University in dark times
Mario Pecheny1
We will exist: What is it destined for?
Pois when you give me a little rose
I saw that he is a cute homem and that maybe he was wrong
Our unhappy children do not illuminate us
Tampouco turva-se a northeastern tear
Barely the matter of life was so fine
And we were olharmo-nos, retina intact
Crystalline cajuine in Teresina
Caetano Veloso, Cajuína.
Dark times
These times we are living through can be described as somber times, times of darkness. I am invoking the expression that Hannah Arendt borrowed from Bertolt Brecht to refer to the existential uncertainty that characterizes the context of our lives, our work, and our universities. Almost four decades ago, Norbert Lechner (1986) analyzed how uncertainty poses a problem for democracies:
There are times of certainty (as firm as they are false) and times of doubt. In our time, the trend points toward radical disenchantment, to the point of identifying democracy with uncertainty. The democratic order is born of secularization and, therefore, does not recognize a transcendent foundation. The critique of illusory certainties should not, however, ignore the demand for certainty. Facing an open future, modernity poses as a fundamental problem how to be certain of ourselves. If democracy fails to account for this quest, then an authoritarian response usually emerges. (1986, p. XX)
Since then, uncertainty has become more widespread and profound. I bring up the idea of uncertainty to establish the coordinates of this essay: our universities today find themselves in a context of uncertainty where restorative actors and their authoritarian discourses find fertile ground to take root and grow. With varying emphases, reasons, and mechanisms, these discourses and actors target the university as a prime target of their attacks. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought uncertainty and these attacks to a fever pitch (I will return to this point later).
This text contains no data and has few bibliographic references. The essay condenses reflections I have presented at various meetings and presentations.2, based on my personal experience as a teacher and researcher, in dialogue with colleagues from Argentina, Brazil and other countries and regions of the world.
I propose to reflect on the role of higher education and scientific and technological research in these dark times, in a hostile context where the public construction of knowledge is under attack from the convergence of neoliberal logics, conservative restoration, and the rise of fascism; a hostile context exacerbated by the extraordinary uncertainty caused by the global COVID-19 pandemic. These attacks, which I characterize as fascist for the sake of brevity and due to the political and emotional weight they evoke, target various inherent or contingent aspects of the university: its public nature and its commitment to evidence and knowledge (that is, to empirically grounded truth and logical argumentation). I also propose that some of the logics that produce unease within our university life do not primarily originate from outside, but rather result from a dynamic in which we ourselves are enmeshed, particularly the uncritical demand for productivity and an evaluative culture aligned with that demand.
In what follows, then, I propose reflections for thinking about the university in dark times: first, the attacks on the social sciences and humanities, on the public university and public science, on empirical truth; second, the unease linked to the evaluative culture in which we already exist and to which we contribute, a culture that ends up shaping our university subjectivities; third, the privilege it represents for us university members to have public spaces in which we can talk about our situation and the ethical dilemmas we face; finally, I end the essay with a call, a call to join forces from Latin American public universities to confront these fascist movements and these logics that produce suffering.
Fascist attacks on the social sciences and humanities, on public universities and public science, on empirical truth
We live in an era where research, teaching, thinking, and intervention are practices that, in their duty to shed light, are paradoxically haunted by darkness. In *We the Refugees*, a text written in 1943, Arendt (2008) recounts the experience of stateless Jews who, deprived of citizenship or not being citizens of any state, lack their right to have rights, become superfluous, and, as the author writes without irony, end up being taken to internment camps by friends and extermination camps by enemies. It is a text of extraordinary power: it speaks of her and her people in complete darkness. Of course, there are insurmountable differences between the contexts of then and now. But the circulation of political discourses in which people are “surplus”, political-economic projects in which not all the inhabitants of the country or the planet fit and could not fit, principles put for consideration according to which there are categories that can be sacrificed in pursuit of some greater good (“flattening the curve” versus “saving the economy”), rapid and “effective” circulation of fallacies and lies, all these elements I believe authorize me to bring a horizon of experience and thought in which we are unfortunately immersed.
