State of Academia Understanding Power and Counter-power

Abstract

The academia within the Military-Industrial-Complex reinforces neoliberal capitalism and deters revolution in and through its promotion of inadequate forms of resistance. The politics of fear within the biopolitical management of life chances both disciplines people and empties out their capacity to engage with any radical social movement. As a reaction to this tragic dovetailing of their desire and scope to protest, people have to take recourse in and through fragmented resistance or micropolitics theorized by Scott, Certeau, Bhabha, Foucault and Deleuze.

With the postmodern rejection of the grand narratives, the academia has participated in fetishizing fragmented resistance. But the present paper critiques these fetishized forms of resistance. It argues that the fragmented resistance recommends compromise with and adaptation to the manipulative system on the excuse of prioritizing survival. Also, the paper develops a spatiotemporal dialectic using which the WikiLeaks and new social movements can attempt for radical changes and revolution.

The incorporation of academia within the neoliberal capitalist project is often criticized as the project of the Military-Industrial-Academic-Complex (Chomsky, 1997; Robin, 2003; Giroux 2007). What Henry Giroux told about his stay in Pen State is still true about all universities: “[...] faculties were becoming irrelevant as an oppositional force.

Many disappeared into discourses that threatened no one, some simply were too scared to raise critical issues in their classrooms for fear of being fired, and many simply no longer had the conviction to uphold the university as a democratic public sphere” (as cited in Hedges, 2009, p. 91). Giroux in the same interview was talking mainly about changes in the universities especially after 9/11. However, in general, the Military- Industrial-Academic-Complex since the 1990s has gone through a paradigm shift from the phase of the Cold War economy to the neoliberal capitalist one.

The shift is not just from one of the bi-polar world politics to that of the unipolar one, it is more about intensification of biopolitical power to discipline people while managing an uninterrupted flow of capital across spaces within the global capitalist economy.

Though numerous scholar, critics, and intellectuals like Henry Giroux, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein and others have already marked the incorporation of academia in both phases, an inside story of the participation of academia to the increasing de- radicalization of political imagination remains long overdue.

I would argue that one of the ways this de-radicalization occurs in and through the production and dissemination of certain theories that provide frames to define, influence and shape all possible discourses including those of activism and politics. In the era of interdisciplinarity in academia, we are going through the best of time and the worst of time: the neoliberal and biopolitical fascism in the name of democracy have been most severe than ever, but, at the same time, we also witness numerous uprisings and protests against this across the world. In this conjuncture, people finding new hope for revolution must reshape the role of academia so that a much required radical praxis for the revolution can at least emerge.

Therefore, it is important to understand how an increasing number of academic scholars, researchers and authors promote certain views of power and counter-power which recommend ceaseless adaptation to and compromise with the hegemonic systems in the form of micropolitics and identity politics. This is how the academia deters radical politics or transformative changes. In this paper, I would present a case study to show how established concepts of power and counter-power within academia are inadequate to bring transformative changes. Also, I would foreground spatiotemporal dialectics as one of the means towards revolution.

Conclusion

In American Studies, Women Studies, Queer studies, and other interdisciplinary liberal studies, the intersectional analysis or research is highly acclaimed and practiced by academics and researchers in these fields. The intersectional analysis shows us how helpful it is to employ multiple vectors: race, class, sex, gender, ability, and so on to understand the complicated and intertwined forms of oppression reinforced by intricate power differentials. Ironically, regarding resistance the same spirit of intersectionality is lost as they recommend micropolitics or fragmented modes of resistance.

Noticeably, these programs in universities have been established in the spirit of the Civil Rights Movement which was, in fact, mobilized through identity politics. Whatever the success the Civil Rights Movement and its useful tool identity politics can actually claim for, I would argue that the interdisciplinary studies should have gone through a paradigm shift in conceptualizing resistance to the interlocked system of oppression consists of capitalism, imperialism, racism, and patriarchy.

Finally, within the double play of the neoliberal and biopolitical forms of aggression, a vision of spatialized identity politics should be encouraged which should be both simultaneously multiple issue based and intersectional instead of single issue based identity politics only. But the single issue based identity politics is not only inadequate but complicit within the manipulative forces of capitalism, imperialism, sexism, classism, and so on.

It is complicit because it keeps open the potential to get appropriated by the reminded of hegemony (Gramsci). The misperception, however, remains unquestioned and unchallenged due to two reasons: (a) stigmatization of Marx and his vision of totality for meaningful changes in the society and (b) an inadequate understanding of the spatiotemporal configuration of social reality.

To attack and disintegrate the Military-Industrial-Academic-Complex with its recommended modes of fragmented resistance, we must initiate a war against the depoliticization of theories in the age of fetishizing difference and “war on terror” so that we can approach spatiotemporal dialectic for all social movements.