Academia and the Political
A Conversation between Prasanta Chakravarty and Pothik Ghosh Institutions and Their Sites Prasanta: Over the past few years there has been a steady shift in the way the academic world is being reorganised and engineered in India. If the break-up of the USSR and the fall of the Berlin Wall gave an impetus to the initial set of policy shifts in the early nineties, the UPA II has been far more ruthless and clinical in its push and success for a set of reforms in the educational sector that is in consonance with larger social changes we witness. The public relations have been quite effective on the face of it. The middle class too, in some sense, is now ready and bloodthirsty to usher in rank consumerism and globalised politics in education. The economic downturn over the past few years has paradoxically emboldened the government to experiment with further reforms and surveillance. In this context, different kinds of responses are emerging from within the educators and intellectuals themselves. One form of response intrigues me a lot—the response of the responsible institution builder, the one who is inclusive, large hearted and reaches out to various ‘stakeholders’. Pothik: You do, indeed, have very good reasons to be intrigued. But my question is how exactly should one map such responses, both in terms of their symbolic economy, and their articulation within the constitutive political-economic structure of the university as an exclusive and exclusivist site of intellectual production? Don’t you think such responses, which are discursively grounded in liberalism, function more as ideological legitimation for the policy-bound neoliberal offensive on our education system, the higher education system in particular, rather than anything else – namely, a liberal politics to democratise the university? Given the changed character of the conjuncture, is it even possible for such liberal responses to be truly effective with regard to democratisation of the university in any small measure? For, what else can the persistence of liberal politics in a neoliberal conjuncture be save an ideology that legitimises the latter and its attendant state-formation and institutional architecture? The principal question for those interested in resisting such all-out neoliberal attack on the liberal institution of the university, and its humanist ethos, in order to deepen the process of its democratisation, is how to envisage a critical struggle that is simultaneously directed both at the authorities and this petty-bourgeois layer of liberal intermediaries in their myriad variety from among the academic community. Can such a politics be imagined without making problematisation and critique of the bourgeois-liberal conception of academics as an exclusive and exclusivist modality of intellectual production, and university as its constitutive material-institutional site, its integral part? That brings me to your assertion about the middle class being, “in some sense now ready and bloodthirsty to usher in rank consumerism and globalised politics in education”. I do not dispute the correctness of such a statement, and, yet, I tend to think that the way you have framed the problem bespeaks a nostalgic and moral registration of the same. Here I would wish to repeat my earlier concerns in a slightly different register. Is it possible, for instance, to develop an effective and comprehensive critique of the neoliberal commodification of education in terms of education as a right? After all, is not the liberal discourse of rights, on which most current critiques of commodification of education have willy-nilly tended to base themselves, structurally and epochally continuous with the neoliberal discourse and practice of commodification (which ought to be read as marketisation)? I mean what unites the two moments — embedded liberalism of early capitalism and neoliberalism of late capitalism — is epochality of the capitalist structure or logic of commodity fetishism, which includes as much the commodity fetish as the fetish character of the socio-economic relations that are its constitutively objective condition of possibility. To the extent that differential inclusion is the conceptual and structural presupposition for the discourse and practice of the politics of rights, such politics is nothing but the concrete expression and reproduction of the fetish character of social relations. That, in other words, is the capitalist specificity of power relations — the socially mediated nature of power. Don’t you think the institutionalised system of education in general, and the institutionalised system of higher education in particular, has, right from its inception, been integral to the segmentation of labour-power and labour market, and thus the stratification of the entire formation of production and socialisation? Therefore, can a struggle against the neoliberal reorganisation of our education system, the university particularly, be truly effective unless it becomes constellationally integral to a larger radical movement that seeks to decimate the epochal capitalist logic of segmentation of labour-power by confronting that logic in its conjuncturally specific and concrete mediation? Between Democratisation and Negation: Love in the Time of the Public Sphere Prasanta: You have brought up two very specific points of interest. The first is the very definition of a university—which you feel by its very nature is a liberal humanist institution and hence the role of the professors who reach out in order to get into a game of balancing various stakeholders, or ask for time from the parliament and so forth in order to actually fortify liberal democratic structures of governance are actually fulfilling their role at best as social democrats. I can see your critique has a lasting point, for you are seeking a (a) a reconsideration of the institution of university itself and (b) that such institutions and its members, students and functionaries cannot function in void but rather have to relate to material changes that are happening outside of such cocooned world. These are important arguments. To the first—whether a radical critique of the university itself is required is a point that has been thought by a few in different ways. There is one that is currently doing the rounds. It is a further refined way of ushering