Reflections on the Cornel West affair

That Cornel West was denied tenure at Harvard because he is black, and a black radical public intellectual, and the nation's wealthiest and most prestigious university is a bastion of white supremacy, is not self-evident as both he and his defenders seem to be assuming. And there is something about that, which I will come to at length here, that is truly and deeply problematic, though in another way than is being assumed, a problem that is both different from and larger than the oppression of an identity position that is being offered up here as example of the persistence of racial exclusions, a persistence that is real enough in the American academy whatever its causes.

The American system of higher education is meritocratic, though it is also chock full of left-wing intellectuals, yet blacks are few among them and those with a strong public presence are few as well. The truth about Affirmative Action is that it mostly benefitted Jewish, white, and Asian women. It also is part of a broad way of thinking that assumes that if in doubt, it's oppression, and that means of us by virtue of the identity of those who by intent or accident were excluded. The problem is not with the possibility of this happening but the way this narrative is taken up prefabricated and readymade, and applied in judging particulars far too loosely. Nothing in West's Christian radical anti-neocolonial and anti-capitalist ideology, with its Christological twist (something he shares with a few other left intellectuals, including Zizek), a broad one of which he is an important articulator, is negated by this observation, which is the claim that the right is always making about the American liberal left, and with reason, as it is a point on which the liberal left is indeed vulnerable, though nothing in his ideology warrants the inference to the judgment that it can be applied (and so does apply) here either.

University tenure committees always intend, whether or not in so doing they merely pretend, to be making decisions based on the quality of the person's scholarly work. I am in no position to judge, and most people aren't. Is West one of the greatest, and not merely one of the most politically correct (which is something that I think both exists and is worth affirming as value and norm), scholars in the American university world? There are many great scholars whose tenured positions were at least prestigious sites.

The obvious error and oversight in thinking here is the unsaid of West's recent interview by black philosopher George Yancy, which is published on Truthout, where West defends himself by going on about the influences and commitments in his style of thinking. He seems to have a certain idea of what it is to be a radical left intellectual in America. The interview is, to be sure, a good advertisement for his books. West even says astonishingly that the New York Review of Books, which like most major book reviews in English is left-liberal, is part of a new form of Jim Crow because of what, or who, they do and do not publish.

There is something I find very annoying in the reflexive assumption that something is racism. It must be related to the broad assumption that our society is in essence racist and oppressive in a set of ways. Therefore, naturally it follows that if something might be oppression by virtue of race or something else, then it is. If it can be thought and said, it is true. This assumption is very damaging for our republic. There is a problem here that is both epistemic and metaphysical: it is one of presupposing what is posited, and totalizing the field of phenomena by means of a thesis about its cause and meaning.

In fact, judgments that something is racism, or that any phenomena is explained by any theory, always have the potential for some arbitrariness. How do you decide that a fact, event, or situation, is an instance of this broad structure or systematic tendency? These are judgments in which a universal claim is applied to a particular, and the applicability is usually assumed, though it must be argued, and other accounts incompatible with it refuted. Our political culture, with its strong doses of both ad hominem thinking and intolerance, generally involves a tacit tactic of making arguments that suppose that if a concept or theory can be applied to explain a particular, than the particular is explained by it, and the claim is true. Thus, the liberal left, though not it alone, is quite regularly captive of a way of thinking that infers the truth of claims from the fact of their articulation, in a way is more at home in our adversarial law courts than in scientific and scholarly thinking proper. Our polemical political culture is one in which people assert claims to truth and (property) right on the basis of who they are and what they want, are certain that they are true and right because it seems so to them, and everyone takes for granted that the most impassioned arguments, which more or less all divide people along the lines of our two major political parties, are instances of might makes right, and thought legitimates a position rooted in material wants in a field of scarcity. It also seems to go with this that much of the disputation is ad hominem, as the arguments of West and his defenders also are (they denied him tenure because they don't like who he is), and that most political conflicts are, qua disagreements, treated on the model of the lawsuit. This may go with the broad shift in our system of government from legislative authority to the administrative and judicial kind, a shift that is furthered by the use in combination of funding of lawmakers by private donations and arranging of continued voter support by gerrymandering. Everyone knows that different political positions are not adjudicated by arguments, even in the courts, the sole branch of government today that preserves a robust notion of reason, but by positions that represent the interests of the parties. We have an interest-based representative democracy and a system of activism that works by funding politicians to answer to corporate and issue-based lobbies and by these same lobbies supporting court cases that are decided largely by the ideological preferences of the party that holds the nation's presidency. In this world, reason along with inquiry dies and is replaced with sophistry.

But there is something else that this fracas points to, and it is both absolutely valid and the real takeaway here. The intellectual world like the professional world generally is, in being competitive, ipso facto exclusionary, and cannot be otherwise. Ought it to be less so? Exclusions can be relative and absolute. French intellectual Julia Kristeva once remarked that there are not enough professors. This is an astonishing even more for a French intellectual to say, since America has many more colleges and universities than France, where they are all government-run, and more professors, though today most teaching of undergraduates is done by dismally low-paid adjunct professors, who after being trained for a life of scholarly research and the kind of creative writing particular to it, are placed in positions where they will never be able to do much of the real work of their professional calling. The university system has been privatized, and there are signs that it is also in the early stages of being destroyed, because our neoliberal capitalism doesn't need it. But Kristeva is right, and for several reasons. One is that we don't have anywhere near enough scholarship in literatures and their languages. Consider one example: Polish writers have won several Nobel Prizes. It is a great national literature. Not many Americans speak it, but also few have the chance to study it. How many professors of Polish literature are there in America? What would a scholar of Polish literature do to get a job that pays a living? Where would he or she teach? Probably only in Poland. That's a shame. Language courses are mostly popular, like everything else, among students because of assessments and guesses about how one might find a job, especially given the enormous burden to most middle-class Americans today in a privatized educational system of student loan debt. People now go to college or university not to learn about world and self in a general way, and become a thinking citizen rather than a merely obedient one, which is what you learn in an American high school. Instead, they do so to be able to get a professional job.

