1

[This essay was delivered on 11 February 2000 as the invited Munro Beattie Lecture, 1999-2000 at Carleton University. The version that appears here incorporates revisions made in 2003 for a projected volume, to be published by Carleton University Press, that was to have brought together the four most recent Munro Beattie lectures, but that never appeared. Abbreviated versions of this paper were delivered as invited lectures to the Miedzywydzialowy Zaklad Studiow Amerykanskich of the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland (18 April 2000), and at the conference on Italy and Canadian Culture: Nationalisms in the New Millennium at the University of Udine, Italy (18-20 May 2000), but it has not previously been published.]

[Index: Canadian politics, US politics, higher education, corporatism, civil commons, critical humanism][Date: February 2000, 2003]

Forging Freedom: Critical Humanist Strategies of Resistance to Corporatism

Munro Beattie Lecture, 1999-2000, Carleton

University

Michael Keefer

1. Inventing crises

I wonder whether the widespread failure of North Americans to

notice that we are living in the midst of a social and political

2

revolution stems more distinctly from inattention, from diffidence, or

from incredulity. In the United States, one might incline toward the

former explanation: our southern neighbours have a well-nurtured

capacity (not seriously dented by the events of September 11, 2001

and their aftermath) for remaining sublimely unaware of much that

goes on in the world. Diffidence, on the other hand, is supposed to be

a national characteristic of Canadians: have we perhaps noticed the

transformations taking place all around us, but all-too-tactfully

refrained from giving them a name? Or have we simply been unable

to credit what is happening, either because we think of revolutions as

events that occur, by definition, elsewhere and in other times, or else

because the very notion of a revolution has been so debased by its

application in advertising to everything from automotive styling to

men's toiletries that we greet fresh deployments of the term with a

yawn?

Whatever else we might fault them for, the corporatist

revolutionaries of our time cannot be accused of having failed to

disclose their intentions—and their strategies as well. Ronald Reagan

campaigned for the American presidency in 1980 as the bringer of

something he called “the Reagan Revolution”; a year into his first

term his budget director, David Stockman, revealed with surprising

candour the way in which Reagan’s handlers (if not the president

himself) understood what they were up to. All the talk about balanced

budgets and prosperity through “trickle-down” economics was hot air,

Stockman confessed. The real goal was a radical redirection of

resources away from social spending, and a deliberate amassing of

huge budget deficits that would make this redirection irreversible by

depriving future governments of the wherewithal to restore the

welfare and civil rights entitlements cut away by the Reaganites.1 A

1 See Stockman’s interview with William Greider in the Atlantic Monthly (November 1981). As George Clark has observed, “Stockman's candour cost him his job, but mentioning his name in the mainstream media is politically and

3

liberal welfare-state future, should the opposition to this radical

conservatism ever sufficiently reassert itself to the point of

contemplating such a thing, would be discovered to have been pre-

emptively, already and for ever, bankrupted.

The anxiously proleptic temporality disclosed by Stockman’s

indiscretions, this desire to constrain succeeding generations by

bankrupting any possible alternative to the future that is being

envisioned and announced, is one early sign—despite all the obvious

continuities with prior forms of capitalist governance—of the radically

transformative nature of what I will be calling the corporatist

revolution. There is, of course, a large disjunction between the

Reaganite rhetoric of economic and military rejuvenation, which

implied the opening out of an expanding field of choices for the

American polity, and the force of negation revealed in this desire for a

foreclosure of all futures but one—beneath which may be detectable a

more deeply rooted readiness to cancel human futures altogether. It

was, after all, a colleague of David Stockman in Reagan’s first cabinet,

Environment Secretary James Watt, who justified the issuing of mining

permits in national parks by remarking that Jesus expects us to have

exhausted all of the planet’s resources before he returns to earth. 2

The strip-mining of national parks would, in this view, accelerate the

Second Coming, the end of time, the cancellation of futurity in a

blessed eternal present.

Brian Mulroney, Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin, Preston Manning,

Stockwell Day, Stephen Harper, and the other politicians who since

1984 have collaborated in hitching the Canadian caboose ever more

tightly onto the tail end of the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush Express

journalistically incorrect” (“Brian Segal on the University: A Response,” ACCUTE Newsletter [June 1994]: 8). 2 Astonishingly, this statement did not cost Watt his job; only after he had scornfully summed up a congressional committee to which he had to report as consisting of a black, a woman, a Jew and a cripple (the latter being Senator Daniel Inouye, who lost a leg in military service) was President Reagan persuaded to replace him.

4

have, on the whole, been less forthcoming about their motives than

David Stockman was. But the inhabitants of Ontario, our most

populous and economically most powerful province, have had in

Premier Mike Harris another self-proclaimed revolutionary—and in the

figure of John Snobelen, Harris’s first Education Minister, one of the

philosophers not just of Harris’s “Common Sense Revolution,” but also

of the larger corporatist revolution of which it was a part. Shortly after

taking office in 1995, Snobelen had himself videotaped explaining his

plans for change to senior education ministry bureaucrats—one of

whom had the decency to share a copy with the media. Despite the

informal looseness of his syntax, Snobelen’s meaning is clear:

“[We must] bankrupt the actions and activities that

aren’t consistent with the future we’re committed to.

But there are a couple of things we need to get done

properly along the way. One of those is ... to declare

the future.

“.... It’s not a very collaborative process. That

needs to be done before what needs bankrupting and

how to bankrupt it occurs.

“I like to think of it as creating a useful crisis....

Creating a useful crisis is what part of this will be

about. So the first bunch of communications that the

public might hear might be more negative than I

might be inclined to talk about [otherwise].

“Yeah, we need to invent a crisis. And that’s not an

act just of courage—there’s some skill involved.”3

3 These excerpts from Snobelen’s talk are derived from the linked quotations given by Richard Brennan, “Minister plotted ‘to invent a crisis’,” The Toronto Star (September 13, 1995): A3; Lisa Wright, “Apologize for remarks Harris tells Snobelen,” and Thomas Walkom, “Snobelen scales windy heights of bafflegab,” The Toronto Star (September 14, 1995): A3, A25. A slightly different transcription of the concluding sentences quoted here appeared in an unsigned article, “Harris Mainly Mum on Plans for Post-Secondary Education in Ontario,” in the CAUT/ACPPU Bulletin (November 1995): 6.

5

Snobelen’s words were dismissed by some commentators as

mere “bafflegab”—an interpretation he encouraged when he

responded to calls for his resignation by claiming that he did not mean

to “invent a crisis” in any normal sense, but had been using a

management-consultant jargon in which these plain words signified

something else altogether. But with due allowances made for

differences in historical context and in the scale of the bankrupting at

hand, Snobelen’s project is quite obviously a development of the

Reagan Revolution, and his posturings provide a glimpse of the

mental workings that underlie and correspond to the radical material

transformations being organized by contemporary capitalist

corporatism.4 The strategy Snobelen enunciated was promptly

followed by the Harris government, with invented crises in public

housing, welfare, environmental regulation, labour legislation,

municipal restructuring, primary and secondary education, health

care, urban transportation, and public utilities, including water supply

and the generation and distribution of electricity. Higher education

has also come in for its share of attention.

2. Defunding criticism

With cuts of 25 percent during the 1990s to university budgets

that in the late 1980s stood at little more than two-thirds of the

funding per student provided to equivalent state universities in the

northern United States, Ontario had by the beginning of the new

millennium sunk to a level of per capita funding of post-secondary

education that put the province last or second-last among the sixty

4 James Watts’s apocalyptic ramblings deserve our close attention for the same reason; however bizarre they may seem, similar forms of thought appear both among the leaders of the Canadian Reform/Alliance Party and among the members of George Bush Jr.’s cabinet.

