stevphen writes:

"Physiognomy of Civilisation"
Angela Mitropoulos

Until recently, Sydney University was to hold a conference called 'Physiognomy of Origin'. Keynote speakers were Adrianna Cavarero and Antonio Negri, who were to open a discussion on the resurgent questions of embodiment, origin and potentiality — questions that, as it turns out, are quite central to what transpired.

In the Sydney Sun-Herald in January, Miranda Devine denounced Sydney University for inviting the 'suspected terrorist mastermind Antonio Negri' rather than offering students 'intellectual enlightenment'. Keith Windschuttle elaborated on that viewpoint in The Australian newspaper — 'education in the humanities was once supposed to be a civilising experience' — and repeated the accusation of 'terrorist' against Negri. He concluded his case against free speech by arguing that universities should not 'accommodate people with so little concern for civilised values'. (It is an irony that, in 1971, Australian Security Intelligence (ASIO) spies similarly vilified the then-leftist Windschuttle, whom they reported as giving 'the impression of being a violent revolutionary'.)As it happened, before Windschuttle's article had even appeared, Negri had withdrawn due to ill health. And the conference — whose financial viability was premised on the calculation of celebrity and audience — was to be deferred until Negri might be able to attend or some form of the conference might take place. Sydney University nevertheless succumbed to Windschuttle's attack by withdrawing funding for any future version of the event.

Negri responded in detail to the accusations made in Windschuttle's article, describing it as 'a scandalous and vulgar act of historical revisionism'. Other responses include a petition defending Negri's standing as a philosopher and challenging Windschuttle's purported adherence to 'traditional intellectual virtues' given the facts relating to Negri's imprisonment.

But it is not merely a question of whether the accusations made against Negri (or Windschuttle) are verifiable. It is simple to prove that they are not — as simple as showing that no children were thrown overboard, that there were no WMD's in Iraq which provided the pretext for war, that those interned in Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib or Baxter have never been charged with or found guilty of any crime. Such accusations are defamatory fragments, whose purpose is to legitimate a war and policies in which every form of violence — from torture, to extrajudicial and indefinite internment, to vilification — against those designated as 'enemy combatants', 'terrorists' or 'suspected illegal non-citizens' is normalised and impossible to bring to account. The accusation is sufficient. It is widely believed because barbarism has already been retrospectively ascribed as an inherent attribute of foreign-ness. This is the physiognomy of "civilisation".

Solidarity with Negri — and thousands of lesser-known individuals — cannot therefore proceed on the basis of insisting that they are civilised, truly a philosopher, one of 'us'. Such defenses allow the defamation to continue its work, leaving intact the rationalisation that there may indeed be barbarians against whom censorship, not to mention cluster bombs and internment camps, are necessary.

This latest episode in the culture wars should make clear that defending the apparently objective space of an ivory tower — whose recourse to a depoliticisation of knowledge marks the concealment of a politics, including the persistent funding of research into military technologies, control and manipulation — will afford little more than the semblance of cultural capital. Indeed, overtures to an aristocratic detachment are strategically weak and politically isolationist, given that there are thousands outside the universities who are subjected to such attacks every day, but also because much of the polemical force against what remains of the universities' autonomy from the state (and from the state's enforcement of commercial imperatives) is founded on anti-elitist, populist rhetorics.

Moreover, such an ivory tower has long ceased to exist anyway, not least because its increasing dependence on precarious, performance-assessed labour transfigures the actual practice of 'academic freedom'. Recoiling from attacks into the presumed comforts of a purportedly disinterested academy will not, therefore, furnish any kind of protection. What must, at the very least, occur is a reflection on the really-existing unfreedoms that inhabit the contemporary university — not to mention the so-called 'public sphere' — and their relation to a war that is fought as much in the press, classrooms, and research laboratories as it is on the fields of Muthana province.

[Thanks to quite a few people who both wrote parts of this and read over drafts, and are feeling the absence of 'academic freedom' more forcefully than I because they work in the academy.]