Culture and the University as White, Male, LIBERAL HUMANIST, Public Space

This is an 'author's cut' of the fourth section of 'Defund Culture'. The first section, titled 'The Culture War and the Attack on the Arts', is available here. The second, 'Culture Must Be Defunded' is here. The third, 'The Ruin of Culture', here. Versions of the first three of these sections appeared in the Spring 2022 issue of the journal Radical Philosophy. The rest I'm making available for the first time here.)

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It is some of those writing critically on race who have perhaps gone furthest in helping us to understand why it’s not enough to just have more equality, diversity and inclusivity. Why it’s important to transform the dominant discourse network and its manufactured common sense about not only who writes and publishes – which people from which backgrounds and communities – and what they are being conditioned to write and publish about. Welcome changes of that kind can be made without threatening the cultural status quo or the financial interests of those who dominate it too much. What’s also important is how people write and publish: how writing, publishing and subjectivity are enacted and performed.

Elsewhere, I’ve drawn on the antiracist, anticapitalist, antiheteropatriarchal approach of Latin Americanist theorists such as Arturo Escobar and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, along with the infrapolitics of Alberto Moreiras and Gareth Williams, to think more about this issue. I’ve engaged with theorists to do so because contemporary theory helps us to understand our modes of being and doing in the world, and to imagine them differently and so change them. In addition to that of Escobar et al, there’s the work of intersectional feminist Sara Ahmed. She has written powerfully about ‘diversity as welcome’, as ‘an invitation to those who are not yet part to become part’, to be assimilated into the dominant way of doing things; and about how much of culture, and the academy within it, is white male public space:

When we talk of ‘white men’ we are describing an institution. ‘White men’ is an institution. By saying this, what I am saying? An institution typically refers to a persistent structure or mechanism of social order governing the behaviour of a set of individuals within a given community. So when I am saying that ‘white men’ is an institution I am referring not only to what has already been instituted or built but the mechanisms that ensure the persistence of that structure. A building is shaped by a series of regulative norms. ‘White men’ refers also to conduct; it is not simply who is there, who is here, who is given a place at the table, but how bodies are occupied once they have arrived; behaviour as bond.

There’s that of Zoe Todd as well – to cite beyond the usual roster of ‘brand’ or ‘rock star’ theorists. Todd draws on Ahmed to critique philosopher Bruno Latour’s failure to reference contemporary Indigenous scholars in his research on cosmopolitics:

What I have experienced in the UK academy is what Ahmed describes: white men as an institution that reproduces itself in its own image. It is important to note that Ahmed speaks to the structures of whiteness, and indeed we must remember that a critique of whiteness is meant to draw attention to the structural, routinised aspects of ‘white public space’. Ahmed goes on to describe how this reproduction is citational – one must cite white men to get ahead.

And, of course, we only need to look at certain fields, such as media philosophy – not forgetting those associated with the ‘trendy and dominant Ontological Turn’ as Todd characterises it: actor network theory, speculative realism, object-oriented philosophy, media archaeology, cosmopolitics, planetarity – to find plenty of scholars (including women and those from Black and Global Majority communities) who primarily cite white men.

We thus have a situation in which both culture and the academy in the West are spaces where those:

·      who are not upper- and middle-class white men, or – and this is important when it comes to thinking about issues of equality, diversity and social justice – or who are not aspiring to be, and so do not operate according to their regulative norms and codes of conduct, are more often marginalised or excluded. They are less likely to be employed or published in the first place; and if they are, they are not promoted, retained or awarded permanent full-time positions.

·      who are not privileged white men – in either body or mind – have lower status and receive fewer opportunities and rewards. This can be seen very clearly in Western-model universities, as an article provoked by the refusal of Harvard to grant tenure to Cornel West, Nikole Hannah-Jones and Lorgia García Peña explains:

It turns out… that the topics that scholars of color often research are less likely to receive research funding and, at least in some fields, are less likely to be included in the very journals that are valued for promotion. Scholars of color are also less likely than white scholars to be cited when their work is published. And on the teaching front, women and people of color are often evaluated more poorly than white men, even when they are teaching identical content.