6

jurisdictions with post-secondary systems north of the Rio Grande. But

in this case the invented crisis is being compounded by demographic

factors. University administrations have belatedly woken up to the fact

that the demographic bulge known as the “baby-boom echo,” which

will produce a ten to fifteen percent increase in the annual student

cohort, is currently moving up through the Canadian school system,

and will arrive at the college and university level at approximately the

same time as the “double cohort” that Ontario’s elimination of Grade

13, the final year of secondary school, will produce in 2003. 5 In

anticipation of an overall enrollment increase of forty percent by 2010,

the Council of Ontario Universities in October 1999 urgently requested

the commitment of at least $1 billion per year in additional base

funding, in addition to the $742 million that the government had

announced would be allocated to capital funding.6 The Harris

government promptly slapped the universities away from the cookie-

jar with a further $30-million cut, and then in February 2000 initiated a

reduced $660-million program of capital spending on universities and

community colleges. Targeting this funding to such areas as

information technology, engineering and the health sciences, the

Ontario government also made it available only in cases where

matching funds could be raised from outside sources, thus ensuring

corporate control of a remodeled higher education infrastructure. As

finance minister Ernie Eves declared, “The private sector ... believes

it’s best to have some input on the ground floor of the postsecondary

education system.... They know what skills are required in the

5 The “baby boom” was a dramatic and sustained rise in birth rates in Canada from the years immediately following World War Two until the end of the 1950s. Demographic statistics revealing a significant surge in numbers among the offspring of the baby boomers, available since the early 1990s, and showed that in 2006-07, at a time when the postsecondary education system would still be coping with the “double cohort,” the number of Canadian students graduating from secondary school would be about ten percent higher than in the preceding year. 6 “Multi-Year Commitment Needed, Says COU,” At Guelph (October 13, 1999): 1, 5.

7

marketplace.”7 Any shortfall in the capacity of the post-secondary

education system is to be met by recourse to this same private sector,

through an invitation to private degree-granting institutions to

establish themselves in the province—presumably in the form of what

historian David Noble has called “digital diploma mills”: low-overhead

distance education operations employing ill-paid faculty on revolving

door contracts to provide job-market training to large numbers of

students in a manner that maximizes the institution’s profits.8

Having informed Ontario’s universities that capital funding could

be requested from the provincial government only for expanded

programs in the applied sciences, Premier Harris subsequently

declared that the universities’ proposals for funding showed there to

be student demand and institutional need for new money in these

areas alone, and not in the humanities and social sciences: “The

demand for new programs is not in liberal arts. The demand is in the

areas where the universities have made applications for significant

expansion [to prepare students] for jobs in the future.” 9 When the

Ontario university chancellors reacted to this maneuver by issuing a

statement defending liberal arts programs, Harris simply repeated his

claim: “We haven’t had very many universities saying they need to

7 John Ibbitson, “Universities and colleges get big boost from Ontario,” The Globe and Mail (February 23, 2000): A1, A7. 8 See David Noble, “Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education,” Toronto: distributed by OCUFA, October 1997; and “Digital Diploma Mills, Part II: The Coming Battle Over Online Instruction,” Toronto: distributed by OCUFA, March 1998. For some historical context to the developments outlined here, see Janice Newson and Howard Buchbinder, The University Means Business (Toronto: Garamond Press, 1988); and Neil Tudiver, Universities for Sale: Resisting Corporate Control over Canadian Higher Education (Toronto: James Lorimer, 1999). Parallel developments in the U.S. have been analyzed by Sheila Slaughter and Larry L. Leslie, Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). 9 Richard Mackie, “Postsecondary-education reforms support job-related courses,” The Globe and Mail (February 24, 2000): A9. In the same press conference Harris declared, no less disingenuously, that “We’re very supportive of liberal arts and continue to fund them to the same levels that students wish to take those programs and the same levels as they have been in the past.” The guiding assumption of such statements as this is clearly that the electorate has a very short memory.

8

expand history and Latin and English departments. We have a lot of

universities saying they have a huge demand for engineering, for

mathematics, for a lot of these new programs. So we’re responding to

their requests.”10

The deception is childishly transparent. As the premier and his

policy advisers must have been aware, there had in fact been “a

significant increase” since 1998 in student applications to Bachelor of

Arts programs in Ontario universities, and at the same time “a

decrease in applications to professional programs such as

Engineering, and a slight decrease in applications to the sciences.”11

Setting aside the premier’s evident contempt for facts, it is interesting

to see a discourse of “free-market” supply and demand applied to a

policy system that more closely resembles a Stalinist command

economy.

As with the invented crisis that our federal government has

created by its withdrawal of support for the Canadian health care

system, the current crisis in higher education seems designed to

convince the public that a once very satisfactory arrangement—a

publicly-funded sector that has fulfilled an essential social function

with (in comparison to the American parallels) high efficiency, high

quality and low cost—needs to be replaced by an increasingly

privatized system run by private corporations for private profit.12 In

10 See Chris Wattie, “University chancellors back liberal arts studies,” National Post (March 1, 2000): A21; and Richard Mackie, “Harris denies bias against liberal arts: Universities sought science funds, Premier says,” The Globe and Mail (March 2, 2000): A6. 11 Communication from Charles Cunningham, Registrar of the University of Guelph, March 2000. 12 This agenda has been pressed with increasing insistence over the past two decades. In a 1992 address to the Canadian Corporate Higher Education Forum, John H. Panabaker, former CEO of the Mutual Life Assurance Company of Canada and former Chancellor of McMaster University, advocated the development of “alternative privately-financed and customer-driven institutions,” but felt that although “individual programmes and functions” might be privatized, it would not yet be “possible to ‘privatize’ a major Canadian university.” See Panabaker, “The University for Tomorrow,” Canadian Federation for the Humanities Bulletin 15.2 (Autumn 1992): 4-5, and my comments in Lunar Perspectives: Field Notes from the Culture Wars (Toronto: Anansi, 1996), pp. 34-35.

9

this light the Ontario Conservative government’s deep tax cuts—44

percent between 1995 and 2000, with further cuts enacted in 2001, 13

and additional corporate tax cuts promised for 2002-03—can be seen

to have served the double function of rewarding the high-income

supporters whom they disproportionately favour, and of preventing

the economic boom of the late 1990s from pushing the government

into budget surpluses that would have made it hard to justify

continued cuts to essential public services in the name of deficit

reduction.14

It would be naïve to suppose that Premier Harris’s repeated

dismissals of the human sciences as useless and unwanted implied

any claim to knowledge of some actual state of affairs. What these

speech acts displayed was rather an ideologically formed intention, a

will to bring about irrevocable change. Despite its grammatical form,

Harris’s declaration that there is no new public demand for liberal arts

programs was performative rather than constative in nature: a

statement not of what he took to be the case but of what he intended

should become the case.15 The agenda of the Ontario Conservative

government, and of its imitators in British Columbia and elsewhere,

13 See Richard Mackie, “Harris ponders steeper tax cuts,” The Globe and Mail (February 7, 2001): A6. 14 The recession of 2001 may in this sense have been welcome to the provincial government, as helping to push any question of substantial social reinvestment beyond the horizon of acknowledged possibilities. The manipulative use of budget deficits is of course a well-established feature of recent attacks upon social programs. In 1995 Dean Neu and David Cooper (professors of accountancy at the University of Calgary and the University of Alberta) analyzed the Klein government’s calculations of debt and deficit and argued that “the provincial Conservatives [had] inflated deficit figures by about 30 per cent to justify deep cuts in program spending....” See Linda Goyette, “We Don’t Want Cheeky Professors Questioning Our Oil Barons, Do We?” CAUT/ACPPU Bulletin (March 1996): 9. The political economy of deficit hysteria has been lucidly analyzed by Linda McQuaig in Shooting the Hippo: Death by Deficit and Other Canadian Myths (Toronto: Viking, 1995). 15 The Council of Ontario Universities’ attempts to inform Premier Harris of (for example) the evidence that humanities and social sciences graduates do as well on the job market as the graduates of job-oriented programs were consistently futile. The performative nature of his statements shows him to have been interested not in such facts, but rather in establishing a new set of facts.

10

involves a systematic defunding of those sectors of the universities

and colleges within which a critical understanding of sociocultural

structures and forces can be produced, and a transfer of resources to

those sectors that are most purely instrumental in orientation and

most clearly aligned with the profit nexus of corporate interests.

Harris’s sneering anti-intellectualism—“We seem to be

graduating more people who are great thinkers,” he declared in

February 2000, “but they know nothing about math or science or

engineering or the skill sets that are needed”16—earned him an

editorial cartoon in The Globe and Mail which revised Jacques-Louis

David’s painting of “The Death of Socrates” to show a blandly smiling

Ontario Premier handing Socrates the cup of hemlock.17 But Harris’s

attitudes seem in fact to be widely shared among Canada’s political

elites, for although the Ontario government has been more vociferous

than its federal counterpart in valuing “skill sets” above critical

intelligence, its instrumentalism and its drive towards privatization

dovetail neatly with the higher education agenda of Jean Chrétien’s

neo-Liberal national government.