In “dark times,” writes Arendt (1990), the public sphere grows dark and the world becomes suspect and untrustworthy. The expression conceptualizes and describes historical contexts in which many have already lived. It also refers to a state of being from which we write and think. Dark times define the conditions we face today in universities in Latin America and other regions of the world.
In dark times, we are constantly confronted with ethical dilemmas. These are not abstract or intellectual dilemmas—or at least not primarily abstract—but rather dilemmas about how to act, how to respond to the actions of others, how to evaluate and take a stand in the face of what others do at every moment, in every interaction. One of the dilemmas Arendt (1990) discusses when referring to Lessing (pp. 13–42) concerns public action versus private withdrawal, judging versus suspending judgment, assuming political identities and acting accordingly, or camouflaging oneself within the generic human experience.
Today we see how dilemmas arise at every moment concerning lives that are potentially expendable. How do we judge? What do we do in such cases? How do we interact with those who accept and encourage ways of living that presuppose a world, or aspire to a world, where there is no place for us, for others who are not us but are our loved ones, friends, or even our enemies, who have a right to be in this world?
For Arendt, “one can only resist under the terms of the identity that is the object of attack” (1990: 28-29). Today we are attacked for promoting gender equality, for our membership in public universities, for our sexuality, for defending the public health system, for fighting for human rights, for preventing avoidable deaths. It is at this intersection and in this nameless entanglement that we must identify the identity of resistance in these times. But how? What are our options?
Dark times are an evocative image, identifiable both in their generality and in the particularities of each individual. Personal times, but above all, collective times. That is why the difficult task is resisting being expelled from the public sphere, the temptation to withdraw into the unknown, to turn off Zoom. Not allowing oneself to be expelled from the public sphere of politics, of classes, of academia, is a way of not becoming dehumanized, of continuing with a life that, simply by being lived, reveals its fragile and precarious nature. At the same time, these very deficiencies expose the possibility of the right to a life worth living.
(…) It is true that in “times of darkness” warmth, which is the substitute for light for the outcasts, exerts a great fascination on all those who feel so ashamed of the world as it is that they would like to take refuge in invisibility. (Arendt, 1990: 26)
In contrast to retreat and isolation, the vital alternative is to engage in politics, to speak and act, to continue betting on life (even when death is there, lurking). That is why this is a time for politics. We can only resist on the terms of the attack. One of the focuses of my research is gender and sexuality, which has become one of the vectors through which authoritarian discourses unleash their artillery on universities and, more broadly, on democratization movements. Dark times are often marked by political and economic crises, but also by moral panic, destabilization, or attempts at sexual and gender restructuring.
These days, the issue isn't about targeting specific rights, but rather about challenging the very right to have rights. Once again, categories of people are being constructed as superfluous; a process that also requires the mobilization of emotions, of hatred directed toward those categories being created. Once again, we witness the paradox that permeates and defines the State: it is a prerequisite for the right to have rights, and yet, perversely, it is simultaneously—whether seized by force or through the legality of votes—that actively expels, segregates, and stigmatizes in many countries. Our brothers and sisters in Brazil and other countries can attest to this.
Dark times are also times of perpetual present: no past (no memory), no future. Today, with COVID-19, we know the subjective importance of reconstructing the experience of the future as a condition for the possibility of living in the present. These times obliterate such a possibility, establishing a threshold of timelessness that makes current conditions seem immutable. This leads us to consider another point, another affect: that of fear. I feel a particular unease when I revisit these notes for this text, notes written a couple of years ago, when we were unaware of the pandemic that would settle into our horizon of experiences. Marguerite Yourcenar wrote in one of her novels, Alexis, or the Treatise on Futile Combat, that “nothing brings us so close to other beings as being afraid together” (2000, p. 31). We dare to respond to Yourcenar that “it depends.” It may be so; we've seen it with the families of those disappeared during the dictatorship, with the mothers fighting against impunity for institutional violence, or in the HIV/AIDS movement. But also, as Arendt showed, fear often nullifies the bonds between people, squeezing them together, imprisoning them. Fear also invites withdrawal. Likewise, to consider another of its risks, Norbert Lechner said in the 1990s:
Fears are dangerous forces. They can provoke aggressive reactions, anger, and hatred that end up corroding everyday sociability. They can produce paralysis. They can induce submission. Fears (like the fear of AIDS) are easy prey for manipulation (1998: 182).
