A \"Weak\" Response to Academocracy

Ian Fong: A “Weak” Response to Academocracy

Midway along the journey of our life - Dante I am often criticized by peer reviewers that my writing meanders and is too fragmented. It exists as a patchwork. The following is a peer review report on one of my papers:

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Am I incapable of being a scholar? Barthes’ response to Raymond Picard’s critique in 1966 does serve as a support for my existing work.1 Barthes wrote Sur Racine (On Racine) in 1963. It can be read as an example of French “new criticism.” Directly aiming at Sur Racine, Raymond Picard, the Chair of French Literature at the Sorbonne who in 1956 published, La Carrière de Jean Racine, in 1965 published a monograph called Nouvelle Critique ou nouvelle imposture (New Criticism or New Fraud?) which criticized “new criticism” as a “movement of fraud” (“intellectually empty, verbally sophisticated, morally dangerous”). (29) “It’s” to Barthes, “an execution” (La Croix). (30 & fn.) It is “a primitive rite of exclusion of a dangerous individual from an archaic community.” (30) Barthes in 1966 wrote Critique et vérité (Criticism and Truth) to respond. The orthodox requirements for “critical verisimilitude,” “objectivity,” “good taste,” “clarity” are the product of the ideology of bourgeois-oriented French criticism in Barthes’ time. In response to the usual comment, “Why not say things more simply?” (50) Barthes asks, “Is old criticism so sure that 1 For the background of Barthes-Picard literary debate which had “important educational, social and political implications” (10) in his time, see Philip Thody, “Foreword,” to Roland Barthes, Criticism and Truth, ed. and trans. Katrine Pilcher Keuneman (London: Athlone Press, 1987), 7-13; and Keuneman, “Preface” to English-Language Edition of Criticism and Truth, 15-25.

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it too does not have its own gratuitous floweriness?” To him, the language used by them is “clear only to the extent that it is generally accepted.” (50)

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If I am unwilling to re-think, to give myself up to an academocratic environment, do I need to re-write? “I am here defending the right to language…” (52) “How can I live my language as a simple attribute of my person?” (52) “The prohibition which

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you cast upon other forms of language [knowledge] is simply a way of excluding yourselves from literature [scholarship]…” (52) The “what-goes-without-saying”2 way of writing an academic paper should be demystified. I need to teach a lot in order to survive. My writing is frequently interrupted by teaching on a daily basis. Writing can only be done during breaks in which I do not need to fulfill any teaching obligations. My situation is similar to women’s writing, as described by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own.3 Absence of uninterrupted time for writing creates loosely knitted patchwork-like writing. Absence in French means both “lack of the person” and “distraction of the mind.”4 For the latter, absence nurtures an ability which concentration can2 See Roland Barthes, “Preface,” Mythologies, 11-12. 3 Woolf says, “ If a woman wrote, she would have to write in the common sitting-room. And, as Miss Nightingale was so vehemently to complain, - ‘women never have an half hour … that they can call their own’ - she was always interrupted. Still it would be easier to write prose and fiction there than to write poetry or a play. Less concentration is required.” See Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Flamingo, 1994), 73. 4 Roland Barthes writes that in French the amphibologies are extremely (abnormally) numerous. “[I] n general, the context forces us to choose one of the two meanings and to forget the other. Each time he encounters one of these double words, R.B., on the contrary, insists on keeping both meanings,

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not have.5 When writing is always distracted, there is a possibility of reading and writing otherwise. Absence, for the former, carries the meaning of poverty. Poverty may mean lack in some sense; but, to Hardt and Negri, it is more significant to read it as possibility.6 To them, thinking in terms of poverty has “the healthy effect of questioning traditional class designations and forcing us to investigate with fresh eyes how class composition has changed and look at people’s wide range of productive activities inside and outside wage relations.” (xi) Then, poverty has “the healthy effect” of exploring alternative ways of scholarship. There should always exist possibilities of knowledge which cannot be disciplinized, institutionalized or academocratized. Walter Benjamin writes, as if one were winking at the other and as if the word’s meaning were in that wink …” See Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), 72. 5 On the importance of distraction, see Walter Benjamin, “Theory of Distraction,” The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings et al, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al (Cambridge, Massachusetts; London: Belknap Press, 2008), 56-7. To Benjamin, distraction, rather than concentration, is the best way to respond to modernity. 6 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 2009), xi.

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I cannot help asking if academocracy should be “struck left-handed” (revolutionized?) in order to develop a more democratic academic way of writing?