In October 1998, federal Trade Minister Sergio Marchi took part

in the Second Annual Canadian Education Industry Summit, a

conference which energetically promotes privatization at all levels of

the education system and enthuses over the huge profits available

within the “education for profit industry.” The Summit’s aim, according

to its own promotional literature, is “to create a platform for the

education industry leaders and the investment community to discuss

the unique opportunities in this new .... $700 billion growth industry.”

Marchi’s participation in the event signalled, in the words of Summit

16 Richard Mackie, “Ontario’s colleges get more cash to cope with growing enrollment,” The Globe and Mail (February 22, 2000): A7. 17 The Globe and Mail (March 3, 2000).

11

organizer Charles Ivey, the “clear support and involvement of

Canada’s Federal Government.”18

This and similar signals have been accompanied by action.

Federal finance minister Paul Martin’s February 28, 2000 budget

denied any funding increase to the Social Sciences and Humanities

Research Council, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research

Council and the Medical Research Council, while lavishing $900-million

(a fraction of the sum withdrawn by the federal government from

higher education funding since 1993) upon the recently established

Canadian Foundation for Innovation. Louise Forsyth, president of the

Humanities and Social Science Federation of Canada, noted that

because CFI funding is restricted to the areas of technology and

applied science, and because the federal government made no

provision for the infrastructures needed to support a revival of

research activity, this initiative can “only exacerbate the pressures on

universities to sacrifice humanities and social sciences scholarship.”19

To obtain CFI funding, moreover, researchers must be able to match

each forty cents of public money with sixty cents from other sources.

Jim Turk, the executive director of the Canadian Association of

University Teachers, noted that this “partnership” arrangement (which

closely parallels the Ontario government’s provisions for capital

funding) gives the corporate sector “effective veto power over who

gets public money, renewing ongoing questions about the implications

for the integrity and independence of university research.”20

18 I am quoting from a press release, “The Canadian Education Industry” (October 7, 1998), issued by a coalition including the Canadian Association of University Teachers, the Canadian Federation of Students, the Canadian Health Coalition, the Canadian Teachers’ Federation, the Canadian Union of Public Employees, the National Anti-Poverty Organization, the Ontario Federation of Labour, and the Ontario Public Service Employees Union. 19 Quoted in Perspectives 3.7, ed. Wayne Kondro (7 March 2000), http://www.hssfc.ca/Pub/PublicationsEng.html). 20 Virginia Galt, “Students, faculty worry that private sector's campus presence tainting the ivy,” The Globe and Mail (March 2, 2000): A3.

12

It may be naïve to think that debate over such issues is still

“ongoing,” when for corporatist organizations like the Canadian Agri-

Food Research Council the matter is already settled. That body’s

“national strategy” for 1997-2002 declares that Canada must focus

research funding on

those areas with highest value and return on

investment.... Priorities for applied research are set by

the marketplace via partnerships, e.g., industry funds

research that fits their priorities.... Augmented

private-sector participation in research priority-setting

will ... ensure scientists have access to the

appropriate market signals, are aware of the

technology requirements of industry and can focus

their research appropriately.21

Scientific researchers who fail to focus their work

“appropriately,” who work on subjects that do not hold out the

prospect of a quick return on investment, or who adhere to antiquated

notions of a public good that may not in every case be congruent with

the maximizing of profits for Monsanto, Nortel, Microsoft, or General

Foods, will have increasing difficulty in obtaining research funding.

While their more compliant colleagues publish, they will perish.

Thus, while underfunded liberal arts faculties are exposed ever

more completely to the proletarianizing processes acerbically

analyzed by Cary Nelson and Stephen Watt in Academic Keywords, the

sciences and applied sciences are ever more completely handed over

to corporate interests and to a wholesale instrumentalizing that

reduces scientific inquiry to what Sheila Slaughter and Larry Leslie call

21 Quoted by John McMurtry, “Accountability and openness to whom?”, At Guelph (November 24, 1999): 4. For an account of the bizarre inefficiencies as well as the alarming epidemiological consequences of agri-business pseudo-science, as applied to cattle-raising, see Edward Luttwak, “Sane Cows, or BSE isn’t the worst of it,” London Review of Books (8 February 2001): 26-27.

13

“academic capitalism.”22 As Bill Readings noted in The University in

Ruins, the corporatist university defines and assesses itself in terms of

“excellence,” a notion which “is like the cash-nexus in that it has no

content….” The vacuous appeal to “excellence” at one and the same

time “exposes the pre-modern traditions of the University to the force

of market capitalism” and “marks the fact that there is no longer any

idea of the University, or rather that the idea has now lost all

content.”23

But we need to understand these developments in their widest

(shall we say their global?) context.

3. Global corporatism

Beyond the domestic boundaries of its Reaganite or Harrisite

manifestations, and beyond the confines of the higher education

sector, the most conspicuous effects of the widely celebrated process

of “globalization” include an accelerating transfer of wealth from

already desperately poor countries in Africa, Central and South

America, and southern Asia to the “developed” economies of North

America, Europe and Japan. This transfer was already well under way

by the 1960s and 70s, thanks to neocolonial political and economic

relations that involved the routine subversion of democratic

governments and their replacement by dictatorships which fostered

high levels of corruption and bribery, cut labour standards and gave

22 See Nelson and Watt, Academic Keywords: A Devil’s Dictionary for Higher Education (New York and London: Routledge, 1999), and Slaughter and Leslie, Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). Nelson and Watt observe that under this regime, scientific departments commonly become no more than product-testing laboratories: “The most thoroughly degraded corporatized university program is one that no longer does any original thinking; it simply tests products developed elsewhere by the corporation” (p. 87). 23 Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 13, 38, 39.

14

transnational corporations unfettered access to natural resources.24 At

the same time, existing agricultural economies were being displaced

by the “Green Revolution,” with an ensuing pattern of mono-crop

export, concentration of land ownership and dependence on first-world

loans.25

In recent decades the transfer of wealth and the ruination of

traditional agriculture have been accelerated by the widespread

imposition of World Bank and International Monetary Fund loan-

repayment austerity plans, which dismantle any structures within

debtor nations that might impede the maximizing and repatriation of

the profits of transnational corporations, and at the same time

accentuate social class divisions by reducing the infrastructures of civil

society to a skeletal remnant. The concurrent imposition of an

international trade regime that gives unprecedented global mobility to

finance capital has made possible such events as the 1995

devastation of the Mexican economy and the so-called “meltdown” of

East Asian economies two years later. A recognition that these

developments have produced monstrous injustices has not been

confined to thinkers on the left: Michel Camdessus, who as Managing

Director of the IMF contributed in no small way to the

internationalizing of the corporatist revolution, declared recently that

“the widening gaps between rich and poor within nations, and the gulf

between the most affluent and most impoverished nations, are

morally outrageous, economically wasteful, and potentially socially

explosive.”26

24 See Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, The Political Economy of Human Rights, vol. 1: The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1979). 25 Essential reading on this subject is still Susan George’s How the Other Half Dies: The Real Reasons for World Hunger (1976; 2nd ed., Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977). 26 This statement by Camdessus, made at the Tenth UN Conference on Trade and Development in Bangkok, February 13, 2000, is quoted by Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Head of the IMF: A Secret Radical?” Comment, 34 (February 15, 2000; email forwarded by the Council of Canadians). For analysis of the issues noted

15

Within the “developed” countries—especially those that have

most completely followed the recipes of Chicago School economics—

there has been a correspondingly relentless transfer of wealth from

poor to rich, with a resulting surge in immiseration and homelessness.

Skilled (and once well-paying) jobs have been exported to foreign low-

wage autocracies, or else have disappeared in a frenzy of down-sizing,

the CEO instigators of which are rewarded with salaries that may be

hundreds of times those of their remaining shop-floor employees.27

Once-progressive personal taxation structures have come increasingly

to favour the rich; and U.S. Republicans, followed by their Canadian

clones in the Reform and Alliance parties, have pressed for a truly

regressive “flat” income tax and for further reductions of corporate

tax rates, even though these have already shrunk to a fraction of their

1950s levels.