These dark times we are living through today in Latin America, and not only there, can be understood as a double breakdown that produces uncertainty and demands a reordering or restructuring that takes on both a nostalgic character, on the one hand, and a critical one, on the other: the breakdown of neoliberal capitalism and the breakdown of heteropatriarchal gender hierarchies. Simply put: on the one hand, in recent decades, capitalism as a mode of accumulation and social organization has failed, even as a utopian ideal and a discourse, to fulfill its promise of inclusion through the labor market, upward mobility through effort, and growth, with a particular impact on the subjective identity of the "male breadwinner"; on the other hand, thanks to the struggles in which many of us have participated, sex-gender and generational hierarchies, and the political-institutional order based on, and reproducing, these hierarchies, have crumbled, with a particular impact on the subjective identity of the "male husband and father." It is a whole world of references to certainty that no longer exists – even though such references and certainties may always have been illusions.
At the intersection of these two civilizational upheavals, spaces, times, and relationships are shattered. Neoliberalism and gender revolutions both deconstruct the order as it has been experienced for decades—the developmentalist model of capitalism associated with the welfare/populist state, and the patriarchal order of gender hierarchies. Without the utopia of upward mobility and without the rigidities of patriarchal power (the hierarchical order of gender and generation), the key points of ontological certainty in the socio-political order vanish. And it is then that attempts at restoration struggle to return, authoritatively and nostalgically, to an order that—as we know—never fulfilled its promises. The destruction of these points of certainty is superimposed on the consequences produced globally and locally by the COVID-19 pandemic: there are no economic or labor certainties, no certainties in interpersonal relationships, and now the pandemic suspends our notion of space and time. How, in this context, can discourses and actors not emerge that seek – in an authoritarian, magical, unscrupulous manner – to restore a lost world of certainties?
This restoration targets the university as a central actor in the process of civilizational change, and it is perceived as a “spoiler” in the face of authoritarian, magical, and unscrupulous solutions. The uncertainty of the capitalist and patriarchal crisis, exacerbated by the emergence of the coronavirus, is part of a long historical trajectory. One of the hostile processes toward the university, scientific research, and democratic politics is the demand for immediate utility: everything must answer the question “What is it for?” in terms of immediacy and in terms of economic reductionism. COVID-19 accelerated the question of utility and posed, in an even more dilemmatic way, the question of social utility: health versus the economy.
The attacks against universities and science are based on various interpretations of the public sphere. I won't elaborate here; the readers of this publication know this better than I do. I will simply list them: the conservative restoration is bothered by the public nature of state management and leadership; funding with public resources; the open, accessible, and non-exclusive nature of the public sphere; the transparency of actions and, therefore, accountability; and the open and democratizing character established when something is neither private property nor a privilege, but rather presented as a right to be attained and as a means for historically dominated, excluded, and marginalized groups to access other rights (public higher education and science as a material and symbolic resource to guarantee citizenship).
In times of conservative restoration, based on the spread of fake news and the propagation of explicitly anti-scientific and anti-intellectual beliefs, empirical truth itself becomes an object of distrust and a key element in the paranoid verification of conspiracy theories.
The phenomenon is not new. Hannah Arendt already showed how totalitarian regimes are based not only on ideologies with specific characteristics, but also on the erasure and falsification of verifiable truths—that is, propositional, empirical, observable truth, articulated in logical arguments with validated procedures. Some irresponsible responses to COVID-19, with consequences in terms of illness and death, synergize with conspiratorial and restorationist discourses in terms of class/capitalism (and geopolitics) and gender/generation, resorting almost caricature-likely to anti-scientific, anti-intellectual, and anti-academic rhetoric. The role of the public production of evidence and the democratizing socialization of knowledge spaces is key as an obstacle to restorationist attempts, which, as we have seen in our continent, are often very violent.
