Broader impacts for anthropology of universities
I envision a number of broader impacts for this project. First, the very process of doing the research, by virtue of its choice of ethnographic object, should contribute to especially rich international collaboration with French colleagues who are both analysts and participants in the university system. As mentioned above, I have already been invited to affiliate with a laboratory (LAHIC) studying the history and anthropology of cultural institutions, and I expect the project to yield long-lasting possibilities for trans-Atlantic intellectual exchange. Second, the research, when appropriately summarized and popularized, should afford eventual opportunities for anthropological participation in current debates over U.S. higher education and academic politics. All too often, U.S. debates on universities are not informed by an international, cross-cultural perspective, and anthropology offers great potential for offering more culturally sensitive analysis of university cultures. I have already been involved in several projects aiming to make social research relevant to university governance and reform, and plan to actively report this research in these extra-scientific forums. Third, the focus on the classroom and departmental setting will hope to contribute to engaged scholarship on teaching and learning in academic settings, a field which has suffered from a lack of basic research (Thorkelson 2008; Wisniewski 2000). Fourth, the focus on the discipline of philosophy and its engagement in politics may offer new empirical support for the social function and utility of humanistic disciplines, which are all too often overlooked by research that sees only natural and social sciences as having social benefits. Finally, by examining futures, perceived crises in the future, and fears about the future, I hope to shed some light on the contemporary hopes and anxieties that the image of the “knowledge society” at once condenses and obscures.

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I have argued that higher education, properly understood, is distinguished by the absence of a direct and designed relationship between its activities and measurable effects in the world.

This is a very old idea that has received periodic re-formulations. Here is a statement by the philosopher Michael Oakeshott that may stand as a representative example: “There is an important difference between learning which is concerned with the degree of understanding necessary to practice a skill, and learning which is expressly focused upon an enterprise of understanding and explaining.”

Understanding and explaining what? The answer is understanding and explaining anything as long as the exercise is not performed with the purpose of intervening in the social and political crises of the moment, as long, that is, as the activity is not regarded as instrumental – valued for its contribution to something more important than itself.

This seems to me not very well phrased, because the distinction between an institutional ideal (which is really what this is about) and institutional reality is not well established; and “instrumentalism” is very clumsily formulated. Fish mentalistically defines being “instrumental” as a matter of purpose or intention; while of course not everything that’s intended to be “useful” actually ends up being useful, and purposes are not often as monolithic as Fish makes them out to be. Is my intrinsic enjoyment of a bag of potato chips, to take the most laughable example, diminished or even altered by the fact that eating is also instrumentally useful for avoiding weakness and eventual death by starvation? Not really; contra Fish, something can be instrinsically valuable while also being useful for some other end, even when that “other end” is, abstractly, far more important than the immediately valuable experience of, say, chewing up crisp little ovals of grease and salt. Purposes can be multiple with regard to a given activity, whose “intrinsic” merits, moreover, aren’t automatically distorted by an instrumental attitude projected onto it. Extrinsic and intrinsic value, instrumentalism vs value en soi, are not mutually exclusive. And Fish is wrong to imagine that scholastic “understanding and explaining” are automatically distorted the minute that someone starts having an intention of  “intervening in social crises,” or that the academic merits of academic knowledge are incompatible with their having some other function, like job training.

Faced with demands for higher education to be “relevant” or “engaged,” either by producing a better corporate workforce as business leaders might want, or by teaching social justice as progressive activists would prefer — faced with these demands, anyway, Fish retreats into the argument that “higher education has no use; it is just intrinsically valuable.” It strikes me that this is actually an strangely deceptive move, because as a professor, higher education is obviously, trivially useful: Fish stands to gain an obvious utility — in fact a paycheck! — from the higher education that he argues is a “determined inutility.” Here is the unspoken reality of Fish’s argument: academic knowledge is useless to everyone except those faculty who are paid to reproduce it.

