Alec Blockis20th Century Political Philosophy

Final Essay04/29/14

Academic Justice and the University’s “Other”

“…[B]y formulating freedom as choice and reducing the political to policy and law, liberalism sets loose, in a depoliticized underworld, a sea of social powers nearly as coercive as law, and certainly as effective in producing subjectivated subjects…[C]hoice can become a critical instrument of domina-tion in liberal capitalist societies; insofar as the fiction of the sovereign subject blinds us to powers producing that subject, choice both cloaks and potentially eroticizes the powers it engages," (Brown, pg. 197).

“…I didn’t know if I could even speak for a group that I was in the process of trying to escape,” (Lee, pg. 85)

Introduction

The University occupies a very peculiar space in contemporary liberal soci-

eties. It has generally existed as a bulwark of elite formation and, in colonial con-

texts, as the alma mater of the comprador class. Today, various avenues within the

University have embraced curriculums that engage with various forms of social jus-

tice movements, movements that frequently contest the conditions that allow the

University to exist in the first place. It’s at this nexus where the University confronts

—and attempts to build solidarity with—the populations who’ve been excluded

from academia whether they’re accepted into the University or not. While this mo-

ment opens up numerous possibilities for a would-be elite institution to be re-

claimed as a transformative political tool that’s capable of undermining liberalism’s

continued viability, the University’s political limitations must be acknowledged. In

this essay, I argue that the University is a political entity that commands a degree of

exclusivity that cannot be remediated solely through academic social justice. Fur-

thermore, by contextualizing the University and academic social justice as exclusive,

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I acknowledge their imbrication in the exclusivist and violent politics of liberal hege-

mony at large. This essay is composed of three sections. The first explicates Carl

Schmitt’s (2007) critique of liberalism. The second situates Wendy Brown’s (2008)

critique of “civilizing” and “tolerance” discourses within Schmitt’s writing, where I’ll

pursue a more detailed analysis of liberalism and the depoliticization of domination.

Third, I will juxtapose M.E. Lee’s (2011) experiences of marginalization, within the

University and academic social justice courses, with the depictions of liberalism de-

tailed by Schmitt and Brown in order to tease out the limits of academia.

Liberalism and the Political

In his essay, The Concept of the Political, Carl Schmitt endeavors to locate a

distinct—but by no means exhaustive—definition of the “political” and a heuristic

for understanding politics as they’re deployed. He argues that the political can be

reduced to, yet not defined by, the friend and enemy distinction wherein any con-

temporary social entity might recognize the latter as an existential threat to the(ir)

former (Schmitt, 2007). He makes a concerted effort to show that the political can-

not be conflated with the functioning of economics, aesthetics, morality, or technolo-

gies of governance because each of these can exist in a (non-existent) apolitical

world and, conversely, their operations must be understood as variably political de-

pending upon the political environment that they’re operating within or for. More-

over, “[e]very religious, moral, economic, ethical, or other antithesis transforms into

a political one if it is sufficiently strong to group human beings effectively according

to friend and enemy,” (Schmitt, pg. 37). In other words, politics are likely to be em-

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bedded in virtually every aspect of our contemporary lives so—for one to under-

stand their imbrication in politics—the political must be demystified.

As I’ve already mentioned, the machinations of politics can be located where

“friends” and “enemies” are delineated. These terms hold a very specific meaning

for Schmitt: the former is embodied by solidarity amongst a group of humans who

share an existential bond that’s both defined and threatened by the latter (and vice

versa). For a social entity to become political, then, it must be capable of maintain-

ing its own existence by incapacitating any enemy that arises; a polity emerges

when a social entity can mobilize itself for war. Schmitt’s employment of the delib-

erately commodious term “social entity” concurs with his contention that any com-

monly held identity—religious, economic, nation-state, or otherwise—can become,

“a political entity when it possesses, even if only negatively, the capacity of promot-

ing that decisive step [whether or not to wage war], when it is in the position of for-

bidding its members to participate in wars, i.e., of decisively denying the enemy

quality of a certain adversary,” (Schmitt, pg. 37). In this way, the possibility of mak -

ing a sovereign decision to mobilize a social entity for or against war heralds this en-

tity’s politicality. Regardless of whether this sovereign decision manifests through a

fascistic diktat or hegemonic consensus, the ways in which a state, church, or group

of insurrectionists (etcetera) can and do engage their capacity to will/wage war and

maintain their existential futurity exposes the mobilizing entity’s political anatomy.