Discontent at SIGEVA
The context is hostile to our life at the university. But there are also phenomena that are not solely exogenous, or that have an endogenous dimension that makes them possible and produces subjective unease. I am referring to the demand for ever-increasing workloads and greater "objectifiable" and measurable productivity, achieved with increasingly homogenizing instruments. Michel Foucault (1978, 1979) coined the term governmentality to describe modes of regulating behavior that are not explained by anyone's intentions but by relationships regulated by their own logics, and in this sense, Pierre Lascoumes and Patrick Le Galès (2004) developed the idea of "governing by means of instruments." To put it simply: our teaching and research practices are increasingly part of a neoliberal governmentality (I use the adjective for the sake of brevity) determined by instruments, even by a virtual tool, that shape not only how we are evaluated and how we evaluate others, but also how we plan, or should plan, our careers. One of the problems that arise from this, but not the only one, is that the instruments are more ergonomic for certain profiles, disciplines, contexts, generations, and career stages than for others.
The unease felt by university professors and researchers regarding the objectification of our work—how our work is evaluated—within the context of a challenge to the utility and productivity of our work as the foundations of its legitimacy and value, and indeed, of who we are, stems from the growing crisis of public value and the value associated with the production of truths (evidence, arguments) that are not immediate and whose translation is not purely economic. The establishment of evaluative standards (Beigel and Gallardo, 2020) that correspond to certain models of university and science (“Northern,” biomedical, English-language, published in peer-reviewed papers, etc.) ultimately shapes not only all types of teaching, research, outreach, and extension work, but also the very subjectivity of those of us who work at the university. SIGEVA, that computer platform that records our production and trajectory, not only measures our performance, but also guides performance: what it values, weighs and includes, and what it does not value, does not measure and excludes.
I say it doesn't just shape our work, but also our subjectivities. It drives us crazy. It poses demands impossible to meet—in times of pandemic and in normal times. Today we must: teach, conduct research, do outreach or community engagement, evaluate, undergo evaluation and be "categorized," train human resources through teaching, supervising theses and scholarships, coach, participate in ethics committees, participate in workplace and gender violence committees, obtain grants, seek funding, manage institutions, engage in union politics, learn and facilitate the virtualization of teaching, research, and administration, publish in English (that is, translate), attend conferences, direct and manage publications, keep them indexed, continue our professional development, contribute our work to help our institution maintain or improve its ranking, and much more. All of this with low salaries and few or no supplementary resources.
It is the practice of the double bind, the “schizophrenic” discourse that poses a practically impossible demand. This is a defining feature of neoliberal subjectivation: you must be a good father/mother, be in a relationship, earn money, succeed professionally, enjoy sex and life, play sports, practice leisure activities, travel, be a good citizen, take care of your health… all that and much more, but the means to meet these demands and expectations are increasingly less accessible, and time is increasingly scarce. This neoliberal subjectivation in university life is increasingly powerful and widespread. One of the interesting aspects of this demand is that we are often the ones who impose it on ourselves.
The necessary inputs and resources for conducting scientific work, as well as a clear policy to guide such work, are scarce in Argentina today. But our discontent is not limited to the budgetary problem and the deterioration of working conditions for teachers, intellectuals, and scientists in our country; it also (and above all) extends to the seemingly unstoppable rise of a focus on productivity, situated within a broader global context, in this era we refer to as dark times. The combination of the neoliberal focus on productivity (however it may be defined) and authoritarian threats (these dark times) produces a powerful attack on the basic sciences, and specifically on the humanities and social sciences. As I stated above, we have no choice but to resist.
I propose to return for our analysis to the categorization of sciences made by Jurgen Habermas (1982) between empirical-analytical sciences, historical-hermeneutical sciences and critical sciences (Pecheny and Zaidan, 2019).