But part of the problem here lies in an overly dichotomous view of the relationship between the pragmatic instrumentality and the fanciful end in itself. It strikes me that Thorstein Veblen, a hundred years ago, had a much more insightful view of this relation, which I wrote about in my orals. I’m going to excerpt my analysis because it seems relevant here (you’ll probably notice the writing style becoming more academic):

In The Higher Learning in America: A memorandum on the conduct of universities by business men, the distinction between pragmatism and fantasy, the instrumental and the in-itself, is turned on its head so very many times that any settled synthesis of its terms becomes unfeasible. Veblen begins by examining “esoteric knowledge” in cross-cultural perspective. Although its “content and canons of truth and reality” vary, being products of a social group’s “institutions” and “habits of life,” he finds that esoteric knowledge is generally ascribed “great intrinsic value… of more substantial consequence than any or all of the material achievements or possessions of the community” (2). The pursuit of this knowledge is based on two instincts: the Idle Curiosity, and the Instinct of Workmanship. Now, here there is already a contradiction, multiply expressed. For one thing, esoteric knowledge is universally rated higher than practical material achievement, and yet it is itself a product of the work of institutions and specialists — in a sense, a practical achievement of its own. For another, the two instincts that lead to the production of esoteric knowledge are themselves opposed as pragmatism is to idealism: the Instinct of Workmanship is a kind of practical principle of production, while the Idle Curiosity is that which yields “a knowledge of things… apart from any ulterior use,” that is, a definitionally anti-pragmatic principle. To add one more wrinkle, in an earlier article Veblen had defined the Instinct of Workmanship as a “quasi-aesthetic sense of economic or industrial merit,” suggesting that even within the very principle of pragmatic action lies an a priori aesthetic norm.

In sum, at the most general level of collective symbolism, esoteric knowledge (which we Westerners call “higher learning”) is cast as impractical, as over and above practical activity. Yet the making of this esoteric knowledge is, for Veblen, a thoroughly practical institutional project, based moreover on a divided set of instincts which themselves recapitulate the troubled opposition between practical and impractical. Of course, “pragmatic” is not a monovalent term here either; higher learning is pragmatic inasmuch as it is the outcome of practice, but it is not pragmatic in the sense that it is not (for Veblen) directly instrumental knowledge, not necessarily useful in the doing of any other task. In other words, ‘esoteric knowledge’ is not pragmatic to the extent that it is (or should be) allowed to be an end in itself. Veblen, however, is skeptical that this knowledge embodies “fundamental and eternal truth,” commenting that “it is evident to any outsider that it will take its character and its scope and method from the habits of life of the group” (2). Insofar as the group inevitably disavows this institutional determination of its highest verities, it appears as if esoteric knowledge were, from the start, the product of a community’s fantasy of anchoring its ultimate view of reality in something other than practice.

But this purely abstract critique of higher learning is not the end; rather, Veblen treats it as the start of a more specific institutional critique of the intrusion of business logic into higher learning. Such an instrusion seemed to Veblen of relatively recent origin, a feature of post-Civil-War university expansion, the decline of clerical power in colleges, and the general system of business and industrial production of the period. For Veblen, business influence stemmed from the Boards of Control (as he summarized Trustees, Regents, and the like). Above all, the Board appointed the President, and controlled the budget; hence it was able to re-orient the university toward vocational and professional ends, to mandate constant financial and institutional growth, and to influence the hiring of business-friendly faculty and the removal of those who disrupted the institutional image — among other things.

In the course of the analysis, a whole new host of contradictions developed around this intrusion of the pragmatic into the academic. In theory, Veblen felt that “if the higher learning is incompatible with business shrewdness, business enterprise is, by the same token, incompatible with the higher learning… they are the two extreme poles of the modern cultural scheme” (12). In practice, however, this radical incompatibility seemed not to obtain. On the contrary, Veblen ascribed the institutional success of “practical men,” coming from technical and professional schools, to “that deference that is currently paid to men of affairs, at the same time that [their] practical training gives them an advantage over their purely academic colleagues, in the greater assurance and adroitness with which they are able to present their contentions” (9). In other words, practical men may have been out of place in academe in theory, but not in practice. As a result, “while the higher learning still remains as the enduring purpose and substantial interest of the university establishment, the dominant practical interests of the day will, transiently but effectually, govern the detail lines of academic policy, the range of instruction offered, and the character of the personnel” (16). Here, far from the university being opposed to business, this very distinction becomes the principle of the university’s internal operation: while the academic principles of impractical learning govern the outermost reaches of institutional form in the longue durée, all the practicalities of the university are shaped by practical men.