Throughout his exploration of the political, Schmitt is principally concerned

with the early 20th century nation-state’s political anatomy and how the character

and legibility of this anatomy has shifted with the advent of the liberal state. While

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he does not endeavor to provide an exhaustive definition of the “state,” he acknowl-

edges that it could be any number of things: “a machine or an organism, a person or

an institution, a society or a community, an enterprise or a beehive, or perhaps even

a basic procedural order,” (Schmitt, pg. 19). Because the state is a recurring theme

in his contextualization of the political, it’s valuable to acknowledge that Schmitt

uses the term “state” to loosely signify a certain organization of a political popula-

tion who can be mobilized for war, such as Germany or France in the 1920s. This

description does not necessitate that a state’s population must be entirely aware of

their politicality. In fact, even if an individual or population within the state identi-

fies themself as apolitical, they remain in political congruence with the state so long

as it retains the capacity to wage war. For example, proclaiming myself to be

“merely a banker” would not render me apolitical because the financial establish-

ment that hypothetically employs me is almost certainly invested in the arms manu-

facturers or oil companies that provide my state the material means to wage war.

According to Schmitt, this hollow proclamation of apoliticality represents a crucial

aspect of the liberal state: the disavowal of its own politicality while ruthlessly de-

ploying it.

The unique governance of the liberal state disavows its own political orienta-

tion in a very distinct way: those in the position to make declarations of war justify

their decisions not out of existential necessity but out of appeals to “universal” ethi-

cal principles or “humanity.” By shrouding acts of war in invocations of humanity or

universality—terms signifying a non-existent apolitical world wherein all of the

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earth’s people are no longer divided amongst friends and enemies1—war-makers

can eschew their murderous trysts by both conducting them “for the sake of human-

ity” and positioning themselves as “universal” subjects who merely make the same

decisions that any other “rational being” would. Moreover, a liberal state’s political

needs are reframed as universal needs, which discursively positions the mainte-

nance of the liberal state’s existential futurity and interests as the precondition to

avoiding war.2 The result of this is not war for self-defense but war for conquest, for

expansion.

Almost a century later, political theorists are still endeavoring to demystify

the consequences of disavowing the liberal state’s own politicality. In other words,

various thinkers are asking how centuries of ostensibly unjustifiable wars, capitalist

imperialism, settler-colonialism, and global policing—all employed in racialized,

gendered, sexualized, and class/labor-oriented manners—can become justifiable or

invisible within a liberal framework that claims to revile all of these practices. In

Schmitt’s words:

“[These liberal technologies of annihilation needed] a new and essentially pacifist vocabulary…War is condemned but execu-tions, sanctions, punitive expeditions, pacifications, protection of treaties, international police, and measures to assure peace re-main. The adversary is thus no longer called an enemy but a dis-turber of peace and is thereby designated to be an outlaw of hu-manity,” (Schmitt, pg. 79).

1 “Humanity, according to natural law and liberal-individualistic doctrines is a universal, i.e., all em-bracing, social ideal, a system of relations between individuals. This materializes only when the real possibility of war is precluded and every friend and enemy grouping becomes impossible. In this universal society there would no longer be nations in the form of political entities, no class struggles, and no enemy groupings,” (Schmitt, pg. 55).2 “When a state fights its political enemy in the name of humanity, it is not a war for the sake of hu-manity, but a war wherein a particular state seeks to usurp a universal concept against its military opponent. At the expense of its opponent, it tries to identify itself with humanity in the same way as one can misuse peace, justice, progress, and civilization in order to claim these as one’s own and to deny the same to the enemy,” (Schmitt, pg. 54).

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In Tolerance As/In Civilizational Discourse, Wendy Brown (2008) explores the ways

in which discursive motifs of universality, humanity, civility/civilization, and toler-

ance frame a contemporary disavowal of the political in the United States. More

specifically, she shows how the hegemonized valuation of “civilized” dialogue and

“tolerance” legitimates and justifies—in both day-to-day conversation and in the up-

per echelons of the state apparatus—“illiberal” actions without appearing to do so.

