Barthes on Provocative Language

"...the paradox here is that “provocative” language is readily accommodated by the literary institution: the scandals of language, from Rimbaud to Ionesco, are rapidly and perfectly integrated; whereas “provocative” thought, insofar as it is to be immediate (without mediation), can only exhaust itself in the no man’s land of form: the scandal is never total ”.
Roland Barthes, A Barthes Reader, (Canada: HerperCollins, 1996) 185

Aphasia

It is absolutely crucial to try to question and analyze the movement/passage that took place in the university in which the academia changed from the place where you ask the questions to the place where students (especially undergraduates) come already with the answers and a prepackaged vision of the self and how within this passage a new language is formed and spoken both by the professors and the students. A language that is related to the corporate world and a language that seems to be locked in an aphasia that creates an incapacity to invent new metaphors and real linguistic movements that could eventually bring to awareness and that could generate new questions and that could be open and deal directly with the idea of a changing self.

Said on Professionalism

“By professionalism I mean thinking of your work as an intellectual as something you do for a living, between the hours of nine and five with an eye on the clock, and another cocked at what is considered to be proper, professional behavior –not rocking the boat, not straying outside the accepted paradigms or limits, making yourself marketable and above all presentable, hence uncontroversial and apolitical and “objective”.”
Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 23

About "the profession"

What exactly is professionalism and does it apply to the academic institution? Is it a certain prescribed protocol? Or is it a qualification given by a group, an institution, an authority? How can one become professional? Does professionalism require a certain skill a certain mannerism?
A definition of professionalism of course would entail a division of professions and should we call ours the “intellectual profession”? Is professionalism driven by personal interest, by convenience? Is it a responsibility or a liability? Is it an imitative activity, a molding magma? What falls under the professionalism of the academic intellectual are certain requirements such as writing papers, publishing them and going to conferences, but for some the demanded production of papers can be a burden. Too often there seems to be a split between what one reads and discusses in a classroom and the requirements and expectations of the “profession” This type of separation between theory and praxis is exactly what turns the early passionate and engaged interest of students into an alluring and dispassionate theoretical horizon of time.
In this sense professionalism remains the burden of a bureaucratic load that provides a certain position, label, name, and a “home”. Students are introduced to the routine from the start but are not engaged in a discussion of the routine’s premises and processes.
Professionalism has become an assessing parameter for success. We as a group are proposing undisciplinarity as an unfixed position from which to reconsider the role of academia and our own work as academics.

Hazy Knowledge and Potential Seeds

It is crucial to investigate the development of “specialized languages,” particularly within academic institutions, and explore the ways in which these “specialized languages,” vocabularies, or terminologies serve to cordon off experience and create “exclusive” zones or zones of exclusion. Aside from the fascinating linguistic debate, we should try to understand what role the intellectual can have today in engaging a discourse that is both outspoken and comprehensible and how this debate is framed in the Academy. Crucial is also to examine the relationship between the imposition of technocratic/corporative languages, specialized vocabularies, and the loss of identity, particularly through imposed boundaries that level out intellectual differences in representative forms of expression... boundaries that are almost impalpable (a deep and extensive analysis of the nature of these boundaries is also a pivotal point).

Moreover within this context: which is the role of “the unperceived”? The idea of the unknown that sparks “mythical” experience, that intersects with and transforms the pragmatic space of a tangible experience, moving beyond the idea of a common ground of shared rules and specialized languages towards a dynamic in which the particular and the subjective are at the center and where this hazy knowledge becomes a crucial seed for further imagining that may eventually lead to open up cracks in the new (functional) intelligibility of the Academia.

Noam Chomsky on the Finkelstein Fiasco

Still, in the universities or in any other institution, you can often find some dissidents hanging around in the woodwork—and they can survive in one fashion or another, particularly if they get community support. But if they become too disruptive or too obstreperous—or you know, too effective—they're likely to be kicked out. The standard thing, though, is that they won't make it within the institutions in the first place, particularly if they were that way when they were young—they'll simply be weeded out somewhere along the line. So in most cases, the people who make it through the institutions and are able to remain in them have already internalized the right kinds of beliefs: it's not a problem for them to be obedient, they already are obedient, that's how they got there. And that's pretty much how the ideological control system perpetuates itself in the schools—that's the basic story of how it operates, I think.
From The Fate of an Honest Intellectual by Noam Chomsky

Excerpted from Understanding Power, The New Press, 2002, pp. 244-248

From Adorno

From Adorno's "Minima Moralia" - "On Marcel Proust" (To me, seems to be a comment on professionalism though filtered from a totally different context)

"The occupation with things of the mind has by now itself become 'practical,' a business with strict division of labour, departments and restricted entry...The departmentalization of mind is a means of abolishing mind where it is not exercised ex officio, under contract. It performs this task all the moe reliably since anyone who repudiates the division of labour - if only by taking pleasure in this work - makes himself vulnerable by its standars in ways inseparable from elements of his superiority. Thus, is order ensured: some have to play the game because they cannot otherwise live, and those who could live otherwise are kept out because they do not want to play the game. It is as if the class from which independant intellectuals have defected takes its revenge, by pressing its demands home in the very domain where the deserter seeks refuge."