But in another set of dialectical reversals, Veblen took pains to show that the so-called practical men were themselves prisoners of a rather extensive panoply of fantasies and irrationalities. To begin with, Veblen views the incursion of the practical, professional men into the university as, in part, an effort to “lift [their work] to that dignity that it is pressed to attach to a non-utilitarian pursuit of learning” (9). In effect, pragmatists were in full pursuit of the non-instrumental, of values in themselves. More profoundly, insofar as the businessmen were ultimately representatives of the leisure class, their pursuit of profit and practicality was ultimately not practical, but was designed rather to afford opportunities for conspicuous leisure and consumption, that is, the intentional waste of resources in the pursuit of status. These businessmen, Veblen argued, steered the university into the same game: a headlong pursuit of institutional status by way of increasingly ostentatious buildings and grounds, student sports, grandiose academic ceremonies and the like (30, 37, 41). And these vast departures from the pursuit of learning became, for Veblen, a massive exercise in public and self-deception: “this large apparatus and traffic of make-believe… is the first and most unremitting object of executive solicitude” (64). All the while, this irrational “make-believe” was cloaked in a near-fetish of “the practical,” which became a justifying rhetoric for executive decisions in the service of private gain (49, 61).

“All of which may suggest reflections on the fitness of housing the quest of truth in an edifice of false pretences,” Veblen is led to exclaim at one point in this analysis (37). But the upshot of Veblen’s analysis is less a simple negation of higher learning by the forces of pragmatism, more a complex institutional vortex in which pragmatism constantly comes into new contradictions with the cultural, the moral, and the utopian. In one place he advocates the impracticality of scholarship; in another he paints scholarship as itself practical in relation to the fanciful delusions of the university presidents. Veblen himself, it seems, valued “practicality” more in theory than in practice: far from adapting to the demands of academic life, he was, as C. Wright Mills puts it, “a natural-born failure” in terms of institutional success. In short, I think we can see in Veblen an ongoing synthesis of fantasy and pragmatism, one contradicting the other only for the contradiction to become productive of the social system as a whole — only to again be brought into contradiction.

About Fish, then: he seems stuck at the zero degree of this synthetic process, not seeing the instrumental use to which he puts the “inutility” that he advocates, nor observing the ways in which the institution itself is internally structured by the distinction that he thinks should distinguish it from its outside. I’ve just been reading a book called L’empire de l’université (The Empire of the University) that argues for an end to any rigid intellectual distinction between the inside and the outside of the institution – an argument which would have fatal consequences for all efforts to evaluate the university’s value ahistorically in isolation from its societal context. Such as Fish’s.

Technocrats say we live in a knowledge society. Educators and politicians sometimes say we live in a knowledge society. Sometimes they’re trying to say: a world where formal knowledge from the education and research sector is crucial to social success, economic production, and the like. OK, education is a means of getting jobs, and a marker of social distinction. Scientific research is sometimes very politically involved (paradigmatically, the Manhattan Project). None of that seems to add up to a social order where “knowledge” is the foremost concern, mightiest tool and dominant value.

Sociologists keep fantasizing that they have the power and insight to rename society. They invent terms: knowledge society, information society, postindustrial society, postmodernity. Nico Stehr, in his 1994 book Knowledge Societies, tries to persuade us that the knowledge society denotes a society based on “knowledge,” rather than on “labor” or “property.” Here’s his list of the changes that, collectively, signal the knowledge society’s emergence:

• the penetration of most spheres of social action, including production, by scientific knowledge (‘scientization’).
• the displacement, though by no means the elimination, of other forms of knowledge by scientific knowledge, mediated by the growing stratum of and dependence on experts, advisors and counselors, and the corresponding institutions based on the deployment of specialized knowledge.
• the emergence of science as an immediately productive force.
• the differentiation of new forms of political action (e.g., science and educational policy).
• the development of a new sector of production (the production of knowledge).
• the change of power structures (technocracy debate).
• the emergence of knowledge as the basis for social inequality and social solidarity.
• the trend to base authority on expertise.
• the shift in the nature of the societal conflict from struggles about the allocation of income and divisions in property relations to claims and conflicts about generalized human needs.