* Socrates acts as a model of wandering scholar for me to follow. The poster for the Wandering Scholars Symposium is taken from Raphael’s “The School of Athens,” in which Plato and Aristotle take the center position. Socrates, their teacher, is marginalized. His friend from boyhood, Chaerephon, went to Delphi and asked whether there was anyone wiser than him. The priestess replied that there was no one. (19D-21A8) To prove the oracle’s answer was wrong, he wandered around and interviewed all kinds of people. In the end, he understood the truth is that real wisdom is the prop7 Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London; New York: Verso, 2000), 49. 8 Plato, The Last Days of Socrates, trans. Hugh Tredennick (London: Penguin, 1969).

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erty of God, and this oracle told us that human wisdom has little or no value. He realizes that ‘The wisest of you men is he who has realized, like Socrates, that in respect of wisdom he is really worthless.’ In the end, Socrates was charged of corrupting the minds of the young, and of believing in deities of his own creation, instead of the gods recognized by the state. He was sentenced to death. While the academia has to prove that one is capable enough for a tenure position, Socrates proved in a peripatetic way he was the most stupid/incapable one. Socrates spent his whole life wandering in poverty and tried to prove that he was not wise enough to be a teacher. He refused to be called teacher/professor. He talked to everyone to convey God’s message that the more we know, the more ignorant we are. On the contrary, Sophists aimed at producing cleverness and efficiency rather than wisdom and goodness; worse still, they charged fees for their services.9 Knowledge, to them, was functional. They are unable to hear the calling of knowledge and ridiculously are rich, powerful and institutional. Then, how can the contemporary scholars hear that calling? Can a scholar possessing excessive intellectual property and having a desire to excel still be able to hear? In OED, to profess means to de9 Hugh Tredennick, “Introduction,” to Plato, The Last Days of Socrates, 7.

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clare. To be a professor is to declare his commitment to knowledge. To profess is to receive the calling from God that I serve knowledge without compromise. Socrates’ service to God has reduced him to extreme poverty and exposed him to danger. He is not afraid of death. Socrates receives the gift from God. Death for knowledge is the only way to pay off such sacred debt and respond to the sacred calling. The sacred duty of philosophy lies in its commitment to death/life. To philosophize is to learn to die which is, at the same time, to learn to live. Simon Critchley says that to learn how to die is to refuse to be a slave, to live with constraints.10 “The unexamined life,” to Socrates, “is not worth living.” We need an examined, but not audited, life in order to learn how to die. An “excellent” university does not teach us to die, but to possess in an audited life. It turns itself into a slave. Learning from literature, the university should learn how to hear/overthrow itself, not to see/possess. Learning from philosophy, the university has its duty to learn how to die, but not to survive. “The autonomy of reason gained by self-criticism” gains “the autonomy of the University” and its sacred duty which distinguishes the University from a research 10 Examined Life, directed by Astra Taylor (2008; New York: Zeitgeist Films, 2010), DVD. Simon Critchley appears in one of the two extra philosopher walks.

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centre and a teaching college.11 And only the university can serve as the trustee of knowledge and can create this title independently. Socrates’ poverty in Hardt and Negri’s sense in their book Commonwealth is not a lack, but possibility. It allows him to explore possibilities of knowledge which cannot be institutionalized or academocratized, to explore alternative/wandering ways of scholarship. He is not a professor who can be tenured because he does not write and only teaches. He is a wandering professor who professes to knowledge. Plato is the tenured professor. Derrida sees a medieval image on a post card he bought at Oxford’s Bodleian Library: Socrates is writing in front of Plato with his back facing him. With his outstretched finger, Plato looks like he is dictating Socrates.12 In the post card, Derrida sees “Plato getting an erection in Socrates’ back and see the insane hubris of his prick, an interminable, disproportionate erection … slowly sliding, still warm, under Socrate’s right leg …”, and steals Socrates’ chair and becomes the chair professor. Ridiculously, we depend on Plato to understand Socrates. 11 Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 57. 12 Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), 9-10.

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* The concept of wandering scholars should “wander” around. Such scholars wander in different ways. They work against the grain and, perhaps, against each other. They pursue a kind of scholarship which their contemporaries do not recognize. They are solitary scholars, or scholars gone astray. A wandering scholar, to me, may be in Socrates’ loneliness. They need “to escape the solitude of individualism.”13 Knowledge is the same as the air, the water, the fruits of the soil, and all nature’s bounty. They are “the common wealth of the material world” shared by everyone. The notion of the common, to Hardt and Negri, “does not position humanity separate from nature, as either its exploiter or its custodian, but focuses rather on the practices of interaction, care, and cohabitation in a common world, promoting the beneficial and limiting the detrimental forms of the common.” Hence, Socrates does not receive money to teach; and he is not teaching, but sharing knowledge. I am looking for a wandering community to break all kinds of boundaries, to share knowledge, and to nurture love for wisdom or scholarship. 13 See Hart and Negri, Commonwealth, xii. To Hardt and Negri, the multitude is “a set of singularities that poverty and love compose in the reproduction of the common.” (xii -xiii)

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