Growing disparities in wealth have been accompanied by an

escalation of political corruption. Episodes such as the kickback

scandals of the Mulroney era, the Reaganite Savings and Loan scandal

in this paragraph, see Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith, eds., The Case Against the Global Economy (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1996); Paul Smith, Millennial Dreams: Contemporary Culture and Capital in the North (London and New York: Verso, 1997); Graham Dunkley, The Free Trade Adventure: The WTO, the Uruguay Round and Globalism—A Critique (London and New York: Zed Books, 1997); Biplab Dasgupta, Structural Adjustment, Global Trade and the New Political Economy of Development (London and New York:Zed Books, 1998); Ronaldo Munck and Denis O’Hearn, eds., Critical Development Theory: Contributions to a New Paradigm (London and New York: Zed Books, 1999); Jim Yong Kim, Joyce V. Mullen, Alec Irwin, and John Gershman, eds., Dying for Growth: Global Inequality and the Health of the Poor (Lonroe, Maine: Common Courage, 2000); Sarah Anderson, ed., Views from the South: The Effects of Globalization and the WTO on Third World Countries (Chicago: Food First Books and International Forum on Globalization, 2000); and Linda McQuaig, All You Can Eat: Greed, Lust, and the New Capitalism (Toronto: Penguin, 2001), pp. 40-93. 27 The previous business strategy of “vertical integration” (in which corporations sought control-through-ownership of as many levels as possible of the processes of production, distribution and sales) has been supplanted by a strategy of “branding” and “out-sourcing” (which depends on saturation advertizing of brand-name goods which are manufactured under contract, and at a small fraction of the final sales price, in off-shore free-trade zones where working conditions are no less brutal and destructive than those of the early nineteenth-century industrial revolution). For a brilliant analysis of this pattern, see Naomi Klein, No logo: taking aim at the brand bullies (Toronto: Knopf, 2000), pp. 195-229.

16

(involving the transfer of approximately one trillion dollars from the

public purse into private pockets), or the still-unfolding Enron scandal

may invite one to suspect a shift from something distantly resembling

democracy, government by the people, to kleptocracy, government by

thieves. But the context of systemic corruption out of which these

scandals have arisen is still more disquieting. International business

deals resting on public-sector purchases commonly involve bribery

and kickbacks of the kind that ex-Prime Minister Mulroney’s associate

Karl-Heinz Schreiber has been accused of, and it has become generally

accepted that corporate interests should be able to shape legislative

agendas through campaign financing and through a lobbying industry

whose sole purpose, as John Ralston Saul notes, is that of converting

“elected representatives and senior civil servants to the particular

interest of the lobbyist”—or in other words, “corrupting the people’s

representatives and servants away from the public good.”28

The so-called “liberalizing” of trade which is the most

conspicuous feature of the movement towards a “globalized” economy

might be more accurately described as a formalizing and legitimizing

of the power of corporate capital to maximize transnational profits at

the expense not just of democratic governance, but also, more

directly, of labour rights and environmental protection. Jeff Faux has

written of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that

If the leaders of the United States, Canada, and Mexico

wanted simply to lower tariffs, the agreement could

have been written on one page. Instead, it is one

thousand pages of detailed rules, most of which are

aimed at protecting the interests of U.S. and Canadian

investors seeking cheap Mexican labor. Intellectual

property rights for corporations, repatriation of capital,

28 John Ralston Saul, The Unconscious Civilization (Toronto: Anansi, 1995), p. 93.

17

and deregulation of foreign business are not only

spelled out, specific punishments and penalties are

described. In contrast, the protections for labor and the

environment—core elements in any modern social

contract—are for all practical purposes non-existent....29

The basic asymmetry of NAFTA—as also of the World Trade

Organization’s adjudication panels and the temporarily defeated

Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI)—is explained by Tony

Clarke and Maude Barlow as stemming from an extension into

international law of the U.S. constitutional principle known as the

“takings” rule, which prohibits governments “from taking private

property ‘without adequate compensation’ and ‘valid public purpose’.”

This principle,

used to protect transnational corporations from any

government intervention or regulation that inhibits the

free flow of capital and profitable investment, ... has

the effect of “taking” away the power of governments

to serve and protect the democratic rights of their

citizens. There are no corresponding rules to protect

governments from the takings of transnational

corporations.30

Transnational corporations thus emerge as strangely hybrid—or

protean—entities. They have all the legal rights of human personhood

(including, astonishingly, the right to free speech, which was the basis

of the tobacco industry’s successful appeal in the Canadian Supreme

Court against the federal law banning tobacco advertising). And yet

they manage to evade most of the human condition's liabilities,

29 Jeff Faux, “Jeff Faux Replies” [“Jay Mandle and Jeff Faux on free trade and the left”], Dissent 45.2 (Spring 1998): 81. 30 Tony Clarke and Maude Barlowe, MAI: The Multilateral Agreement on Investment and the Threat to Canadian Sovereignty (Toronto: Stoddart, 1997), pp. 32-33.

18

remaining largely immune, it would seem, to those two fixities of

human experience, death and taxes.

Should the clauses of the MAI become law, whether through

inclusion in the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) or

through some more devious means, transnational corporations would

also acquire the status of nationhood, though in a similarly hybrid or

doubled manner. They would be the equals in law of the nation-states

that make up the membership of the Organization for Economic Co-

operation and Development (OECD), while at the same time enjoying

free access to signatory countries for their key personnel, treatment

no less favourable than that accorded to domestic companies, and

exemption from labour and environmental standards.31 And since the

new international trade regime enshrined in the regulations of NAFTA,

the WTO and the MAI prohibits nation-states from considering “extra-

jurisdictional” matters in relation to trade—that is to say, from

discriminating in any way against imports produced (for example) by

child labour, slave labour, or under conditions of systematic torture or

mass-murder—transnational corporations are already effectively

exempted from compliance with international law on human rights.32

Although the protean corporate entity has at once no fixed

address and many shifting addresses, it thus claims equality with the

spatially delimited nation-state—and indeed establishes itself within

its household, claiming a key to the front door, the same (or better)

rights of bed, board and access to the house’s contents that its

citizen-residents enjoy, the right to bring in material of whatever kind

obtained by whatever means, and finally the right to depart

unmolested with whatever portion of the household goods it has been

able to appropriate.

31 Clarke and Barlow, pp. 33-38. 32 John McMurtry, The Cancer Stage of Capitalism (London: Pluto Press, 1999), pp. 232-37.

19

The extension and legitimizing of corporate power through what

amounts to a slow-motion global coup d’état has of course had

political as well as economic repercussions. John Ralston Saul argued

in 1995 that contemporary corporatism is well on the way to fulfilling

the primary aspirations of the fascist corporatism of the early

twentieth century: these were to transfer political power from elected

parliamentary bodies to hierarchically and corporately-organized

socio-economic interest groups, to intrude entrepreneurship into

previously public domains, and to “obliterate the boundaries between

public and private interest....”33 A parallel recognition of a threat to the

structures of representative democracy is evident in billionaire

currency speculator George Soros's 1997 expression of his “fear that

the untrammelled intensification of laissez-faire capitalism and the

spread of market values into all areas of life is endangering our open

and democratic society. The main enemy of the open society,” he

went on to propose, “is no longer the communist but the capitalist

threat.”34

4. The “civil commons” and “the tragedy of the

commons”

The nature of the threat perceived by Saul and by Soros can be

readily defined. The corporatist revolution operates through a

diversion of professedly democratic state power into ever more

complete subservience to the interests of transnational corporations—

thereby making any claim of governments to be (in Lincoln’s words)

33 Saul, p. 87. Saul here acknowledges Traute Rafalski, “Social Planning and Corporatism; Modernization Tendencies in Italian Fascism,” International Journal of Political Science 18 (1988):10; Rafalski is in turn quoting from Paolo Ungari, Alfredo Rocca e l'ideologia giuridica des fascismo (Brescia, 1963). 34 George Soros, “The Capitalist Threat,” Atlantic Monthly (February 1997): 45, quoted by McMurtry, Cancer, p. 202.

20

“by the people” and “for the people” seem increasingly fraudulent.