I find the last of these rather opaque, and it seems unclear whether all of these really are global trends. Is there really a growing tendency to base authority on expertise, for instance? Are most spheres of social action truly “penetrated” by scientific knowledge? That is not clear. And there is a tendency in Stehr to treat “science” and “knowledge” as the independent forces reshaping other social formations, with insufficient consideration of the ways that “science” and “knowledge” (by which Stehr really means socially legitimated, primarily academic knowledge) are themselves dependent variables, products of political and historical circumstance.

What Stehr does say about knowledge is suggestive but vague. He hesitates between analyzing knowledge as an “anthropological constant” of any possible society (since all social action depends on some kind of knowledge), and as a historically specific value and force of production. He also seems to be suggesting that knowledge constitutes a new and thickening form of mediation between human individuals and world:

…knowing is a relation to things and facts, but also to laws and rules. In any case, knowing is some sort of participation: knowing things, facts, rules, is “appropriating” them in some manner, including them into our field of orientation and competence. A very important point, however, is that knowledge can be objectified, that is, the intellectual appropriation of things, facts and rules can be established symbolically, so that in the future in order to know, it is no longer necessary to get into contact with the things themselves but only with their symbolic representations. This is the social significance of language, writing, printing and data storage. Modern societies have made dramatic advances in the intellectual appropriation of nature and society. There is an immense stock of objectified knowledge which mediates our relation to nature and to ourselves. In a general sense, this advancement has been called, in other contexts, modernization or rationalization. This secondary nature is overgrowing the primary nature of humans. The real and the fictional merge and become indistinguishable; theories become facts and not vice versa, that is, facts do not police theories. (13)

There are two thoughts happening here. First, Stehr wants to establish that knowing is social, not in the strong constructionist sense that all objects of knowledge are social constructs, but in the weaker sense that all knowledge entails not just a relation to a known object, but also to a procedure for knowing, a set of “laws and rules.” Then he wants to suggest that knowledge gets disconnected from knowing subjects, that knowledge doesn’t require a knower because it circulates on its own as the “symbolic representation” that is the product of some prior act of knowing. Such a large mass of objectified knowledge is now circulating, Stehr thinks, that our relation to our worlds is permanently mediated through this traffic in social representations. As if we are all even more alienated from the world by knowing too much. When Stehr says that “the real and the fictional merge,” I don’t think he means that we can no longer tell the difference between fact and fiction; I think he means that the world itself is now increasingly re-organized around the “fictions” of scientific knowledge.

Pending a different order of evidence than Stehr offers, I am inclined to reject the claim that contemporary society, however one wants to label it, is really very unique in having an epistemically mediated world. Surely the Azande lived in a no less symbolically constituted space. But Stehr, importantly, is not simply applauding the new social order that he thinks we live in. Rather, he believes that the “knowledge society” is uniquely precarious:

Although much effort has been invested in the reduction of the contingencies of economic affairs and in the improvement of the possibilities of planning and forecasting, the economy of the knowledge society is, as much as the rest of global society, increasingly subjected to a rise in indeterminacy. While success may at times justify the high hopes of many that techniques and technologies will be developed to reduce if not eliminate much of the uncertainty from economic conduct, sudden and unexpected events almost invariably disconfirm, almost cruelly, such optimistic forecasts about the possibility of anticipating and therefore controlling future events. As a matter of fact, and paradoxically, one of the sources of the growing indeterminacy can be linked directly to the nature of the technological developments designed to achieve greater certainty. The new technology contributes to and accelerates the malleability of specific contexts because of its lower dedication (limitation) to particular functions. Technological developments add to the fragility of economic markets and the need of organizations operating in such a context to become more flexible in order to respond to greater mutability in demand and supply. In the sphere of production, as a result, a new utopian vision arises, a vision which Charles Sabel (1991:24) sketches in the following and deliberating enabling terms:

“Universal materializing machines replace product-specific capital goods; small and effortlessly re-combinable units of production replace the hierarchies of the mass-production corporation; and the exercise of autonomy required by both the machines and the new organizations produces a new model producer which view of life confounds the distinction between the entrepreneurial manager and the socialist worker-owner.”