According to Brown, this is achieved by distinguishing, “”free” societies from

from [sic] “fundamentalist” ones, the “civilized” from the “barbaric,” and the individ-

ualized from the organicist or collectivized,” (Brown, pg. 177). These couplings have

been naturalized as theses and antitheses to one another within mainstream dis-

course, “assist[ing] in each other’s constitution and in the constitution of the West

and its Other. Whenever one pair of terms is present, it works metonymically to im-

ply the others,” (Brown, pg. 177). She avers that the functioning of these couplings

tacitly positions Western civilization as superior to “non-civilized” “cultures”—those

groupings of people that “cannot” think for themselves—which ought to be “toler-

ated.” It is in this way that tolerance can be understood as a performance of domi-

nance between those who preach its virtues and the “cultured” Other, who can be ei-

ther tolerated or intolerable depending upon their capacity to challenge Western

hegemony. Throughout my explication of Wendy Brown’s (2008) essay, I will pay

specific attention to the relationships between tolerance and culture and how the

liberal virtues of individualism and freedom serve to disavow the political.

As I’ve already stated, the terminological espousal of “tolerance” is eminent

in virtually every proponent of liberal society and, Brown (2008) avers, a critical

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component of pro-Western pedagogy, as well. Many of us are taught in schools and

through the news media that certain people and practices must be tolerated if they

fit within the pale of Western civilization while lacking the puissance or interest to

challenge it—“gay is okay,” “Muslims are people too,” “I don’t see race, I see people,”

“I haven’t a political alliance, I’m a humanist.” If a social group, in Schmitt’s lan-

guage, can garner the means to politicize itself in opposition to globalized Western

hegemony—the “Islamic jihadists,” the Congo’s “warlords,” or “uncivilized tribes”

who oppose the Amazon’s deforestation—they must either become civilized, by

comporting themselves to US or Western European interests, or become subject to

annihilation for “the good of humanity.” Moreover, “the valuation and practice of

tolerance simultaneously confirm the superiority of the West; depoliticize (by re-

casting as nativist enmity) the effects of domination, colonialism, and cold war de-

formations of the Second and Third Worlds; and portray those living these effects as

in need of the civilizing project of the West,” (Brown, pg. 186).

Power and politics disappear when toleration is espoused; the hegemonic is

poised as the “universal” and a polity’s enemy is reframed as “anti-human,” as a dan-

ger to all. Whether a population is to be tolerated—to be treated as deviant and in-

ferior to liberal elites and those that pass as such—or “dealt with,” the functioning of

tolerance—no matter how capacious a (de)political entity might assert itself to be—

delineates global populations as differentially superior, inferior/deviant, and insur-

gent/barbaric, while the “superior” can evade accusations that their politics far out-

strip existential self-defense and the “deviant” can deny any degree of complicity.

Brown (2008) argues that this evasion is realized not only by effacing the political

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but through the denigration of people who “belong” to culture as well. To be(come)

tolerant/superior is not a “choice” open to the “Other,” to the “tolerated”: they are

described as possessed by “culture”—characterized by a primitive or child-like ab-

sence of agency due to their enmeshment in a morass of social medievalism—and

are therefore not capable of comporting to the liberal virtues of individualism and

“freedom.” Within this framework, “culture” effaces the reality that populations

who’ve been subjected to the interests of (Western) civilization are likely to engage

in resistance (read: existential self-defense; politics), while disavowing the violent

mores and laws within civil society by appealing to the liberal virtues of “freedom,”

“tolerance,” and “autonomy.” It is within this context that Brown (2008) conceives

of tolerance as, “less a moral or political achievement of liberal autonomy than a

bourgeois capitalist virtue, the fruit of power and success…even domination,”

(Brown, pg. 200).

Summarily, tolerance and civilizing discourses operate both as propellants of

and veils for globalized governance and sovereignty. Brown illuminates the, “dis-

cursive function of tolerance in legitimating the often violent imperialism of interna-

tional liberal governmentality conjoined with neoliberal global political economy…

[that] liberalism’s conceit of independence from culture, of neutrality with regard to

culture…[is] a conceit that in turn shields liberal polities from charges of cultural

supremacy and cultural imperialism,” (Brown, pg. 202). This universalization of “ci-

vility” and shrouding of violent global Western hegemony serves to justify the

slaughter and exploitation of the (un)civilized and (in)tolerable “Other.” Whereas

Schmitt (2007) has outlined the unjustifiable expanse of warfare natural to the lib-

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eral state, Brown (2007) has contextualized the ways in which liberal violence is

disavowed and, consequentially, justified at virtually every level of society. Addi-

tionally, Brown (2008) has detailed an heuristic of the political, which differs from

how Schmitt (2007) might’ve imagined warfare, that suits the contemporary politi-

cality of liberalism. I would like to ask, though, if there is a particular politicality,

immanent within Brown’s (2008) capacity to locate the carnage of globalized liber-

alism and its “Other,” that has yet to be demystified?