The empirical-analytical sciences, those that follow the positivist model of the natural sciences, those enshrined in prestige and institutional instruments of validation, are increasingly judged less by the degree to which they manage to dominate nature and by their long-term technical success; rather, they are increasingly evaluated based on their immediate application and utility, linked to short-term (economic) utility. Exaggerating (only slightly), we could say that they have been tinged with a kind of "as if." The neoliberal common-sense discourse on the utility of science and technology produces and reproduces views that refer to the incremental construction of knowledge. The standardized and short-term evaluation characteristic of neoliberalism raises tensions regarding the objectification of scientific practices and their link to evidence-based policies: there is no questioning of policies, since the processes of evidence production are not questioned, nor is what evidence is considered valid. For this very reason, tension is not a burden specific to the social sciences and humanities, but ends up questioning all basic, exact and natural science, insofar as they move beyond immediate satisfaction and immediate technical translation with an economically measurable impact.
The historical-hermeneutical sciences, for their part, find themselves in a twofold tension. First, they are in tension with the empirical-analytical sciences, which, despite everything, determine the scientific language—providing the rules of the method, the type of evidence, even the format of the paper, the thesis, and the curriculum vitae. The desirable formats and the standard formats of evaluation are more ergonomic for the empirical-analytical sciences than for the hermeneutical-historical ones. The standardization of the paper format and other valued formats (including the book, for example) gives more authority to certain disciplines than to others, and some ways of practicing them are more highly rewarded than others. In this context, we see today the struggle of other forms of knowledge to gain entry into the scientific community: hybrid or borderline practices and formats, such as performance art. The question of formats and recognized objectifications is a serious scientific and intellectual problem for our social sciences and humanities. Second, the historical-hermeneutical sciences are in tension with the demands of immediate utility: the practical becomes technical, and measurable objectifications are even less ergonomic for the humanities than for other sciences. This double tension of the hermeneutical-historical sciences (with the empirical-analytical sciences on the one hand and immediate utility or application on the other) is compounded by a structural bias of subordination: the tension between rational, masculine, hard disciplines and feminized, literary, soft disciplines.
Finally, critical sciences (at the time of Habermas's text, Marxism, and psychoanalysis) seem to have been reformulated with other questions and perspectives: such as gender studies and theories, feminism, queer theory, post- and decolonial studies, crip studies, etc. In any case, these studies and theories are still struggling to gain academic acceptance, both in research and in their institutionalization within higher education, and it is not surprising that they constitute prime targets of university attacks by hostile conservative and restorationist sectors.
One further comment: what has been said so far does not imply that the demand for the immediate utility of knowledge production is present exclusively in neoliberal discourses. The question of the usefulness of what we do comes not only from the prophets of austerity, but also from groups and movements that oppose them. There is a populist challenge to (in)utility, expressed in the proliferation—even within the public university—of a plebeian anti-intellectualism, as well as in a militant challenge in the context of disputes about who can speak authoritatively on a given topic or social problem, which translates into the claim of monopoly (and exercises of censorship) by those “bearers of experience.”
In conclusion, the productivist and objectified format, based on limited types of legitimacy for research (and therefore academic and university work), produces and reproduces unease within the university and science and technology community—but it is, in turn, largely produced and reproduced by the community itself. At a time when the legitimacy of scientific knowledge production in public institutions of higher education and scientific research is being challenged by a discourse that articulates a desire for social restoration (of class, gender, and generation) with anti-intellectual and anti-scientific attacks framed in a conspiratorial way—attacking the utility and cost-effectiveness of investment in these fields—those of us within higher education and science and technology institutions are aware of the alienation involved in demanding and demonstrating ever-increasing productivity, measurable utility, and immediate translation. Thinking about the temporality and legitimacy of higher education and public scientific research in a less individualistic, more collective, less immediate, and longer-term way is a challenge that the pandemic, paradoxically, seems to me, forces us to take seriously.