Much of the standard discussion of these matters, at least until recently, has been animated by opposite expectations. Bell (1973:26), for example, confidently asserts that the ‘development of new forecasting and ‘mapping’ techniques makes possible a novel phase in economic history – the conscious, planned advance of technological change, and therefore the reduction of indeterminacy about the economic future.’

But the factor of greater fragility, malleability and volatility is not confined to the economy, the labor market and the social organization of work and management, nor does it merely have ‘positive’ effects on social relations and individual psyches. Greater vulnerability corresponds to greater fragility and greater flexibility is linked to new regimes of production. (158)

This is interesting because it suggests that a newly precarious world is not only the product of a new capitalist labor regime but also the product of a new epistemic and technical regime of disorientation, in which technology designed to be malleable ends up being unstable. As if the “knowledge society” had a structurally unstable future. Of course, dialectically speaking, what society doesn’t have a structurally unstable future? But the question remains: even if “knowledge society” is the wrong name, what contradictions structure the futures of contemporary Euroamerican social orders?

There’s something maddeningly abstract about Stehr’s book. We don’t learn what it is like to know something, we don’t see case studies of knowledge entangled in the social world, we don’t see cross-cultural comparison, we don’t see experiential detail. It’s hard to comment on the book, even, without getting caught in its abstract morass. But one wonders: perhaps the abstract, scholastic, combative, polysyllabic, skeptical convolution that one feels in reading Stehr’s prose is precisely what life in the knowledge society is like? Does Stehr’s book perform what it describes? If so, all the more reason to shun the knowledge-based social order he articulates.

It’s probably also false. What’s actually happening, according to another article a few weeks later, is that applications to expensive private universities are dropping, while more students are probably going to go to cheaper schools, particularly public schools. But the question remains: if fewer people got to go to college, why would that be a bad thing? Or rather, what makes higher education valuable?

I have to say I’m skeptical about most of the arguments I’ve encountered in this arena. I have an intuition that there is something worth defending, but most of the existing arguments seem deeply flawed. Here I just want to outline some critical and methodological theses that seem to demand our attention.

1. Sound arguments are neither necessary or sufficient for a thing’s existence or value. Higher education does not stand or fall on the basis of a sound argument in its favor. Many, probably most, teachers and students have no good argument to justify their activity, and that doesn’t necessarily make a difference. (Social practice, mercifully, need not be founded on philosophically valid premises.) Insofar as going to college has become a customary part of the life course for Americans of a certain social class, it can just become something that one does, almost as a matter of ritual. Does one go to college because it is valuable to do so, or does it come to seem valuable because one does it?
2. Moreover, arguments for the value of higher education vary across time and place, and as a function of people’s social positions, interests and aims. To understand higher education, and thus to account for its value, is in part a matter of understanding the differentiated social worlds in which many different values are ascribed to the institution. How does one understand the value of a polymorphous institution, or reckon with value claims that are contested and plural? Any argument I could present here would equally take its place in this field of existing arguments, in tension or harmony with them, and would likewise have to examine its common origin in broader sociohistorical fields and processes.
3. At a strictly logical level, there are different ways to structure arguments for the value of higher education. We have to make a number of conceptual choices just to pose an argument of this sort. For instance:
   1. Is higher education valuable as a process or as a product? Does the process, the sheer experience of higher education, taken as a polyphonic set of moments, matter, no matter how ephemeral its results? Or is it the product or outcome, the effect, the state of being educated, of having survived, of being credentialed, that matters? Or if both, how does one relate to the other?
   2. Relatedly, is it the formal aspect of higher education that is relevant to its value, or do we evaluate the whole life process associated with college? Are we thinking of higher education as what one’s supposed to learn in a classroom, or do we include the dorms, the frats, the clubs, the odd jobs, the late nights, the whole mythical American college experience?
   3. For whom is higher education valuable? I might argue that my college education was valuable to me as a single person, without making claims about the value of anyone else’s education; or that higher education is valuable to some social group or another; or even that higher education is valuable for society at large.
   4. What temporal horizon do we use to evaluate the value of higher education? An hour? A year? A century? Surely its value must change over time, just as higher education and its social contexts have changed drastically over time? And longer timespans tend to fit well with larger units of analysis. Perhaps higher education is valuable now, at this very moment, for some teenager in the midst of a transcendental intellectual awakening; perhaps on the other hand it has been valuable for society on the whole over the last five decades, promoting social mobility, as some argue.
   5. What kind of value do we ascribe to higher education? Is it in some sense intrinsically valuable? If so, what is its content such that it has intrinsic value – skills? knowledge? cultural awareness? habits of mind?* Or does one simply see education as intrinsically valuable without being able to explain why – which would most likely be rooted in the central cultural premise of formal education, which is that the state of being educated, whatever its content, is simply recognized as having a higher status than the state of “not being educated”?
      