·     institutions that are not dominated by the inherited standards and structures of the bourgeois white patriarchy tend to be seen as less prestigious and ranked lower. Again, it’s a situation visible within Anglo-American higher education. As Angela McRobbie writes of the UK context:

The effect of contemporary neoliberalism in the field of education has been to succeed in creating a new common-sense about the university system. … The downside of this is that it has become normal to disregard local universities and to only hold in esteem those belonging to the Russell Group. … Competition translates into re-invoking class-based (not to say ethnic and gendered) hierarchies, and this in turn becomes part of the wider culture. We begin to get used to comments from parents and their teenage children and teachers, as well as from journalists and commentators that what really matters is getting into a ‘top university’.

At the same time, this is where things become even more challenging. For the argument I’m making  is that we need to recognise that culture, and the university within it, is not just a white male space. It is a Euro-Western, modernist, liberal, white male space. In fact, I want to go so far as to argue that it is precisely because culture is liberal that it is a white male space.

Liberalism, as a philosophy, is based on the idea of free human individuals using their capacity for reason to enter consensually into an agreed formal contract with other free individuals in order to maintain their universal right to freedom along with that to life and property. Under liberalism everyone is supposed to have an equal right to participate in the public domain. I stress supposed because for liberalism some individuals are more equal than others. This is especially true of the classical unmarked and disembodied white male liberal subject of the epistemological global North and West. Liberalism’s emphasis on universal rights has never actually been applied universally: it has always referred primarily to privileged Euro-Western white, male, cis, heterosexual human individuals.

John Stuart Mill provides an infamous example. Mill is one of the most important thinkers in the history of liberalism. He has been called both the father of liberalism and ‘the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century’. Yet Mill was also a colonial administrator for the British East India Company from 1823 up to 1858, just one year before the publication of his classic work of liberal philosophy, On Liberty. In that book, written with his partner Harriet Taylor (although in a further example of liberalism’s privileging of well-off white men her contribution often goes unacknowledged and unattributed), he reveals why there is no contradiction between his liberal values and the violent regime he was helping to maintain in India. (We can think here of the liberal belief that the individual’s free, voluntary and undeceived consent is the foundation of the legitimacy of government, this being a consent Britain didn’t trouble itself too much about acquiring in its colonies.) There is no contradiction quite simply because Mill does not consider Indian people to be fully human beings. We can see this from the way in which in On Liberty he offers a version of the ‘white man’s burden’. When it comes to dealing with those regarded as ‘barbarians’, he writes, despotism is a perfectly ‘legitimate mode of government … provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end.’

Mill is, of course, only one of the most well-known examples of the way in which, for liberalism, the freedom of individuals really means the freedom of certain white male human individuals (who nonetheless claim the right to speak for everyone). There are many more. They include the fact that the majority of those who signed the US Declaration of Independence in 1776, with its insistence on the self-evident truth that ‘all men are created equal’, were themselves the owners of other individuals as property. These slaves were neither free nor equal. At one point they were calculated to represent only three-fifths of a free person. Ever since, the United States has been a liberal democratic nation that is on the one hand based on the idea that everyone is equal, and on the other riven with laws and practices that have denied that equality to large sections of its population based on race.

It is a modus operandi on liberalism’s part that can be tracked back to the very beginnings of the European Enlightenment, for all the latter’s belief in reason, objectivity, impartiality, tolerance and respect for fair and rational debate. It is certainly present in John Locke’s view of animals, plants and the environment as ‘inferior’ non-human others with no natural rights. As he makes clear in The Two Treatises of Government, published anonymously in 1690, this means that, while they might be owned in common, free human individuals can transform these resources into private property by virtue of the labour they invest in them, whether that be hunting, farming or mining.

Locke’s conception of individual liberty – of which a person’s right to property and possessions that ‘no-one ought to harm’ plays an important part – was a key influence on the historical development of both the European Enlightenment and liberalism. Yet this structure of thought, whereby those that comfortably-off, middle- and upper-class white men consider to be inferior and Other are excluded from having equal rights to life, liberty and property, as Locke famously put it, can be traced back still further to some of liberal theory’s earliest origins in the Putney debates. Held in 1647 shortly after the first English civil war and chaired by Oliver Cromwell, these were a series of discussions among the New Model Army, a lot of them Levellers, over the composition of a new constitutional settlement for Britain. It was here that (in the West at least) the notion of inalienable individual rights, including freedom of religious worship, freedom from conscription into the military and freedom from indiscriminate imprisonment, was established. (Prior to this people only had privileges and specified liberties, which were given to them – and could be taken away again – by the powers that be: the monarchy, aristocracy, church.) However, it was accepted that these rights, like the Putney debates themselves, did not include women. Foreigners, servants, beggars and debtors were also excluded.