What is occurring, philosopher John McMurtry has argued, is a

mutation of governments “to become more and more dominantly

coercive debt collectors on behalf of banks and foreign bond-holders

from citizens who have received little or no benefit from the debts,

and international trade agents and deal-makers for transnational

corporations against the most basic interests of domestic workers and

businesses....”35

If we remind ourselves that one of the goals of transnationals is

unrestrained access not just to the oil reserves of the Persian Gulf and

the Caspian basin, but also to resources like the forests of the Lubicon

Cree or the Coast Salish and the Nis’gah, or, on a larger scale, to the

diminishing remains of the Amazonian rainforest and to the fresh

water of the Great Lakes and the Canadian Shield, it will be evident

that something more significant even than political freedoms is at

stake. What governments are collaborating in is, in McMurtry’s words,

a “stripping of society’s shared life-ground,”36 an attack upon what he

calls the “civil commons,” and defines as “human agency in personal,

collective or institutional form which protects and enables the access

of all members of a community to basic life goods.” This “civil

commons” includes, at the same time, those aspects of our life-ground

in nature which we can work to preserve through “conscious human

acts and social constructions (for example, effective laws against

environmental pollutants that destroy the ‘global commons’ of the

atmosphere or oceans)”37—but which under unregulated market

35 McMurtry, Cancer, p. 219. See Eduardo Galeano’s acerbic discussion of “the power of kidnappers” and of what he calls “globalitarian power” in Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World, trans. Mark Fried (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000), pp. 148-56. 36 Ibid., p. 192. 37 McMurtry, Cancer, pp. 204-5.

21

conditions are subject to what Garrett Hardin in a famous essay, first

published in 1968, called “the tragedy of the commons.”38

McMurtry’s concept of the civil commons differs significantly

from Hardin’s much more limited understanding of the commons. The

things we define as “commons”—including, for example, the Grand

Banks cod fishery, the “crown land” rain forests of the Pacific coast, or

the St. Lawrence River, in its capacity as an open sewer—are all finite

in nature. Hardin’s view of unrestrained freedom in a commons as

tragic, in the sense of resulting in inexorable degradation, stems from

this recognition. However, McMurtry finds reason for a more hopeful

analysis in the fact that many different cultures have articulated their

sense of interdependence with the natural life-ground in the form of a

practical and institutionally embodied social ethic that offers

alternatives to Hardin’s grim conclusions.

Taking the example of common grazing land, Hardin argues that

in conditions of social stability (which rule out wars or cattle-raids) its

destruction is inevitable. For if the marginal benefit of adding an

additional animal to each cattleherd’s share of a herd supported by

common land accrues to the single owner alone, while the marginal

deficit caused by overgrazing is communally shared among all users

of the common land, it will always be in the private interest of every

cattleherd to increase the number of grazing animals he or she owns.

Claiming that each cattleherd “is locked into a system that compels

him to increase his herd without limit—in a world that is limited,”

Hardin declares that “Ruin is the destination toward which all men

38 Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (December 13, 1968); rpt. in Mary Elizabeth Bowen and Joseph A. Mazzeo, eds., Writing About Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 331-48. I am concerned here only with Hardin’s analysis of the logic of the commons; the principal argument of his essay, a neo-Malthusian proposal of a need for coercive population-control measures, does not interest me; it rests upon sociological and anthropological assumptions that are naive in the extreme.

22

rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in

the freedom of the commons.”39

I have italicized the word “compels” because it so conspicuously

does not follow from any of the stated assumptions of this case. If

Hardin’s logic of marginal private advantage had occurred to medieval

English cattleherds, it would have done so in the form of temptation

rather than compulsion, because their common land was in fact

regulated—and protected—by the requirement that each commoner

could graze only as many animals on it as could be fed in his or her

own corral over the winter.40 Only when the economic agencies in

question are behaving in the same way as capitalized corporate

bodies—operating, that is, in accordance with the demands of modern

equity and commodity markets—can it be said that participants in a

commons are compelled, on penalty of loss of market share, reduced

equity value, and absorption by competing corporations, to maximize

profits by following the logic of marginal private advantage (and

marginal communal disadvantage) in relation to whatever in the

commons can be appropriated for productive use or employed for the

disposal of wastes. Hardin acknowledges this to be his guiding

assumption when, in writing of waste disposal, or of what he called

“the tragedy of the commons as a cesspool,” he remarks that “The

rational man [sic] finds that his share of the cost of the wastes he

discharges into the commons is less than the cost of purifying his

wastes before releasing them. Since this is true for everyone, we are

locked into a system of ‘fouling our own nest,’ for so long as we

behave only as independent, rational, free-enterprisers.”41

39 Hardin, p. 336. 40 See Gary Snyder, “Understanding the Commons,” in Susan J. Armstrong and Richard G. Botzler, eds., Environmental Ethics: Convergence and Divergence (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993), pp. 227-30 (cited by John McMurtry in Unequal Freedoms: The Global Market as an Ethical System [Toronto: Garamond Press, 1998], p. 399). 41 Ibid., p. 338.

23

Hardin’s analysis of the commons is thus premised upon a quite

specific economic logic, that of “free enterprise.” This makes it all the

more compelling as a refutation of the claims made in support of

deregulation and market “liberalization” by the ideologues of the

corporatist revolution. Whether we think of the commons in terms of

production, as the natural basis of all life-sustaining activities, or in

terms of waste disposal, as providing sites for the absorption and

dispersal of human wastes, Hardin argues that it is only through one

or another form of social regulation that the tragedy of freedom in a

commons can be averted. He proposes, for example, that “our

particular concept of private property” contributed, as one such form

of regulation, to a closing of the commons in relation to productive

land use. However, he is at the same time aware that the rule of

private property obstructs contemporary struggles to “close the

commons to pollution by automobiles, factories, insecticide sprayers,

fertilizing operations, and atomic energy installations.”42

The apologists of corporatism are seeking, in Hardin’s sense, to

“re-open” the commons—for this is what it means to insist on the

abolition of environmental regulation, and on unconstrained access by

transnational corporations to natural resources. Corporatist attacks on

labour legislation, union rights, welfare entitlements, public education

and medicare add up to a parallel attempt to return human labour to

the status—closely resembling that of an unregulated commons—that

it occupied in the slums of the industrial revolution and in the thought

of “classical” political economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo.

In the rhetoric of the corporatist revolution, “free competition” is

described as the model and the basis of all other human freedoms.

But this hoary orthodoxy is no truer now than it was a century and a

half ago, when Karl Marx proposed that “The analysis of what free

competition really is, is the only rational reply to the middle-class

42 Ibid., pp. 338, 347.

24

prophets who laud it to the skies or to the socialists who damn it to

hell”—and when, having made such an analysis, he heaped scorn on

the insipid view “that free competition is the ultimate development of

human freedom,” concluding rather that “It is not individuals who are

set free by free competition; it is, rather, capital which is set free.”43

Contemporary evidence of the continuing validity of this conclusion

(and, at the same time, of the corporatist perversion of governments

noted by McMurtry) is provided by Shell Oil’s unconstrained polluting

of Ogoniland, aided and abetted by the Nigerian government's violent

repression of the Ogoni people and judicial murder of their leaders; by

the ecological and behavioural sinks of the maquiladora wastelands

along the Mexico-U.S. border, constructed in collaboration with a

Mexican government that has routinely stolen elections and

collaborated in the elimination of opposition journalists by death

squads; and, in Canada, by Daishowa Corporation’s ongoing

despoliation of the homeland of the Lubicon Cree, a process enabled

and facilitated by the Alberta and federal governments.

In these cases, and many others, one might respond to the

rhetoric of the free marketers with Garrett Hardin’s observation that

“Individuals locked into the logic of the commons are free only to

bring on universal ruin....”44 In their rush to re-open the commons, the

ideologues of the corporatist revolution may be drawing us into a

more radical bankrupting of future possibilities than even they intend.

What Hardin calls “the logic of the commons”—a logic of

marginal private advantage and communal disadvantage most

evident at present in the operations of transnational corporations—is

diametrically opposed to the ethics and to the actuality of the “civil

commons” as these are analyzed by John McMurtry. Let us consider

43 Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), pp. 651-52, 650. 44 Ibid., p. 347.