      Or is higher education less intrinsically valuable than instrumentally useful, by opening up possibilities beyond itself — jobs, professions, worldviews, cultural affiliations? Or is it perhaps neither intrinsically nor instrumentally valuable, but rather valuable for its side-effects: the skills, for instance, one has to develop to cope with the contingent conditions of college life, skills for sociability, money, cuisine, stamina, and so on.* Or, finally, is higher education valuable because it is functionally necessary, inasmuch as it performs functions that “society” needs or desires? For instance, one might say that higher education is necessary for producing a skilled, flexible workforce, an informed and critical citizenship, a technocratic elite, a nation of depoliticized debt-laden consumers, or whatever.
   6. Do we argue for the value of higher education as it exists now? Or as it was in the past? Or in our nostalgic fantasy of its past or our utopian vision of its future? What degree of idealization should our arguments countenance? Does value reside in what something is, or in what it could be?

   These issues tend to overlap with each other, but I think they are each conceptually distinct, and I think in many cases there is no a priori reason to choose one way or another.

4. I tend to hear two major sorts of arguments in circulation when it comes to higher education’s value. First, the vocational argument would have it, roughly, that higher education is good because it helps one to get a job, and indeed opens up routes to various high-status professions and occupations, not to mention greater wealth and income. At the individual level, this tends to become an instrumentalist argument: “it’s good to be wealthy” or even “college is a good investment.” At the societal level, it becomes a functionalist argument: “society needs higher education because it needs to reproduce a skilled workforce”.

   The problem with this argument, of course, is that college education is often not very good preparation for a job (with big exceptions in engineering, nursing, social work, and other applied fields), and that the university’s role in reproducing class hierarchy is not necessarily something to celebrate. I note that the potential for individuals to rise up in class status through higher education actually presupposes the continued existence of class hierarchy and inequality, at a structural level. If there were no hierarchy, there could be no mobility. Elite American universities, moreover, seem to have served for a long time as bastions of upper-class social reproduction. So this argument seems rather politically problematic (not to mention somewhat dismissive of the general education that college often involves).

   Second, a more liberal artsy argument holds that college need not (and probably should not) be directly vocationally relevant. Rather, higher education is reckoned valuable because it makes one a critical thinker, a creative and well-rounded person, knowledgeable, virtuous, autonomous, historically and politically and scientifically aware, fluent in foreign tongues. Sometimes this argument is linked to ideas about what a good citizen should be, about general culture, and so on.

   Like a good academic, I don’t have anything against this per se, but it strikes me that the values expressed here are actually those of a certain class of professors, universalized as if they ought to become everyone’s values. Critical thinking in particular is somewhat fetishized by academics, and tends to be mentioned almost robotically in defenses of higher education. Also, there may be troubling class polarization around these two arguments. Is it mostly the privileged who can go to liberal arts colleges, disdain immediate vocational utility, and in short, afford to pay for non-instrumentally-useful educations? If so, the former argument may be an argument given preferentially to the children of the privileged (though I don’t have statistics on this), and that would be disturbing.

   Andrew Abbott, for instance, told incoming University of Chicago students, in 2003, that education is good in itself simply because being educated makes one able to have more experience, richer, more meaningful and more complex experience, than an uneducated person. I won’t bother to refute this bit of anthropological lunacy here; I just want to note that, at a highly elite institution, Abbott specifically dismisses vocational training as a candidate for the value of education. Over at the nearest community college, Malcolm X, on the other hand, the most prominently displayed field is the most vocational: nursing.