The University and the Political

The primary purpose of this essay is to show how the same consequences of

liberal depoliticization framed by Carl Schmitt (2007) and Wendy Brown (2008)

manifest themselves in the university. That is to say, Brown’s depiction of the “ped-

agogy of tolerance” can be located within the University, a linkage that’s rendered

barely legible for many of those who’re invested in academia as a catalyst for

“change” or social justice. While many of us invested in the University and academia

might have to do a lot of digging to “discover” its politicality, folks like M.E. Lee had

no choice but to confront the University’s politicality and its familiarity head-on. In

M.E. Lee’s (2011) essay, Maybe I’m Not Class Mobile, she recounts how her queer-

ness, bi-racial identity, and low-income upbringing impacted her understanding of

the University and how the University concurrently transformed her relationship to

capitalism, race, queerness, the family, and social justice.

I would like to bring particular attention to the ways in which Lee became

disillusioned with her women’s studies courses. It’s been fairly safe (and accurate)

to assume that the University has been a particularly favorable environment for

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White heterosexual men with a substantial degree of economic security, which Lee

has argued for. In addition to this, though, she endeavors to destabilize the idea that

courses with a focus on social justice, such as women’s studies, operate as a sort of

subversive element of the University that challenges its pandering to the elites of

liberal society. In her own words, “[a]cademic institutions reinforced class privi-

lege, but academic feminism, for all its espoused anti-oppressive commitments, did

not want to get into the details,” (Lee, pg. 86). Whenever she tried to speak out

against “the classist aspects of the academic industry and the values that permeate

it,” (Lee, pg. 85) in her women’s studies courses, for instance, she would be, “met

with slight-of-hand, apologist pandering, and dismissal,” (Lee, pg. 86). Her lived ex-

periences of economic, sexual, gendered, and racial marginalization—the very one’s

being discussed in her classes—were effectively ignored or pinned as “problematic,”

running parallel with the underrepresentation of low-income folks and people of

color in the University; “[e]ven when the oppressed person is sitting right there, the

subjects of our study, the university setting permits everyone to talk about us in the

third person,” (Lee, pg. 90). This is an example of a liberal disavowal of the political

par excellence, wherein those who preach social justice, a manifest “good,” often re-

main unwittingly complicit with the very institution they wish to critique. Nowhere

in Lee’s (2011) essay is this made more salient than in her brief discussion on “oth-

erness.”

Lee (2011) explains that as she, “began to put down roots in the middle-class

professional world, it became clear that there was a lot of unresolved, even unac-

knowledged tension and anger with regard to those with class privilege. [Lee and

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her mother] had not constructed this “us and them” world, but [they] had lived in it

all of [their] lives, and suddenly, [Lee] was becoming a “them[”],” (Lee, pp. 86-7).

Throughout this passage, Lee constructs an understanding of isolation that I would

like to juxtapose with Brown’s (2008) explicit employment of the “Other.” While

Brown (2008) is principally focused on how liberal discourse attempts to contain

and marginalize the “Other,” Lee expands our understanding of marginalization as

not only something that pits a population against polities subsumed in bourgeois

liberal values but as a population’s isolation from their own economically and

racially subordinated communities and families. In other words, political entities

that benefit from liberalism, such as Universities, do not own a monopoly on the

power to marginalize.

An academic3 conception of liminality, marginalization, or “otherness” that

focuses solely on a unilateral relationship of power between mainstream society

and the “Other” conveys 1) a narcissistic conviction that only the people sharing

many facets of the academic’s own positionality—a positionality that the academic

is actively critiquing—possesses the power to isolate and 2) a claim to universality,

wherein the academic’s understanding of a topic is intended to speak truth to the

subjects under scrutiny when said subjects are regularly excluded from the Univer-

sity, the institution that’s played a significant role in producing the academic writer

in the first place. This isn’t to say that Brown’s (2008) utilization of the “Other” is

incorrect or useless but, rather, that her capacity to speak for the populations she

3 While I may have used the term “academic” in a potentially facile manner, I do not intend to argue that all academics are the same. I’m merely trying to convey a certain positionality held by many scholars in an economically elite and white supremacist pedagogical institution. M.E. Lee’s descrip-tion of her academic career should suffice to evidence the fact that the experiences of academics in general are, briefly put, absolutely plural.

