Economic categories are only the theoretical expressions, the abstractions of the social relations of production...Social relations are closely bound up with productive forces. In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist. The same men who establish their social relations in conformity with the material productivity, produce also principles, ideas, and categories, in conformity with their social relations. Thus the ideas, these categories, are as little eternal as the relations they express. (Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, Chapter Two: "The Metaphysics of Political Economy")
In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. (Karl Marx, 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy)
Introduction
I begin with my favorite lines from Marx's corpus of writings in order to set the tone for my argument here. This argument concerns what I call the "seminar mode of production," which, I believe, ought to be seen as a set of economic and social relations that are associated with particular forms of consciousness in our world today. This mode of production may be observed primarily in universities and research centers, but its influence is not merely confined to these peripheries of modern society. Indeed, insofar as a university degree is widely considered a necessity by middle and upper classes worldwide, the influence of the university, and by extension, of the seminar mode of production, may be seen everywhere. This mode of production, therefore, along with the social relations of production associated with it, is the object of critique in this post.
So what exactly is the "seminar mode of production"? It is the sum of the productive forces and social relations that exist between administrators, donors/funders, professors and students in the contemporary world, whose perpetuation depends, in the final analysis, on performing erudition in the physical setting of a seminar room. This definition needs to be parsed a bit. Note three key elements here, each of which will be elaborated upon subsequently.
1. The seminar functions as the crucial setting in which erudition is expected to be performed by students and professors alike. Secondary performances of erudition (by-products?) such as published articles, edited volumes and books, reviewed by peers, are also derived from the same productive relations established within the university. Performance, however, does not necessarily imply feigning erudition since it is quite possible that some performances are genuinely good.
2. The seminar is nestled in the framework of the university, which has increasingly being seen in the postwar era as a knowledge factory to be managed and run by professional administrators. As I shall explain below, this is a fairly recent development in the institutional history of the university, characterized as it is by medieval norms and rituals even today. In other words, what we are witnessing nowadays is the fruition of a post-WWII process of incorporating academia into the larger social relations established under the capitalist mode of production, albeit in a somewhat peculiar way.
3. The production of "knowledge" in seminars across the modern university system occurs parallel to the formation of particular kinds of consciousness among students and professors. These forms of consciousness, as I shall argue, are essentially apolitical, despite appearances to the contrary, and geared to the preservation of bourgeois society and its interests. Moreover, these forms of consciousness (note the plural!) may be associated with distinct socio-cultural processes, most notably (a) co-option into existing power structures of some claiming to represent the subordinated classes, (b) a stable supply of skilled workers for the labor force, whose intrinsically petty bourgeois nature favors preserving the status quo above all else, and (c) the rise of a global neo-brahminical elitism that values higher education degrees as markers of social distinction despite the irony of "subalterns" acting strategically as objects of research.
The Performance of Erudition
By erudition, I mean literally e(x)-rudis or the Latin root for the expulsion of rudeness in personal manners, primarily by the acquisition of what is commonly known as “polish.” In the seminar room, “polish” is typically demonstrated by a combination of everyday strategies: dropping names of famous individuals both alive and dead, references to fashionable theories and tools to suggest a deep familiarity with these, and/or appeals to the rhetoric of science (hypotheses, data, sampling, testing, etc). Jointly or severally, these strategies are used regularly by students and professors across seminar rooms to demonstrate proof of erudition to other participants gathered therein. Taken together, they constitute a collective performance of erudition in the seminar setting.
This collective performance, in fact, lies at the heart of the seminar mode of production. Indeed, the success or failure of productive forces may be judged on the basis of these performances. This holds true not only for students who are graded on their performances, but also for professors, who are evaluated by universities on the basis of their performances of erudition. These evaluations of performance create distinctions of note between students (an “A” student is regarded as different from a “C” student) and professors (a full professor is viewed differently from a junior faculty member). The distinctions created thus are not restricted to classroom settings because students with higher grades end up being hired in better-paid jobs or attending better graduate schools. Likewise, professors promoted to higher ranks of the pecking order enjoy substantive social and material privileges not enjoyed by those below them. Socio-cultural distinctions thus reinforce and are reinforced by material ones.