5. It would be easy to argue for the value of higher education if I were certain that scholarly knowledge is an authentically, intrinsically good thing, like my philosophy teacher in college, who once said directly that a culture without philosophy was an impoverished culture. If this were the case, it would certainly be easy to argue that it is desirable to become versed in scholarly ways.

   Alas, things are not so easy, since I am skeptical and ambivalent about the value of scholarly knowledge. It’s so easy to find things that are wrong with academic culture (isn’t that the very premise of this blog?). At the same time, it is just this skepticism and ambivalence that higher education, according to arguments about “critical thinking,” is supposed to impart. So perhaps it is a measure of the very success of higher education that one should become skeptical of its value.

6. College is, for “traditional” students ages 18-21 or so, a phase in the lifecycle in which one doesn’t have to work. Of course, Marc Bousquet has demonstrated just how exploitative “student jobs” can get, and Jeff Williams emphasizes that student debt is a new form of indenture. So perhaps we should say: in which some people manage to avoid the full force of the work world for a few more years.

   Insofar as most jobs suck this may well be a valuable thing in itself.

7. The value of higher education is something that is the subject of intense marketing and propaganda by colleges and universities themselves. It isn’t just that there is a socially determined field of arguments; the arguments themselves are politicized, politically and institutionally motivated.
8. But one can nonetheless plausibly argue that, on the whole, it has been very good for those millions of Americans who have gotten to go to college, especially in the post-World-War-II era. Although that said, it may not have been good for all these people in the same way. Different kinds of people go to universities; it requires a charmingly universalistic value theory to imagine that its value would be identical for all of them.

… And yet if higher education is to become more scarce — or just more stratified – a general argument for its value would be a crucial political resource. Although I hate to say it: the most valid argument is not necessarily the most politically effective.

Richard Wolin, in “America’s Tolerance for French Radicalism,” attempts to describe the complementary histories of French poststructuralism in France and America. Making no distinction between the American nation and American academic culture, he argues that american pluralism and “democracy’s historical strengths” made it possible to assimilate post-structuralism as “merely another framework to choose from amid the ever-expanding marketplace of ideas.” Let’s leave aside the claims that America is democratic and pluralistic through and through, and that our intellectual world forms a free marketplace. These platitudes need not detain us. What’s more interesting is the claim that the intellectual world is “ever-expanding.” Here we have a more complex spatio-temporal image of the intellectual world: to be ever-expanding is to be growing in space as it progresses through time.

This sounds like a coy analogy with the astronomers’ hypothesis of an ever-expanding universe. Yet while Wolin apparently imagines the expanding marketplace of ideas as an endless intellectual bounty, the astronomers have envisioned a world whose infinite expansion will end not in unlimited light, but in indefinite cold and darkness. We might ask Wolin, is an endless marketplace really anything but a stultifying dream? And there’s something more directly debilitating about Wolin’s spatial image of the intellectual world. He views intellectual exchange as fundamentally bounded by national borders, walled off into separate French and American worlds. This leads him to homogenize French and American intellectual spheres. While he equates America with liberal pluralism, he equates France with an unstable radical-authoritarianism. He can’t recognize the immense internal differentiation of the French intellectual field, the profound differences between Derrida’s and Foucault’s institutional careers, the separation of French philosophy into small avant-gardes, numerous sub-specialties, and many different institutional milieux. (Foucault, far from being forgotten in France, is now taught, contra Wolin, in French lycées.) And even as Wolin denounces the category of “post-structuralism” as an American invention, he employs it unwittingly himself, describing a homogeneous American response to poststructuralism unsettled only by a few “committed disciples.”