25

the implications of this opposition. I have compared the labour market

of the industrial revolution to an unregulated commons—one that

might appropriately be called tragic, since it engulfed innumerable

human lives in misery and despair. This unregulated commons

developed in England as a direct consequence of the appropriation

and enclosure of communally regulated village common-land for use

as sheep-pasture by the landlords and merchants who participated in

the emergent international wool-trade. Village commons seized for

use as private pasture were simultaneously opened to exploitation as

part of a nascent capitalist system of cloth-manufacture, and closed to

use by the community, a large proportion of whose members were

thereby driven off the land. Toward the end of the first great wave of

enclosures, Thomas More wrote with bitter irony in his Utopia (1516)

that English sheep, “that were wont to be so meek and tame, and so

small eaters, now, as I hear say, be become so great devourers and so

wild, that they eat up and swallow down the very men themselves.”

Rural people began to drift into the cities, deprived, More says, by

“fraud, or by violent oppression…, or by wrongs and injustices” 45 both

of their own small-holdings and of access to lands which for centuries

they had communally shared.

There were currents of resistance: around 1549 the anonymous

author of “Jack of the North” declared his intention to restore common

land to the common people “[w]herever it hath been yet common

before”; a century later, Gerard Winstanley’s Diggers denounced the

gentry with “their wisdoms so profound, to cheat us of our ground.”46

But by the early nineteenth century, after subsequent waves of

45 Sir Thomas More, Utopia, trans. Ralph Robinson, ed. Edward Arber (London: Murray, 1869), pp. 40-41. (I have modernized Robinson’s mid sixteenth-century spelling and punctuation.) For a summary account of changes to the landscapes of England, Wales and Scotland brought about by enclosures during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see Michael Reed, The Age of Exuberance 1500-1700 (1986; rpt. London: Paladin, 1987), pp. 69-98. 46 David Norbrook and W.R. Woudhuysen, eds., The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse (London: Penguin, 1993), pp. 389, 465. (I have modernized the spelling.)

26

enclosures, the once numerous class of yeoman freeholders had

effectively disappeared from England, and a new urban industrial

working class was beginning its long struggle to organize itself against

unconstrained exploitation by employers in an “open” labour market.47

Historians have long recognized connections between the

enclosure movement, which reached its height in England during the

late eighteenth century, and the developing corporate organization of

trade and manufacture.48 John McMurtry follows them in seeing a

historical continuity between the privatizing tendency launched in

England by the international wool trade, “the progenitor of the global

market from the fifteenth century on,” and the movement towards the

“clearance and appropriation of communal lands,” with a concomitant

production of a landless urban labouring class and a growing “assault

on the environment,” that has subsequently swept across the world.49

Central to McMurtry’s concept of the “civil commons” is its

incorporation both of the natural life-ground that sustains human

society, and also of the human institutions and the web of social and

discursive interactions by which this natural life-ground is itself

preserved and sustained.50 Insofar as this concept proposes an

47 Linda McQuaig offers a lucid analysis both of the enclosure movement and also of the popular resistance to it in All You Can Eat: Greed, Lust, and the New Capitalism, pp. 161-93. 48 In the early 1920s, for example, Arthur J. Ireland noted that the enclosure movement of the late eighteenth century “marked the appearance of the trust system in operation, although it was still in the embryo stage” (“English Life in the Eighteenth Century,” in J. A. Hammerton, ed., Universal History of the World [10 vols.; London: Educational Book Co., c. 1925], vol. 7, p. 4219). See also G. M. Trevelyan, English Social History (1942; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), pp. 391-95. 49 McMurtry, Unequal Freedoms, p. 399. 50 In this he differs from Hardin, who assumes human society to be an aggregate of atomistic individuals motivated by considerations of immediate self-interest, and gives no consideration to the social and discursive interactions (themselves constitutive of the complex subjectivities of members of the society) which in any functional social order also include countervailing suasions and sanctions that have the effect of subordinating private to public interest. For detailed expositions of the civil commons, and its rootedness in communal discursive practice, see McMurtry, Unequal Freedoms, pp. 368-95, and Cancer, pp. 190-254.

27

understanding of nature as suffused with and sustained by discursive

terms that appear also in political, ethical and other discourses, it

might be said to resemble traditional doctrines of “natural law”

enunciated by thinkers like St. Thomas Aquinas and Richard Hooker.51

However, McMurtry’s view of the civil commons differs from these in

its recognition that the interactive co-dependence of social life and its

basis in nature is the expression of human rather than of divine

agency, that it is the product and material embodiment of human

histories, and that it is a matter of the utmost importance to any

human future. As he argues,

the progression or decline of the civil commons is the

most fundamental social fact there is, though like the

sea to the fish not recognized…. [T]he question of

whether a society's civil commons is intact, falling or

gaining in the life goods all its members have access

to, is a real-world issue and of life-and-death reality for

all on a practical level.52

5. Critical humanism and the civil commons

I have argued that we are living through a corporatist social and

political revolution whose goal is the destruction, through strategies of

deliberate bankrupting and invented crises, of what John McMurtry

calls the civil commons. (Consider again the objects of the corporate

revolutionaries’ attack: progressive labour codes, environmental

regulations, redistributive taxation of private income and corporate

51 See, for example, Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II, Q. 94, art. 1-6, in Anton C. Pegis, ed., Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas (2 vols.; New York: Random House, 1945), vol. 2, pp. 772-81; and Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, ed. Christopher Morris (2 vols.; 1907; rpt. London: Dent, 1963), Book I. iii, vol. 1, pp. 154-61. 52 McMurtry, Cancer, p. 212.

28

profits, international law governing human rights, laws restricting the

movement of corporate capital, civil rights entitlements, welfare and

public housing programs, state-owned corporations and utilities,

public non-profit health care, public education and, in particular, the

potentially critical as opposed to instrumental functions of public

higher education. The list amounts to a good first approximation of

the institutional embodiments of the civil commons.)

Certain aspects of the corporatist attack on public higher

education have been emphasized here: first, because this sector’s role

in the reproduction, re-creation and transformation of the social order

makes it an important part of the civil commons; and secondly,

because this is a sector in which there has recently been a growing

awareness of the need to defend the human values, institutional

structures and forms of life threatened by the corporatist revolution.

Public higher education is a strategic (if already seriously

compromised) site in the defence of the civil commons and the

resistance to corporatism.53

But what does it mean to speak of “critical humanism” as one

way of defining the forms such resistance might take in my own

discipline of literary studies, and possibly more widely across the

human sciences? The term may well seem an oxymoron. Many of the

self-identified humanists of the past century, in addition to leaning

more in the direction of dogmatism than of an open or unconstrained

53 The public status of Canadian public universities has been compromised by the government policies described above—which, as David Noble writes, have resulted in “an intensified web of interlocking directorates between the boards of universities and private corporations, a plethora of largely secret contracts with private companies, and the establishment of an intellectual property regime throughout the institutions, which include[s] unprecedented emphasis on confidentiality and non-disclosure…” (“How Public Are Our Public Universities?” CAUT/ACPPU Bulletin [January 2003]: A3). Noble also exposes at his own institution, York University, moves by the administration to re-define it as “a private, charitable corporation, which is ‘publicly assisted’”—while at the same time withholding from public disclosure “any information regarding student enrollment, which is the chief criterion for government funding, and course offerings, the educational grounds for charitable status,” by declaring these matters to be “commercial” in nature (ibid., A13).

29

criticism, were also dubiously, if at all, interested in formulating or

supporting projects of a democratic tendency (it should suffice to

name Irving Babbitt, B. F. Skinner and H. J. Eysenck as examples) 54—

while on the other hand, some of the most strenuous and most

influential critical thinkers of the late twentieth century (among them

Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida) defined themselves as anti-

humanists. But although any deployment of “humanism” might seem

controversial (not least one that would take the critical and

emancipatory orientation of much of Renaissance humanism as

exemplary for our time), outright dismissal of the term entails another

kind of risk. Such at least is implied by Robert Young’s reflections on

the dilemma faced by literary theorists who sought to resist the

“‘technologico-Thatcherite’ assault on the humanities,” the British

form of the corporatist attack on the critical functions of higher

education:

[T]he terms by which their subject was established

historically, and the only effective terms with which it

could still be defended, were those of the cultural

conservatism and humanist belief in literature and

philosophy that ‘literary theory’ has, broadly speaking,

been attacking since the 1970s. When theorists found

themselves wanting to defend their discipline against

successive government cuts they discovered that the

only view with which they could vindicate themselves

54 For a brief indication of the reactionary and anti-Enlightenment orientation of Babbitt’s “New Humanism,” see William V. Spanos, The End of Education: Toward Posthumanism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 79-93, and my Lunar Perspectives, pp. 146-47. Skinner and Eysenck were both involved with the British Humanist Association (see their essays in A.J. Ayer, ed., The Humanist Outlook [London, 1968]); Kate Soper has described their behaviourist stance as a “'technical fix' humanism” which “approaches human affairs on the model of the industrial enterprise, where all can be set to rights provided we adopt the more efficient management techniques afforded by scientific and technological development” (Soper, Humanism and Anti-Humanism [London: Hutchinson, 1986], p. 14).