It would not make any sense to suppose that all very good scholars, of whom there are many thousands, should get tenured jobs as professors at Harvard. But something else does make sense, and it is a reason why, if scarce opportunities should be kept meritocratic, the chance to study, learn by doing so, or do scientific or scholarly work is one that should be available to all who want it. That is the democratic socialist ideal. And that its reason for being.

Cornel West should be given tenure somewhere, radical intellectuals should write and be read, and there is not enough high-quality black studies among the many radical left thinkers trained or employed by American universities. These anodyne and self-evident conclusions point to others that are less so. Moreover, in ways that both our left-liberals and conservatives fail to rightly understand, understanding what is at stake here is key to either reinventing our republican society on more democratic grounds or even salvaging what persists of the forms of it we suppose our institutions and culture to have.

The problem with the left in America today is less with its theories than its tactics. But this is partly a problem of totalizing theories and judgments that apply them to particular cases. West, it must be said, is a leftist who is not a liberal in the ways some on the right and some of us on the left (in fact) find problematic. He has famously quarreled with other black intellectuals whom he finds to be too close to a neoliberal thinking rather than the left critique of racial capitalism of which he is a major representative, along with people like Achille Mbembe, David Lloyd, and many others. From a standpoint that accepts the correctness of the left's theories and its desires and motives, the problem is a political field structured in a way that favors certain tactics, and the way the system turns radical thought into radical chic and its militancy that functionally is more sophistical and less challenging than it would be.

We need more black scholars, and one reason there are not enough of them is that our educational system is thoroughly class-stratified because public schools are funded out of local property taxes, instead of being uniform at a state or federal level. While white resistance to it obviously was and is greatly interested and culpable, tactics like busing and Affirmative Action are solutions that accept the terms of capitalist regulation of opportunities by markets and austerity, and merely aim at a resorting of who, by demographical group, is included in which more or less privileged groups. This is a system that instead of abolishing its de facto aristocracies promotes the sons and daughters of workers as candidates for king or queen. What pains me about the loss represented by the West affair, beyond these methodological caveats concerning the way it has been interpreted on the liberal left, is that Cornel West is one of the American intellectual world's best positioned thinkers to challenge liberal solutions to the problems the left rightly cares about. The need for inquiry and theory being applied to social problems is most acute when the problems exceed the solutions, and as West with his great moral intellectual integrity knows very well, it is this disconnect that calls us to the difficult tasks of thinking.

Whatever particular cases mean or tell us, their adjudication will not solve our social problems, because the field of politics exceeds, necessarily and infinitely, that of law and so also morality and justice.   What this case tells me is that we need to democratize more the life of the mind in American society.  Democracy depends on reason, argument, and rigor in thinking, and on non-monetized markets of art and ideas.  There are positive and hopeful signs technologically concerning the latter, though the utility of our markets for culture and ideas is limited by the way they are indirectly marketized, in ways that tend to reduce meaning and its dependence on thought to value as dependent on taste and preference, in a system that remains profitable because of how the objects of the latter are organized and distributed, with the use of surveillance to keep consumer, citizen, and worker profit-generating power effectively surveilled, and thus limited and controlled. The danger of our form of democracy is what it always was, sophism, or the eclipse of thinking by the mere ability to speak in a space of common appearance.   The too little remarked yet obvious fact about our educational system is that, unlike that in many other countries, like France, whose society is often and rightly considered a related but divergent model to ours, it doesn’t teach people to think, but to have right opinions and maybe be creative in articulating them.  The proof of this is that almost no one in America believes that thinking is a skill involving a work that goes beyond the having of opinions, unless they are in a profession like law or academia, that does involve thinking according to some canon of rigor proper to the idea of doing so. At the upper levels, our schools promote both an untrammeled creativity (something Americans excel at, and it isn’t all bad) and ‘leadership’, which arguably is the main attribute sought by our colleges and universities, run as they are on a corporate business model, in recruiting the future professionals who are meant to be their students. At the same time, it is stratified in ways that by design directly reflect social differences maintained on an economic basis.  The system of public schools in this country is so organized that a person’s life opportunities in terms of job satisfaction and earnings are largely a function of the neighborhood their parents lived in, which determines what schools they attended, and the level of their funding. Might it be that while taste or preference and the subjectivity of one’s own opinion as a kind of private property right is a mere norm of consumerist equality, knowing facts or truths and so having the right opinion is an authoritarian one, and ‘creativity’ is a norm that implies social distinction; the properly democratic norm of the mind is reason, which supplies non-arbitrary canons of thinking correctly; it is in any case the form of thought proper to modern republican polities with their idea of the subject who is also a citizen. The French system is so much better than ours not only because school children read literary classics, but also because it is based on the essay exam rather than the neoliberal multiple choice one, which identifies correctness in thinking with representation of data in the form of ‘facts’. The system is also national in both funding and teacher placement. If our schools had essay exams, they would prepare everyone for the university studies the experience of which is what divides the ruling professional class from that of mere employees who must do what they are told, like soldiers, and like slaves. Thus in several ways, and this is a fact that should concern more black Americans who might want their sons and daughters to consider being scientists, scholars, or social theorists and not only sports or pop music stars or something in the field of opportunities most likely presented to them in the course of their schooling, — as well as all of us who would benefit if this were more true, and we would — what limits the democratic character of our society is its capitalist one.