François Cusset, on the other hand, in “French Theory’s American Adventures,” takes a much more subtle view of theory’s spatial and historical situation. He asks about theory’s future, about the convergence of theory and activism, about the intellectual transformations that theory met as it crossed from France to America. He does see an inversion between the political fate of theory in France and in the U.S., but less ahistorically than does Wolin:

“What we are facing here is a symmetrically reversed situation: on the one hand, a society run by a new wave of conservatives, but whose intellectual field, limited to isolated campuses, enjoys a proliferation of radical discourses, minority theories, and bold textual innovations, with little effect on the rest of America’s public space; on the other hand, a country run by a new wave of liberals (François Mitterrand’s “socialists”), but whose broad intellectual field, occupying a central role in the public space, has just been taken over by a herd of young center-left humanists, with the result of sweeping away leftist and radical tendencies and replacing them with a universalist moral blackmail still on the front stage in today’s France.”

That is, while a conservative American government faces a segregated but lively subculture of campus leftism, a liberal French government is accompanied more harmoniously by a widespread culture of “center-left humanism” that actively suppresses more radical leftist discourse. Hence, in contrast to Wolin, for Cusset it’s America that’s more politically bipolar and France that’s more oppressively and homogeneously liberal. And Cusset foresees new possibilities for the spatiotemporal flow of poststructuralist theory:

“French society is now at a time when all those American intellectual currents, forbidden for import over the last three decades, can finally be put to use in making sense of an unprecedented situation. Indeed, universities and independent publishers are working hard these days to make cultural studies, minority theories, “pop” philosophy, gender analyses, and the postcolonial paradigm not only better known in France (the only major country where prominent theorists behind such currents had not yet been translated), but also critically reformulated to better address specifically French issues… [French theory authors,] their texts, and the endless interpretations they inspire (together forming one cultural continuum) can still help us fashion a future of struggles and world making — within but also beyond higher education, in the United States but also throughout the rest of the world.”

In other words, while Jeff Williams laments that theory is being reprinted and memorialized in the U.S., Cusset informs us that American cultural and theoretical critiques are now being imported into France with renewed intellectual vigor. (For example, Judith Butler’s 1990 classic, Gender Trouble, was recently published in France, in 2005.) Wolin, for his part, rejects “poststructuralism” as irredeemable irrationality even as he rather cheerfully characterizes it as one more competing product in the intellectual market, as if he’s uncertain whether to give it a philosophical thrashing or to compliment it on its market share. Cusset, on the other hand, says that we need to get beyond blithe reenactment or crude rejection of theory, taking a more critical historicist approach:

“If theory is to be of any use nowadays, the many tricks and games implied by its cultural metamorphoses should be taken seriously: by addressing the American identity of French theory, and even by pondering the strange feedback effect of a recent return of French theory to France.”

In other words, if we are to critically reappropriate theory, if we are to make use of it in the present or future, we must first analyze its history, examine its flows through time and space, and more generally, put spatiality and temporality at the center of our theoretical consciousness. Such an analysis, for Cusset, is necessary for making theory again relevant to social struggle and transformation. One might say that Cusset is advocating a dialectical and historical – maybe even Marxist – approach to theory as a historical phenomenon and an intellectual avenue for political change.

The prevalence of rhetorics of time and space in academic texts has intrigued me for some time (“here I’ll demonstrate that x…”; “we must begin anew”; “we must go back to Freud”; “we have transcended Freud”; I hear frequent talk of intellectual “moves” on an intellectual “terrain” of “positions”). These peculiar spatiotemporal strategies and rhetorics, curious in themselves, are also perhaps revealing of the fantasy structure of academic labor, in which immaterial, abstract intellectual activity is humanized and rationalized by way of familiar schemas of place and time. I suppose it goes without saying that such strategies often serve as conduits for academic power and debate and struggle: to call something passé, say, is most certainly to denigrate it. And it may be that academic construals of time and space have some more buried ideological function, deserving of further scrutiny.

But on a less abstract level, I wonder whether a critical reappropriation of 60s radical philosophy is really the best intellectual task we could set for ourselves. I often suspect that today we lack the sense of intellectual excitement that was present once, elsewhere. Perhaps it would be better to form new theories and intellectual collectivities, rejecting aspirations for thorough mastery of the intellectual past. We needn’t consign ourselves to the endless rereadings of Marx and Adorno that define a group like Chicago’s Platypus. Should we take the path advocated by Hiro Miyazaki, in which we generate intellectual hope for ourselves by re-enacting the hope of others on a new terrain? Or is the intellectual future something that we discover by undoing the world around us rather than trying to imitate it?