the poetics of common knowledge

"The common is given, but the common knowledge is not. It should not be confused with "common sense"–that is to say, the lore of compromise a culture builds up with its own ignorance. The common knowledge might be properly contrasted to disciplined knowledge. The domain of the common knowledge has no preexistence. It comes into being only when contingent beings come into contingent relationship. The common knowledge leads not to certainty, but to confidence of action." (Byrd, The Poetics of Common Knowledge, 23)

politics and academia

Stanley Fish raises some really interesting issues in relation to the separation between literary criticism and political influence, perhaps extending that to the whole academic institution. There seems to be a consensus that the political independence of academia preserves it's progressive ideology by allowing it to be freely leftist without concern for larger political influence. The more problematic aspect of his argument is that he calls for an acceptance of the lack of political influence, and a depoliticized practice of literary criticism. But just because literary criticism is insignificant politically doesn't mean that we should give up the politics of criticism and the underlying ideology of the institution. Again, Fish seems to point to a certain academic neutrality, or isolation from the larger social arena, and even seems to find that a positive attribute that should be embraced. In other words, if I understand this correctly, one should embrace political irrelevance of the discipline because that is the context we are in, and not try to make it into a political discipline.

I understand that we are not going to change the course or the war in Iraq through literary critique and that the White House policies are not influenced by Stanley Fish's latest essay, but that doesn't mean that as literary critics we should not be political and politically active, even within the discipline. One of the purposes of our undisciplinarity is to address the political from within the academic as a way to reconnect it to the larger context, by saying that there is a link, no matter what people might think. There is a link between departmental censorship and intimidation practices and the current regime in the White House. To ignore the political climate we are in would be naive. So gatekeeping shouldn't be to keep politics outside, as though it were some kind of purity that the rest of society lacked. The discipline itself should learn to be messy again, utopian again, and seek influence, even if it is unattainable. To be political is not just to influence the government, it is to become participant in the production of a culture that is politically relevant, even to those in power.

politics and academia

While there is much debate from within the academic institution on global American politics, and support for political intellectuals such as Cornell West, Stanley Fish, Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, David Harvey, there seems to be little attention paid to the changing politics of the academic institution itself, as though it were immune to the growing attacks on the democratic process. Being students today is a radically different experience, one that in many ways replicates the deeply troubling mechanisms of censorship we see all over America. Many of these students, from undergraduate to the graduate level, have internalized the political climate into their academic thinking, becoming self-censoring in order to advance their careers. This unquestioning acceptance of career advancement has turned the university into an business-oriented institution, seriously undermining the university as a place for critical thought. Of course there are still the great critical and progressive thinkers, but given the course of the past few years, we might be tempted to think that they are the last of a kind of political intellectual that resists and thinks the givens of political mandates. It is time to reclaim their resistance and the university as a space of intellectual protest, especially in a time of unprecedented erosion of democratic values.

Undisciplinarity is a provocation and a resistance, a way to rethink the categories we live by and propose a new space of free critical thought, one that need not take into account disciplinary boundaries. Undisciplinarity is a way to think and to act, to disobey the pervasive mandates of fear and suspicion in the university in order to make it a place of freedom in a global world of terror.

Context:

All of this has emerged from the way in which our Comparative Literature department at the City University of New York evolved over the past few years and how it affected our course of study, our choice of fields and approaches to research. Much like other universities, CUNY has been making changes within its sprawling educational system to accommodate the trends towards an unfortunate professionalization and corporatization of the academic world. Being in New York City, overt manifestations of these transitions came to the fore after the 9/11 tragedy as censorious organizations such as a Campuswatch and other more virulent forms ofconservatism in the media pushed the Humanities departments in different directions. Of course, some departments reacted and debated these changes, our Comparative Lit dept further embraced the atmosphere of censorship generated by the 9/11 tragedy. There is a distinct feeling that there is a renewed attack upon the university as a liberal institution and thus the intellectual and political discourse it generates is getting monitored in various ways. The academic world has become a mirror of political trends in this country and that there is an inextricable link between the two.

On the university front, we have tried to engage and confront these issues by questioning certain policy decisions and asking for changes within the extremely traditional Eurocentric reading lists, course listings, colloquium choices and so on. Since then, our department has become a place of ideological battle regarding the future of Comp Lit itself. Not only has it led to some polemical debates but it has led to the exclusions of many of us interested in more politicized fields of study. This departmental politics is merely a point of entry in what seems to be a greater malaise within academia in the United States. It seem that, on the one hand, departments and disciplines within the United States are transitioning into interdisciplinarity, studies of transnational literatures an intermingling of fields and methodologies while on the other hand, there is a renewed vigor to conservatism and the resistance to the breaking down of monolithic canonical structures, disciplinary models and more traditional ways of thinking through the field of the Humanities.

There are subtle and unsubtle processes of gatekeeping and constructions of boundaries within the institutions that transform the fields in which students undertake research, the theory that gets taught in the classrooms, the reading lists that get drawn up and the professional market that one tends to cater to. As much as all of this seems to be exceptional to our department, we have realized that many of these practices are also present at other departments and that in our case, they are merely hyper-realized. We have begun to detect, in fact, a sort of phenomena within the academic universe which all of us realized that it needed to be addressed, analyzed, and shared with other academics.