Of course, performances are not only oral. Performances in written form, such as papers, reports and the like, are just as vital in demonstrating erudition in the seminar setting. In written as well as oral performances of erudition, it is not always possible to distinguish between “genuine” and “fake” though it is possible to separate better from worse performances according to established criteria. Occasionally, I have found it possible to expose a student or faculty presenter (yes, this is true!) at a seminar who has referred to, say, Foucault without actually reading the primary texts. But in most cases, it is exceedingly difficult to tell whether someone quoting Foucault has actually read the relevant texts or has simply faked erudition by reading a few pages of summary online. Faking erudition in this manner is anything but uncommon in seminars. Students do it routinely at both undergraduate and graduate levels. But what is less known is that faculty members do it only slightly less frequently, albeit in more sophisticated or “polished” ways. Usually, professors do so by using the rhetoric of science to cloak their research findings, or by claiming authority based on their privileged access to a particular text or context. Both rhetorical strategies are persuasive enough for most audiences, and erudition can be performed easily under such circumstances.
The emphasis on performance has an obvious casualty: learning. There is no guarantee that the dialogues between student and teacher or between peers lead to a genuine understanding of the topic at hand in a seminar setting. In most cases, the objects of performance are discarded much like fancy dresses as soon as the student (or professor) exits the seminar room. A peer who took a graduate seminar with me in African Politics, therefore, found it easy to make a number of carefully-orchestrated statements on North Atlantic racism hampering serious scholarship on politics and society in Africa. Yet the same student told me outside the classroom on the very same day that she considered Africa as a continent to be “beyond repair” because she deemed its inhabitants to be too corrupt and lazy in general. One can come up with dozens of similar examples after even the slightest acquaintance with the performance-based regime of the seminar room. What is noteworthy is this: whether the student has actually internalized or imbibed what is read and discussed is not deemed as relevant as performing erudition, whether authentic or fake. This, as I shall argue next, is only to be expected in the knowledge factory or the higher education industry, the common names for learning and scholarship regimes in the contemporary world.
The Knowledge Factory
The knowledge factory is, in many ways, akin to a sausage factory. A delivery line of sausage-like products are produced periodically in fixed quantities under clearly-defined quality criteria. These sausage-like students are then absorbed into the capitalist economy based on pre-existing job descriptions and selection criteria. It is a wonderful system, of course, devised in the United States over the post-WWII era to meet the growing demand for goods and services by an expanding “affluent society.” By the early Sixties, the rudiments of the current system were in place. College graduates began to be churned out in large numbers by the assembly line of the knowledge factory. As demand for commodities grew over the past fifty years, the demand for skilled labor rose correspondingly, and the university system came to be streamlined to meet these labor demands. Of course, as the demand for college students grew, so too did the demand for teachers. Accordingly, the number of graduate programs and doctoral degrees rose exponentially over the postwar era. Since quality control of sausages and students is vital to the success of a capitalist economy, the descendants of Puritans sought to “professionalize” various disciplines, generally by making gratuitous use of the rhetoric of science, which is, of course, the religion of our secular age. And thus it came to pass that administrators, managers, and clerks came to find a comfortable home in the university.
The potted history I have just described may be regarded as a brief account of the absorption of academia into the capitalist economy. It seeks to explain why economists, for instance, have come to acquire so much prestige in the corporate sector. Or why economics has become a default standard for the other social sciences, which have striven fruitlessly to “mathematize” or quantify their research despite their actual results being closer to those of astrologers and numerologists than to those of real scientists. Or why those in the natural sciences have focused their energies on devising technologies of different sorts that are socially and ecologically wasteful instead of producing ecologically-sustainable technologies that serve communities and preserve natural resources. The transformation is hard to appreciate today because one is tempted to believe that it was always so. But it wasn’t. That is exactly why it is important to understand the socio-historical changes over the past two generations, alongside an appreciation of the underlying material basis of these changes.