Public spaces and Latin American solidarity
The malaise to which we are subjected is not simply an external phenomenon; rather, it requires the reiteration of our own practices for its reproduction. To the tensions between types of knowledge, the tensions with the pursuit of immediate utility, and the exclusionary hierarchy of objectified formats, is added the malaise derived directly from neoliberal subjectivation. Neoliberalism has been able to construct an atomizing imaginary, which internalizes the guiding principle of competition in the collective unconscious. Becoming aware of the modes of subjectivation inherent in the neoliberal form of capitalist production is necessary if we intend to alleviate, in any way, the malaise that pervades us. However, at the same time, we must become aware of another aspect of our position in society. Today, many of us suffer all the ills of capitalism, of neoliberalism, of the intersecting tensions mentioned above, it is true, but from a position of privilege. In these dark times, our privilege lies not only in having jobs and salaries, and in doing work we choose, but also in the fact that, faced with the constant ethical dilemmas imposed by the context of neoliberal capitalism, we still have public spaces where we can exchange ideas with our peers and collectively reflect on these dilemmas. It is only by simultaneously identifying the causes of our unease and our privileged position that we can consider forms of resistance.
My reflection on the privilege of having public spaces to share problems and dilemmas began with the resurgence of Bolsonaro-like figures and the attacks on colleagues at universities around the world. In times of COVID-19 and social isolation, this privilege is even more apparent. Despite everything, in university life we can still share reflections on the conditions of our work and our lives. This is not something most of the population can do. It also highlights the unequal conditions that—let's acknowledge—are sometimes obscured within the university and scientific community in ordinary times: inequalities linked to class and economic resources, but also to regional diversity, gender, generation, and institutional framework. In dark times, those of us in privileged positions have a greater responsibility.
In Argentina, we have a society, a government, and a state that support university and scientific life, even with the difficulties we know and endure. In other countries of the region, the situation is more complicated. As in other moments of our Latin American history, solidarity among colleagues and institutions is fundamental: as intellectual, academic, civic, and human solidarity.
BIBLIOGRAPHIC REFERENCES
Arendt, H. (1990). Men in Dark Times. Barcelona, Spain: Gedisa.
(2008). We refugees. In H. Arendt, J. Kohn, and R. H. Feldman (Eds.). The Jewish writings (pp. 264-274). New York: Schocken Books.
Beigel, F. and Gallardo, O. (2020). Productivity, bibliodiversity and bilingualism in a complete corpus of scientific productions. Ibero-American Journal of Science, Technology and Society, 46.
Foucault, M. (1978) « Introduction au cours Sécurité, territoire, population », du 11/1/1978, Seuil/La Licorne ; « La gouvernementalité », cours du 1/2/1978, Dits et écrits, Volume III, p. 635-657;
Foucault, M. (1979) « Naissance de la bio-politique », cours du 10/1/1979, Seuil/La Licorne.
Habermas, J. (1982). Knowledge and Human Interests. Madrid: Taurus.
Lascoumes, P. and Le Galès P. (dir.). (2004). Gouverner par les instruments. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po.
Lechner, N. (1986). Does democracy respond to the search for certainty? Zona Abierta, 39-40, pp. 69-94.
Lechner, N. (1998). Our fears. Latin American Profiles, 13, pp. 179-198.
Pecheny, M. and Zaidan, L. (2019). Humanities, social sciences and science policy. In Contreras, S. et al. (Eds.). The Humanities to come. Policies and debates of the 21st century. Rosario: IECH, pp. 346-361.
Yourcenar, M. (2000). Alexis or the treatise on futile combat. Madrid: Alfaguara.
1- PhD in Political Science from the University of Paris III. Full Professor at the University of Buenos Aires and Principal Investigator at CONICET in the Germani Institute. Published in: http://www.pensamientouniversitario.com.ar/index.php/2020/08/25/universidad-en-tiempos-sombrios/
2- A partial and previous version can be read in Pecheny and Zaidan, 2019.
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