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studies—those who were either denied admission to higher-education or ignored

upon their acceptance—and to share her thoughts with tens-of-thousands of read-

ers is implicated in the relations of power that she demystified in Tolerance As/In

Civilizational Discourse. In Lee’s (2011) words:

“[U]niversities do not merely mediate the boundary between professional and labourer, they teach the body of knowledge, the worldview, the values that mark a person as professional, as “be-longing” to the middle- or upper-class. Universities teach us to renounce our sense of identification with the poor; they teach this by mainly ignoring the existence of poor people, and by treating us as “other” when we do become the subject of discus-sion…Universities teach us that we are separate from where we came from, that we are “qualified” (which suggests that our fami-lies and peers are not), that we are justified in having power over people, in speaking for the subjects of our study,” (Lee, pg. 90).

Moreover—as an extension of Brown’s (2008) and Schmitt’s (2007) concordance

that the depoliticization of the “illiberal” is a critical component of liberalism—I

would aver that depoliticizing the University and academia’s relationship to system-

atic forms of oppression and their imbrication in a broader liberal polity, which

shares these values and reproduces the conditions that these oppressions emerge

from, provides the false notion that an academic analysis of power will produce the

political transformations fought for everyday by humanity’s most marginalized. In

accordance with Schmitt’s convictions that 1) nobody can exist apolitically unless all

politics have disappeared and 2) that simply speaking out against a liberal state ful-

fills the liberal virtue of “free speech” without posing a concrete challenge to the

state’s stability, it seems unlikely that academic literature, on its own, could ever

emerge as a true political contestation to globalized liberalism.

Conclusion

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In keeping with Schmitt (2007), I cannot assume myself or my writing to be

apolitical so I’d like to make my political convictions (or, convictions that I would

like to become politically viable) clear: what must not be tolerated are the condi-

tions that put “successful” academics in a position to speak for the “Other” as well as

the subjugated communities that many students, academics, and professors are of-

ten, “in the process of escaping,” (Lee, pg. 85). Under the depoliticized guise of

“meritocracy,” those who best navigate the forms of gendered, racial, sexual, settler-

colonial, abled, and class-based marginalization, that both reproduce and constitute

the University, usually achieve “success” within academia. What ought to be

avowed, then, are the ways in which the University’s exclusivity ekes it’s way into

academic literature—especially in writing that pertains to social justice—and the

certain types of people and voices that tend to realize academic “success.” It should

be noted that the intent of this essay was not to critique Carl Schmitt (2007) or

Wendy Brown (2008) but, instead, to utilize their theories in a manner that would

unfurl the University’s politicality and how academic social justice is necessarily in-

debted to and imbricated in this institutional paradigm.

I will conclude by explicating a term that I’ve employed frequently throughout

this essay yet only defined indirectly: politicality. A social entity’s politicality is the

conditions and characteristics of this entity that cannot be measured solely by its

complicity in the state’s capacity to wage war. In other words, the University as we

know it owes its existence to the same systems of oppression, capitalism, and bu-

reaucratized governing structures that allow the liberal state to perpetuate itself

and engage in war. Therefore, if we are to reduce “the political” to a social entity’s

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capacity to cohere and wage war, “politicality” can be understood as a social entity’s

internal self-organization that produces the means for it to wage war. It is in the

University’s politicality—a reification of and in communion with the liberal state’s

politicality—where the limits of academic social justice can be located.

Works Cited

Brown, Wendy. “Tolerance As/In Civilizational Discourse.” In Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire, 176–205. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.

M.E. Lee. “‘Maybe I’m Not Class-Mobile; Maybe I’m Class-Queer’ Poor Kids in College, and Survival un-der Hierarchy.” In Feminism for Real: Deconstructing the Academic Industrial Complex of Feminism, edited by Jessica Yee, 85–92. Our Schools/our Selves, 4th v. Ottawa, ON: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, 2011.

Schmitt, Carl. The Concept of The Political. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

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