However, the transformation is a peculiar one, certainly not identical to that occurring outside the academic groves. Being a medieval institution, the university could never have undergone an easy transition to modernity. It was elitist, even aristocratic, in its very substance, not merely in the paraphernalia of scepters, robes, gowns and caps. The very structure of academia has always been true to its feudal origins that sought to make numerous marks of distinction within the professoriate as well as the student body. The feudal order also sought to keep out, in the words of a former adviser, the “riff-raff.” To participate in the modern world without becoming an anachronism did indeed seem to be a great challenge to Western universities in the 18th and 19th centuries. No less an authority than Adam Smith suggested that lecturers at Edinburgh ought to be financed by their students instead of being funded publicly, ostensibly to weed out outdated and unfashionable subjects not demanded by the student body. One can imagine how the protectionist racket that is academia must have reacted to Smith’s maverick suggestion. Those were difficult times for the aristocrats in Western European universities (though not in the securely racist, aristocratic milieu of New England universities at the time). By the early 19th century, however, the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie had kissed and made up, a union symbolized definitively by the Great Reform Act of 1832. The compromise ironically involved inventing new forms of snobbery that could be blended imaginatively with older forms. British and French universities ended up creating a new class of pseudo-aristocrats at home and in the colonies abroad. In Victorian Britain, one could certainly buy one’s way to becoming a peer or a civil servant in the East, but universities provided the surest and most secure means to climb up the social ladder and thus, to perform “erudition” in its etymological sense of expelling rudeness.
Those neat pseudo-aristocratic arrangements were nonetheless rend asunder by the two world wars. In WWI, for instance, it is estimated that roughly a third of Oxford’s graduates departed the earthly realm without encashing their privileges of education. Furthermore, the geopolitical shift across the Atlantic had effectively ended the heyday of the traditional Western European university. Oxford and Cambridge were merely vestiges of the Old World in the new scheme of things. Still, Neo-Gothic spires and gargoyles continued to provide solace to cultural conservatives and snobs in the United States. Medieval markers of privilege could be conveniently accommodated within the knowledge factory in order to keep alive the pretense of a continuous Western tradition. Consequently, status and prestige are still determined by medieval norms and rituals even in an overwhelmingly capitalist world. Tenure, that great aristocratic vestige, thus continues to sit uneasily with the modern capitalist dictum of hire-and-fire. And minorities, women, and the subordinated classes of society continue to be poorly represented in universities. In retrospect, none of this is actually paradoxical: modernity depends fundamentally on the strategic use of traditional idioms and icons, and capitalism too needs institutions that transform wealth into status and power. The social relations appropriate to the seminar mode of production are thus somewhat different from the idealized Marxian abstraction of capitalism. The social relations corresponding to the seminar mode accommodate the pre-modern within the modern, the feudal within the capitalist, and the aristocratic within the bourgeois. This is because the university produces not only sausage-like students, but also cultural capital that enhances status and power. The knowledge factory is, in this sense, also a producer of aristocratic badges that awards considerable privileges to their wearers.
Forms of Consciousness and the Social Dynamics in Bourgeois Society
If the university today were merely a knowledge factory in which workers and their apprentices performed erudition, it might have been a fairly innocuous affair. In fact, it is not. The production of “knowledge” in the seminar mode gives rise to particular forms of consciousness among students and professors that are fundamentally apolitical, despite appearances to the contrary, to the extent that they seek to preserve bourgeois society and interests, that is, the status quo. There are three forms of consciousness that deserve to be highlighted. Firstly, there is the worldview of the privileged minority or the “creamy layer” as middle-class Indians call these determined seekers of upward social mobility. In this worldview, education is an input in the production of erudition, literally the expulsion of rudeness, which provides new avenues for employment, wealth, power and status. First-generation college-goers feature in this group as do racial minorities in the United States. What is most interesting is that these minority seekers of privilege actually believe the dominant elite mythology of sophistication, at least outwardly, and act as if it were true. The logic here is pragmatic: the status quo is certain to remain, so it’s best to make peace with the powers-that-be and grab a piece of the power-status-wealth pie.
