Introduction — § 2

The texts and practices that I have critiqued in this essay are exemplary sites of the operation of ideology. To unpack the highly sedimented work of ideology in them, one needs to write a detailed critique since ideology always represents itself as the voice of “reason," the “caring," "concerned," and “commonsense," and as the way things “naturally” are (and thus ought to be). Through such representations, ideology interprets any critiques of the ruling assumptions (such as the critique I am writing) as “unreasonable," “obstructionist," and “destructive." To show how ideology constructs the binaries “reasonable"/"unreasonable” or “caring"/"destructive” to legitimate the interests and political goals of the ruling elite, a critique must unpeel the texts of ideology, layer by layer. Dominant ideology survives through the cunning production of the common belief/despair that “nothing ever changes” — a belief necessary for discouraging people from taking an active part in reshaping daily practices. It is secured, in part, because most people do not have the patience for meticulously unpacking ideology. In fact, the ruling order always counts on such impatience. It “knows” that texts such as mine rarely reach their destination because it is much easier to read the simple texts of ideology (which have no arguments — their arguments are always already made for them by the ruling power) and to agree with them (because they repeat the naturalized clichés about the university, pedagogy, knowledge) rather than take the time to read a long, slow-going text such as this one. But I am not a manager of perceptions, I am a critic of ideology, and for me to adopt the representational techniques of the clerks of ideology is to abandon my work as a critique-al citizen.

The texts that I “read” in this essay are based on the logic of ideology that what IS, in fact, OUGHT TO BE. My work questions both the “IS” and the “OUGHT TO BE” of these texts. To show how the “IS” and the “OUGHT TO BE” have been constructed in these texts, I have examined their underlying assumptions about “education”; the role of the humanities in a democracy; the practice of power (networking); the situation of intellectuals and intellectual dissent in the university, and their “theory” of citizenship—among other issues.

Readers, who find the stories of ideology “readable” (because they are uncomplicated accounts that absorb social contradictions in the pleasures of simple tales), will find my analysis highly “unreadable." This is not because my text is “difficult” in any usual sense of the word, but because it is critique-al. Under the power of the ruling ideology, my critique-al analysis of events — which articulates the counter-memory of the institutional narratives — will be marked as a misreading, mischaracterization, misinterpretation, a subversion of truth and, in short, an “uncongenial," alien and alienating text.

I offer my text for public debate about public education and the fate of critique-al humanities in the emerging world of transnational capital. I believe a serious public discussion about (public) education in a democracy and the place of critique-al knowledges—as well as the way in which the established powers attempt to obscure such knowledges — is urgently needed. Such a discussion must also include a sustained reunderstanding of the role of the intellectual-as-pedagogue, the role of democratic governance in universities, colleges and other institutions of research and inquiry. Without such an inclusive public discussion, no coherent understanding will develop about the formation of the subject(ivity) of citizens — it will remain in a mystified state, which is, of course, the desired state for the ruling elite. Issues about education are the very matrix of the forces shaping citizenship, and affect the shape of labor relations, the structure of the distribution of wealth and access, and the very forms of daily life. It is by means of such public discussion that public priorities are set.

To facilitate this debate by and about citizens, I have written this text on the shifting borders of the “local” and the “global." To make the issues “concrete," I have addressed the recent “events” that have happened in one specific institution, but I have also tried to show how these “specific," “local” issues and practices are structurally connected to “global” practices — practices that are, in the end, material and economic. One of the side-arguments in this text is that cultural and educational issues — although important in themselves — are always articulations of global material forces. The de-formation of the university, in other words, is intimately connected with the new shape of the deployment of capital in the transnational world. The shift of focus in public education from critique-al knowledges aimed at educating critique-al citizens of a democracy (the “good society") to merely skill-full citizens of a pragmatic society of goods (a consumer society) is part of this structural connection.

The reader of this text, therefore, will often find herself in a defamiliarizing zone in which the seemingly “internal” scene opens up to the “external," the “event” shifts to “structure” and the “local” becomes “global." A border text is difficult to read precisely because it is a “genre” on the shifting frontiers of tenuous conventions — it is, nonetheless, a genre of our times. These are times in which it is increasingly necessary to draw connections and foreground relations and to resist the relentless attempts at “regionalism” — attempts to isolate practices from one another and study them “case by case." The regional “case by case” inquiry is an evasive mode of reading that erases structural connections and thus limits the understanding of issues to an “immanent” and “local” knowledge.