This is why I say it is because culture is liberal (and not in spite of it), that it is a Euro-Western, modernist, white male space. I want to emphasize these other aspects of culture and the university – which for shorthand I’ll refer to as liberal or liberal humanist (to emphasise the centrality of the human). I want to do so for the simple reason that we can’t escape complicity with the institution of ‘white men’ if, to now remix Ahmed and Todd, the categories and frameworks that are used to perform this decolonisation of thought persist in recreating the academy's white male liberal humanist superiority. In other words, we can’t expect ‘lasting change, or decolonization, to occur’, we can’t ‘bring the house of whiteness down’, if we continue to practice our disciplines in Euro-Western, modernist, liberal humanist terms: that is according to the narrow worldview of privileged white men, their regulative norms and codes of conduct regarding the composition, presentation, publication and communication of research and scholarship.

All of which brings to mind something Michel Foucault writes in The Birth of Biopolitics. In a little dwelt upon passage we find him arguing that ‘liberalism’ should be analysed, ‘not as a theory or an ideology … but as a practice, that is to say, a “way of doing things”’. Foucault’s insistence on the need to interrogate liberalism as a practice helps us to appreciate something important when it is brought to bear on our way of doing things as theorists and scholars. We may espouse explicitly anti-liberal (and anti-neoliberal) theories. We may subject many aspects of the liberal tradition to radical intellectual critique, including its marginalisation of low income, working-class people, female-identifying people, Black and Brown people, trans and nonbinary people, neuroatypical and differently abled people. We may scatter our writing with terms such as relational, ontological and entanglement and talk about how we are intimately enmeshed with our material and immaterial environment.  But we are nevertheless liberals by virtue of how we live, work and think in the world. When it comes to contemporary theory (and much else besides), such liberal humanist blind spots or datum points include:

•       the autonomous (and proprietorial) human subject  
•       the self-identical rational liberal individual
•       the named author as romantic / modernist genius
•       linear thought
•       the long-form argument
•       the coherent, single-voiced narrative
•       the consecutively paged book / journal article designed to be read in a progressive temporal order
•       the unified, homogeneous, fixed and finished autograph text
•       the perfect object, published in uniform, multiple-copy editions, distributed on mass industrial basis
•       monumentality      
•       creativity
•       self-expression
•       authenticity
•       copyright

To provide a specific example: if – riffing on the argument of Jessica Pressman and others – the book is a symbolic representation of and proxy for white, male, liberal humanism, then we can’t change that simply by publishing or citing larger numbers of books by thinkers who are not white men. That risks just being more white, male, liberal humanism. As Ahmed concludes: ‘It takes conscious willed and wilful effort not to reproduce an inheritance.’ (Given what I said in previous sections of 'Defund Culture', it’s worth remembering that the novel is also a bourgeois European invention.) We don’t necessarily need new books, then – or indeed new theory. (Or new novels.) All that risks just being more of the same.

This is why it’s important to go further than ‘situating’ one’s knowledge, to use Donna Haraway’s influential term. (‘Situated knowledge’ is a term that has itself been dislocated from its embeddedness in specific knowledge situations to become something of a fashionable floating signifier in the contemporary humanities.) Or, for that matter, acknowledging one’s individual authorial subject position – say, as an academic in a Western university system, working in a disciplinary environment strongly influenced by European (French, German, Italian) theory, as reflected in the references made and sources draw upon. Or even, in Otegha Uwagba’s words, checking one’s ‘privilege (white or otherwise) … to make clear to others that you are at least aware of the unfair advantages you’ve been granted by virtue of skin colour, class background, gender or whatever your own particular stroke of luck.’ For one thing, as Uwagba points out: ‘Conveying that self-awareness’ can become ‘an end in itself, a moral get-out clause alleviating the pressure to do anything more substantial to offset that privilege’. For another, you can do all that and continue to act as a white, male, liberal humanist, whether you identify as one or not. What we really need are new, non-liberal ways of working and living.