Secondly, there is the weltanschauung of the plain-vanilla petty bourgeois students, who arguably are the most numerous on any university campus. For these types, education is a “given,” since their parents and grandparents most likely partook of it en route to careers as professionals in the service sector of the economy. These are the men and women who, in due course, comprise the core of the capitalist workforce in any country. Like all young people, petty bourgeois students too are attracted to pop radicalism, usually expressed in the form of peace marches, tree-hugging, anti-war protests, and so on. These are low-risk declarations of their moderately radical temperaments. More intrepid adventurers, of course, choose to volunteer at soup kitchens and churches or even to travel abroad as Peace Corps volunteers. Learning a foreign language, usually a European one, or studying abroad for a semester in a suitably exotic location are fairly common for this type of student. It is not so much that the petty bourgeois types lack a sense of adventure or genuine intellectual interests, but that their worldview is fundamentally limited by an everyday conservatism inherited from their parents and by their own mediocrity that makes every course and every assignment challenging. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge sounds quaint; radical politics seems outrageously risky; public service can be no more than an occasional hobby. In the final analysis, therefore, courses end up being about grades more than intellectual interests, education ends up being a mere cog in the wheel that preserves (or slightly enhances) social status and privilege, and the route from the seminar room leads firmly to the corporate desks of our modern-day Bob Cratchits and Bartlebys.
Finally, there is the oddest of the three forms of consciousness produced and sustained by the modern university system, the neo-brahmnical. It enjoys the greatest prestige because it is the preserve of those who “beat the system.” Professors and students alike share this neo-brahminical consciousness, mainly because the better, brighter students appear to mimic their teachers in the most sincere manner. In this milieu where the feudal/aristocratic is blended smoothly with the modern/capitalist, higher education is recognized principally as a means of acquiring cultural capital, not as an input in the production of erudition. Often, this recognition is linked to the privileged backgrounds of students, who consider themselves to be high-status creatures already, albeit in search of the right kinds of gloss. These kinds of gloss are material, verbal and rhetorical. In material terms, gloss takes the form of the latest and most fashionable gadgetry, cosmetics and clothing, preferably from brands such as Apple, Sephora and Neiman Marcus. In verbal terms, it means an accent that is free from plebeian sounds, pronunciation that is free from colloquial influences, and diction that is free from grammatical errors. In rhetorical terms, it means posturing as champions of the downtrodden and oppressed; forcefully employing the language of rights to side with causes such as genocide in Darfur, sweatshops in Asia, and animal rights; acquiring a vocabulary that readily references academic terms such as “subaltern,” “indigenous peoples,” “deconstruction,” and “social construct.” Dressing and owning certain articles, speaking in a certain way, and using a well-defined set of jargon words are, therefore, the surest means of asserting one’s superiority over others in this “game.” The social relations of production pertinent to the seminar mode entail precisely such markers of sociocultural distinction that definitively define high and low in the university system. These Bourdieusian distinctions exist in the student body on every campus, but interestingly enough, similar markers of differences are to be found among the professoriate too (comparing the average senior and junior professors around you should drive home the point forcefully!). This status game is neo-brahminical since cultural rather than economic capital is its basic currency though the game as a whole is supported by the capitalist economy (thus the prefix “neo-”). The cynical and ironic uses of the underprivileged and their legitimate needs are, of course, intrinsic to the neo-brahminical status game, which is, in its highest form, an elite competition to establish oneself as a supreme do-gooder without actually doing any good. In other words, a form of politics that is actually anti-politics insofar as claiming, without authorization or authenticity, to speak for the subaltern ultimately neglects, even mocks, any attempt by subalterns to speak and act as meaningful agents of social change.
It is not difficult to appreciate that these three forms of consciousness associated with privileged minorities, the petty bourgeoisie and the neo-brahmins are linked to three distinct sociocultural processes in the North Atlantic world. The privileged minority consciousness leads to a gradual co-option into existing power structures of those claiming to represent traditionally-subordinated groups on the basis of their ascriptive identities. The petty bourgeois worldview leads to a steady supply of skilled workers into the capitalist workforce due to the limited talents and ambitions of this population. Lastly, the neo-brahminical consciousness leads to higher education continuing to be a means of gaining cultural capital, status and prestige through the strategic use of high-minded rhetoric concerning the oppressed and the suffering, and the subsidization of traditional privileges by the capitalist economy.
