Thinking otherwise deconstruction in the University.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Hart, Kevin
• Date: 22 March 2002

In the May of 1840 Thomas Carlyle delivered a series of six lectures under the general title, 'On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History'. * Taken together, these lectures provide us with what is perhaps the nineteenth century's most striking response to individualism. Unhappy with his period's materialist zeitgeist, disturbed by society's unhealthy self-consciousness, and antipathetic to projects of social amelioration by political legislation, Carlyle conceived history as a matter of individual strength and greatness. Far from being the product of his age, the hero produces the age, fashioning it by sheer force of character and vision, and as ordinary, unheroic people, it is our responsibility to recognize, follow and obey the great man once he declares himself. Moral culture is thus to be valued over political action; the 'mechanical' needs of economic man should be subverted by his unseen 'dynamical' needs.

We see here an extreme reaction against not only scientific models of explanation but also all expressions of democracy. For the first four lectures we view a world where power properly resides only in certain privileged individuals, conferred, it often seems, by an inscrutable divine will. So it is with some relief that in the fifth lecture we hear that 'Hero-gods, Prophets, Poets, Priests are forms of Heroism that belong to the old ages' and that 'some of them have ceased to be possible long since'. And it is with considerable surprise that we learn that the new, perfectly possible model of the hero is the 'man of letters', an Enlightenment phenomenon which provides various models in Dr Johnson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Robert Bums. The circumstance which has allowed this new kind of hero to emerge turns out to be 'the wondrous art of Writing, or of Ready-writing which we call Printing', and as long as writing can be easily disseminated, the hero as the man of letters 'may be expected to continue, as one of the main forms of Heroism for all future ages', vying for pride of place only with that other exemplary hero, the king. (1)

Before discussing Johnson, Rousseau and Burns, Carlyle addresses the importance of writing in more general terms. To begin with, he makes it quite clear that printing is a mere appurtenance of writing--'a simple, an inevitable and apparently insignificant corollary'--so it is writing, rather than printing, which has ushered in 'the true reign of miracles' and changed all things for all men, in 'teaching, preaching, governing, and all else'. (2) Little surprise then, that Carlyle turns to consider an institution which, while it looked askance at Burns and Rousseau and condescended to Johnson, had many years earlier precipitated his own crisis of faith--the university. Although it is impossible to imagine a university without writing, it is just possible to conceive a university without books or, at any rate, with very few books. Such was the situation at the first university, namely the University of Paris, which Carlyle calls 'the model of all subsequent Universities'. It is possible to think of Paris as a model university in two ways, both of which I wish to consider: first, as a material institution with a particular arrangement of faculties; and second, as a pedagogic site, with a definite idea of what it is to teach and learn.

With regards to the material institution of the University of Paris, Carlyle only makes passing reference to the role of the state: 'that the King took notice of this new phenomenon; combined or agglomerated the various schools into one school; gave it edifices, privileges, encouragements and named it Universitas, or School of all Sciences'. (3) What will interest us here, though, is precisely the way these schools were combined; how the structure of the university was thought in the thirteenth century, how it was thought otherwise in the early nineteenth century; and how it is in the process of being thought otherwise again, in Paris and many other places. More particularly, I want to examine the structure of the university from two points within it: the disciplines of Philosophy and Literary Studies; and, like Carlyle, I want to argue for the importance of writing within the university. This will involve me, to be sure, in the question of the ways in which the university structures writing; but it will pull me closer, I think, to another question: how does writing structure the university?

For Carlyle this was a question which marked one limit of contemporary theory and practice, for as he observed, 'the University which would completely take-in that great new fact, of the existence of Printed Books, and stand on a clear footing for the Nineteenth Century as the Paris one did for the Thirteenth, has not yet come into existence'. The contemporary university is linked by a powerful tradition to the first university: 'If we think of it,' he tells us, 'all that a University, or final highest School can do for us, is still but what the first School began doing,--teach us to read'. (4) The new university, he suggests, would not only be engaged in reading but also in thinking of the condition of possibility of reading, 'the Books themselves', which is to say 'writing itself'. Before we can begin to imagine what this would involve, what new orientation it would give to reading, we must go back to the first university and familiarize ourselves with its structures.

The University of Paris was organized by a basic division between the Upper Faculties and the Lower Faculty: the former comprises the disciplines of Theology, Canon and Civil Law, and Medicine; the latter, Philosophy. We come face to face here with a common problem, which affects both teachers and students, namely that the university does not offer access to knowledge as such but to knowledge as already formed in conventional subject areas. The word 'faculty', in the sense of an Arts or Science Faculty, originates in the twelfth century; it stems from the Latin facultas (meaning 'power', 'ability', "property') which ramifies into three main branches: the power to do anything; a kind of ability and a conferred power. When we talk of a university faculty, we draw upon the second branch, a kind of ability, yet it is worth recalling that this sense is not absolutely separated from other branches. On the one side, we have faculties which are innate, natural or internal; on the other side, faculties which empower, licence or permit. A university faculty distributes knowledge in an apparently natural way, such that it seems to correspond to the student's and teacher's innate abilities; but we should remember that the faculty is empowered to organize knowledge in these ways and, in doing so, the university confers power to some areas of knowledge while passing over others. When we observe that, in traditional universities, there are departments of English, History and Philosophy, although not departments of Gender Studies, Race Studies and Hermeneutics we see, first, that the boundaries of disciplines are unmotivated and, second, that the boundaries which exist reproduce the very lines of social and political power which stake out Western society.

The hierarchic distinction between the Upper and Lower Faculties of the University of Paris clearly indicates the lines of power operative in the mediaeval university. By the same token, when we compare the mediaeval university to its modern counterpart it is easy enough to recognize the conventional structure of university disciplines. The dispute between realism and nominalism which characterized so much of mediaeval academic life can itself bring our question into sharp focus. Is there such a thing as a university with an existence independent of its students and teachers; or is the university simply a name we give, by convention...