30

was the very one which, in intellectual terms, they

wanted to attack…. In short, for theorists the problem

has been that in attacking humanism they have found

themselves actually in consort with government

policy.55

A brief glance at the history of the term “humanism,” and at the

cultural phenomena it was coined to describe, may help to dissipate

confusions of this sort. Among cultural historians of early modern

Europe, the word usually refers to a particular phase in the

development of what we now call the humanities—that surge of

critical, scholarly and creative energies that shaped the cultural forms

of the western European Renaissance of the fifteenth to seventeenth

centuries. Late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italians had a word,

umanista, for those who were engaged in restoring or emulating the

textual remains of ancient Greece and Rome; this word passed into

French (1552), English (1589), and Spanish (1614) usages.56 But rather

surprisingly, the abstract noun dates only from early nineteenth-

century Germany, where Humanismus was coined as the name of a

traditional or conservative theory of education in the classics and

Christian doctrine which opposed itself both to progressive

Rousseauistic or Enlightenment pedagogies, and also to practical or

utilitarian tendencies.57 The teaching practices of what we would now

call Renaissance humanism were no doubt the source of this German

55 Robert Young, “The Idea of a Chrestomathic University,” in Richard Rand, ed., Logomachia: The Conflict of the Faculties (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), p. 113. 56 See Nicolas Walter, Humanism: What’s in the Word (London: Rationalist Press Association, 1997), pp. 13-14. 57 Walter briefly discusses Friedrich Niethammer’s Der Streit des Philanthropinismus und Humanismus in der Theorie des Erziehungs-Unterrichts unsrer Zeit (1808) in Humanism, pp. 17-19.

31

pedagogical Humanismus,58 and yet the new term seems to have

referred to current practices rather than to those of the Renaissance.

Subsequent appropriations of the term have likewise often been

both ‘presentist’ and politically conservative in nature, even when

professedly referring to the humanism of Renaissance scholars and

writers. Detailed analysis would be required to show that this was the

case in Jacob Burckhardt’s influential 1860 interpretation of the Italian

Renaissance as the moment at which “man became a spiritual

individual, and recognized himself as such,” and of Renaissance

humanism as the ideology of autonomous selfhood;59 but a reactionary

‘presentism’ is clearly evident in Douglas Bush’s claim, first published

in 1939, that sixteenth-century humanism amounted to a proleptic

echo of Matthew Arnold’s conservative mid-Victorian “orthodoxy of

sweetness and light.”60

58 See Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986). On the basis of a fascinating study of Renaissance humanist pedagogy, Grafton and Jardine make what seem to me unacceptable generalizations about the orientation of humanism as a whole. 59 Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy [1860], trans . S.G.C. Middlemore (2 vols., 1958; rpt. New York: Harper & Row, 1965), vol. 1, p. 143; Burckhardt characterizes the exponents of humanism as “the advance guard of an unbridled individualism” (vol. 2, p. 479). 60 Douglas Bush, The Renaissance and English Humanism (1939; rpt. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), p. 83. Bush argued that the biblical, patristic and classical texts with which Erasmus and his predecessors worked were seen by them as offering “a working ideal of a universal state in which reason and the will of God should prevail” (p. 65). “Sweetness and light” and “making reason and the will of God prevail” are Arnoldian catch-phrases: see Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. Samuel Lipman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 31-32, 37-39, and my comments in Lunar Perspectives, pp. 203-07. Bush maintained that “sceptical and naturalistic doctrines” were the “two great philosophic enemies of religion and morality, and hence of Christian humanism” (p. 85)—thus with the stroke of a pen banishing from the ambit of humanism such figures as Valla, Agrippa, Rabelais and Montaigne, not to mention Erasmus himself. He claimed that, like “the great body of continental humanists,” English humanists were “unanimous in their defence of established authority”—a defence which appears, however, to have been an anxious matter. For as Bush immediately added, “this solid, all-embracing orthodoxy is a dyke which the smallest stream of water may undermine, and every hole must be stopped.” But reinforcements are available: Shakespeare himself “is no less attached than the most orthodox humanist to constituted authority, is no less scornful of the mob” (pp. 88-89, 95).

32

More recent and more historically adequate interpretations of

Renaissance humanism include Hiram Haydn’s recognition of an

antagonism in Renaissance Europe between divergent strains of

Christian and “naturalistic” humanism;61 Michel Foucault’s proposal

that humanism invented what he called “subjected sovereignties,”

structures within which human subjectivity claims a restricted, usually

internal rule or control, at the cost of a fuller subjection to external

powers, both social and metaphysical;62 Anthony Grafton’s and Lisa

Jardine’s argument that humanist pedagogy, “foster[ing] in all its

initiates a properly docile attitude towards authority,” served the

needs of an emergent Europe of “closed governing élites, hereditary

offices and strenuous efforts to close off debate on vital political and

social questions”;63 Donald Kelley’s analysis of Renaissance humanism

as embodying complementary motifs of institutio (individual and

collective self-fashioning) and restitutio (the recovery, encyclopedic

reintegration, and reanimation of antiquity);64 and Charles Nauert’s

argument that whatever Renaissance humanists may have thought

themselves to be doing, humanism’s historical function was “to act as

an intellectual solvent, striking at traditional beliefs of all kinds.”65

Lest we fall ourselves into the ‘presentism’ of supposing that

recent writers on the subject, despite the fault lines that separate

some of them, might be approaching a consensual understanding of

the diverse tendencies that together constituted Renaissance

humanism, let us end this brief list of interpretations with a mention of

61 Hiram Haydn, The Counter-Renaissance (1950; rpt. New York: Grove Press, 1960), pp. 27-67. 62 Michel Foucault, “Revolutionary Action: ‘Until Now’,” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 221-22. 63 Grafton and Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities, p. xiv. 64 Donald R. Kelley, Renaissance Humanism (Boston: Twayne, 1991), pp. 23-33. 65 Charles G. Nauert, Jr., Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 197.

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John Carroll’s neoconservative sermonizing in a book whose subtitle

indicates with sufficient clarity the nature of its argument: Humanism:

The Wreck of Western Culture.66

The “ism” termination of “humanism,” which would seem to

identify it as the name of an ideology, may be one source of the

debates that have swirled around this term. Yet the tendencies in

early modern culture to which “humanism” refers are perhaps better

described, in the manner of contemporary scholars like Kelley and

Nauert, in terms of the cultural practices they involved. (As they are

both aware, Paul Oskar Kristeller insisted that umanista carried no

specific doctrinal or ideological sense, but referred simply to a

professor or student of the studia humanitatis, “a well-defined cycle of

teaching subjects listed as grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history and

moral philosophy.…”)67

Renaissance exponents of the studia humanitatis, obsessed with

what Donald Kelley calls restitutio, the project of giving a “re-

naissance” to the discursive, artistic, architectural and social forms of

the cultures of ancient Rome and Greece, coined the term “Middle

Ages” to speak of that which stood between them and the forms they

wanted to re-vivify. The nineteenth-century term “humanism” likewise

came to confer upon a previous age meanings that it did not find in

itself: as Burckhardt’s classic study makes evident, this later restitutio

developed into an appropriation of early modern traditions in the

service of a Romantic ideology of essentialist autonomous

subjectivity.68 But if, setting aside this and subsequent primarily

66 Carroll, Humanism: The Wreck of Western Culture (London: Fontana, 1993). For other more responsible contemporary interpretations, see the essays assembled in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, ed. Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 67 Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and the Arts: Collected Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 3. 68 For an argument to this effect, see Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (2nd ed., 1989; rpt. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993). As Dollimore notes, one famous Renaissance text, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of

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ideological deployments of the term, we focus instead on Renaissance

humanism as a set of cultural practices rooted in a particular

sequence of western European social contexts, it may be possible to

draw different consequences from the emergence of humanism out of

the interactions of a nascent (or re-nascent) Italian civic culture with

the remains of ancient Roman and Hellenistic literary, rhetorical,

juristic, philosophical, and historiographic writings.