Each of these three social processes, it must be understood, buttresses and reinforces the other. The co-option of privileged minorities into power structures supports the status quo, whether in the capitalist economy or in the university system, by preventing radical pressures from below to rise to a boil. The steady supply of petty bourgeois workers into the service sector is the engine of growth and/or stability in the capitalist economy, which thereby makes it possible to write off the costs of co-opting privileged minorities and supporting the neo-brahminical status game. And the neo-brahminical emphasis on cultural rather than economic capital legitimizes the entire capitalist system by invoking an imaginary, unbroken elite tradition of Western civilization. There is thus a neat complementarity to these three seemingly distinct forms of consciousness and social processes that owe their origins to the seminar mode of production.
Conclusion
In a functionalist vein, one might be tempted to argue that the seminar mode of production nourishes a social system that is stable, self-regulating, and internally coherent. Such a perspective, however, neglects the considerable imperfections in the social relations of production established within the knowledge factory itself and its relationship to the wider capitalist system. Within the university system, one ought to acknowledge the presence of a limited set of dissenters and heretics who do not toe the line defined by the authorities. Their everyday conduct is transgressive in subtle and not-so-subtle ways though open confrontation is hardly a prudent option for either students or professors. These transgressors may choose to use the grading system subversively to reward genuine learning rather than mere performance; to enable students to partake of the sheer joy of reading poetry, understanding how the past illuminates the present, or making scientific discoveries rather than to preoccupy themselves with jobs or jargon; and, to avail of the advantages of experiential learning to silently challenge received wisdom, and perhaps even the seminar mode itself. In sum, we are not in The Matrix, and it is quite possible for teachers and students to be subversive/ transgressive in covert and less overt ways. Whether they do so or not, in fact, thus becomes a matter of individual choice that we should not wish away via a structurally over-determined explanation.
Just as there are crevices for dissent, subversion and transgression within the knowledge factory, so too are there contradictions in the relationship between the knowledge factory and the capitalist economy. The overproduction of doctoral students relative to available jobs in the humanities and social sciences is one symptom of these contradictions. Another symptom is the growing joblessness of college graduates in depressed economic conditions. Yet the most obvious symptom of the uneasy place of the seminar mode of production in the capitalist economy is the commonplace notion that universities are ivory towers that promote outdated or other-worldly thinking ill-suited to the needs of contemporary capitalism. This is a rather amusing notion when one considers the tortured history of a medieval institution trying to reform itself in the modern world. After all, the modern university or knowledge factory owes its existence to private and public capital, and in turn, keeps the wheels of the capitalist economy moving by releasing a steady supply of inputs for productive activities.
The contradictory, awkward relationship between the knowledge factory and the capitalist economy also point to a larger malaise within contemporary capitalism itself. This has, of course, been revealed most dramatically over the past couple of years in the form of a protracted economic depression worldwide. The causes of this depression are essentially structural, as the likes of Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz and David Harvey point out repeatedly. The hyper-speculation that generated super-profits to sustain and expand the financial sector does not correspond to any actual productive activities or production that is measurable in terms of GDP or GNP. Anyone familiar with the economic history of the North Atlantic world over the past three decades is familiar with the astonishingly low levels of national income growth and the structural need for “bubbles” of speculation to temporarily forget the structural crisis at hand. The collusion between the knowledge factory and the global financial sector has been well-documented and justly criticized in recent months. But it isn’t stated often enough that particular theories and models emanating from the quiet groves of academia were, in fact, responsible for the unseemly rush to collude with the financial sector, and subsequently, to bring about the worst economic crisis in the postwar era. The delicate underbelly of the golden goose has now been gently slit open. It is only a matter of time before the creature, gasping for breath at the moment, dies and the golden eggs of the capitalist economy cease to be laid. Whenever that auspicious hour arrives, we shall see the end of the unholy nexus between financial speculators and their economics-trained numerologists/astrologers. In the short run, there is thus much to be hopeful: on the horizon is a wholesale renegotiation of the social relations of production in the capitalist economy as well as in the knowledge factory. How exactly these future developments will affect the seminar mode of production is anyone’s guess, but I, for one, am confident that snobs, prudes, and wannabe feudal lords will not vanish into thin air like the hard-earned salaries of so many capitalist workers. The medieval past thus seeps into the post-modern future in insidious ways long after it has outlived its usefulness.