Social practices, even without constituting a coherent ideology,

can have large transformative effects, at once discursive and material.

The crucial contribution of the humanist practices of the Italian

Renaissance, as I proposed in Lunar Perspectives, was that they

opened out within the civic culture of cities like Florence and Venice

a discursive space, which the advent of printing

subsequently made accessible across Western Europe

under the name of “the republic of letters.” Within this

space various forms of writing (among them the highly

wrought epistles with which humanists flattered,

cajoled, and bombarded one another) could acquire a

previously unknown degree of autonomy, and

thoroughgoing critiques of constituted authority and

Man, does assert a radical human autonomy—while at the same time inverting the traditional relationship between being and acting: in Pico’s rewriting of the creation myth, Adam has the freedom to fashion his own nature into a vegetative, animalistic, angelic, or divine nature. Dollimore (p. 169) quotes Ernst Cassirer’s recognition that this text is existentialist rather than essentialist in implication: “It is not being that prescribes once and for all the lasting direction which the mode of action will take; rather, the original direction of action determines and places being” (Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. Mario Domandi [1963; rpt. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972], p. 84). While Burckhardt’s study gave a particular view of humanist subjectivity its canonical late-nineteenth-century form, it seems no accident that the coinage of Humanismus in the early nineteenth century coincided with von Humboldt’s formation, in Berlin, of the first modern university, an institution dedicated to the producing of autonomous subjectivities—or perhaps, as Foucault would say, of “subjected sovereignties.” See Readings, The University in Ruins, pp. 7, 46, 66-69; and Walter, Humanism, pp. 17-20.

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authoritative dogma could be envisaged and

undertaken.69

While conceding to Michel Foucault that humanist subjectivities

commonly incorporated a duplicitous conflation of supposed

autonomy and actual subjection, we may perhaps uncover a deeper

historical significance to humanism if, focusing on the literary and

critical productions of humanists, we understand the movement out of

which these texts emerged as

a collection of enabling strategies, which is also to say,

a rhetoric (Renaissance humanism was, if anything,

rhetorical)—but a rhetoric whose general tendency and

function was to bring into being and to sustain a

discursive space, a public sphere, within which the

power of established authority no longer retained its

previously overwhelming position as a criterion of

judgment, and within which the goal of legitimizing

established authority no longer exercised a

determinative influence upon the various forms of

writing which at one and the same time constituted

and were enabled by this newly opened discursive

space or public sphere.70

69 Lunar Perspectives, p. 148. Major contributions to an understanding of the cultural impact of printing include Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), and The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), and Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 70 Ibid., pp. 148-49. Jürgen Habermas identified the development of the public sphere of civil society as an eighteenth-century phenomenon; see his classic study The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society [1962], trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (1989; rpt. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991). More recent scholarship has shown that various forms of public sphere were decisively active at least a century earlier; see for example David Zaret, “Religion, Science, and Printing in the Public Spheres of Seventeenth-Century England,” in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 212-35. Emergent forms of a public sphere are evident in the humanist mobilization during the Reuchlin affair (1510-20) as well as in subsequent Reformation controversies.

36

In this emergence of a public sphere we can identify an essential

precondition for the fully conscious development of the civil commons.

John McMurtry makes a point of distinguishing “between ‘the

commons’ as nature-given land or resource and ‘the civil commons’

which effectively protects it, and ensures access of all members of the

community to its continuing means of existence.” The latter “is ‘civil’

insofar as the common life-good it embodies is protected by conscious

and co-operative human agency,” and “what was once the ‘commons’

of nature becomes ‘civil commons’ as it is preserved by conscious

human acts and social construction….”71

In reconstituting the republic of letters, a res publica or “public

thing” that had been a distinctive feature of certain phases of classical

culture but had wholly disappeared after the collapse of the western

Roman empire, Renaissance humanism reinvented, as a social

possibility, public debate about a public good. The respublica

litterarum of the humanists amounts therefore to the social space

within which a reflexive awareness of the common good could

develop. It would not be an exaggeration to describe it as the

emergent—if also fragile and perpetually endangered—matrix of the

civil commons in its modern form.

Satirical discourses flourished within this social space, many of

them belonging to the mixed genre or anti-genre of Menippean satire

or anatomy that was epitomized for Renaissance readers by the

second-century writings of Lucian of Samosata: More’s Utopia,

Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, and Cornelius Agrippa’s Of the Vanity and

Uncertainty of All Arts and Sciences are prominent examples of the

type. These works contain wide-ranging critiques of social injustice,

misgovernment, corruption, religious dogmatism and clerical tyranny

—and display, in addition, a very interesting willingness to

contemplate alternative arrangements. Within the humanist public

71 McMurtry, The Cancer Stage of Capitalism, p. 205.

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sphere to which they contributed it became possible to undertake, as

Machiavelli did in The Prince and The Discourses, a wholly disabused

analysis of political power; to declare, as Agrippa did in his

Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex, that

the inferior social status of women results from masculine bad faith

and violence, “without reason or necessity natural or divine, but under

the pressure of custom, education, chance, or some occasion

favorable to tyranny”;72 and to offer unstinted praise to fearless social

critics, as Thomas Nashe did to the memory of Pietro Aretino in a text

that has been described as an important late work of “humanist

poetics”:

If out of so base a thing as ink there may be extracted

a spirit, he writ with nought but the spirit of ink, and his

style was the spirituality of arts, and nothing else;

whereas all others of his age were but the lay

temporalty of inkhorn terms. For indeed they were

mere temporizers, and no better. His pen was sharp

pointed like a poinyard; no leaf he wrote on but was

like a burning glass to set on fire all his readers.… No

hour but he sent a full legion of devils into some herd

of swine or other.... He was no timorous servile flatterer

of the commonwealth wherein he lived. His tongue and

his invention were foreborne; what they thought, they

would confidently utter. Princes he spared not, that in

72 Henricus Cornelius Agrippa, Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex, trans. and ed. Arthur Rabil, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 95. As I noted in Lunar Perspectives, Agrippa’s feminism was not merely theoretical: “At a time when such interventions were dangerous, he mocked the theological faculty of the University of Cologne for having given its approval to that notorious handbook of witch-hunters, the brutally misogynist Malleus maleficarum. And when in 1518 he served as municipal advocate in the city of Metz, he put his life and career on the line by intervening in the case of a woman who had been arrested and tortured by the inquisition on a charge of witchcraft. Agrippa secured her release and the return of her property—and made the inquisitor answer to a charge of heresy” (pp. 145-46).

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the least point transgressed. His life he contemned in

comparison of the liberty of speech. 73

6. Exposing forgery, forging freedom

In what ways, then, might a contemporary critical humanism

affiliated to certain practices of Renaissance humanists and, more

widely, to the social function of Renaissance humanism as the

emergent matrix of the civil commons, be of strategic relevance to the

multiple invented crises brought on us by the corporatist revolution?

Etymology may provide one clue. I am thinking of the cognate

Greek and Latin verbs krino and cerno and their declinations and

derivatives. The Greek krino (meaning “to separate, distinguish,

choose, or pick out”) is part of a semantic field that includes the

adjective kritikos (“able to discern”), which moved into Latin as

criticus (“critic”), as well as the nouns kriterion (“a tribunal, standard

or test”) and krisis (“a choice, separating, a power of distinguishing, or

the result of a trial or contest, a decision or judgment”). The Latin

cerno (meaning “to sift, separate, distinguish, to decide or determine,

and also to see distinctly or perceive”) is the root both of the English

verb “to discern” and also, through the past participle certus, of our

adjective “certain.”

73 Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller, in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow, revised by F. P. Wilson (5 vols., 1957; rpt. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966), vol. 2, pp. 264-65. I have modernized Nashe’s spelling. The identification of this fiction as an important late statement of humanist poetics is Arthur F. Kinney’s, in Humanist Poetics: Thought, Rhetoric, and Fiction in Sixteenth-Century England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), p. 329. Aretino was not quite the sixteenth-century Noam Chomsky that Nashe makes him seem—but Nashe, whose books were burned and banned by the Bishop of London five years after he wrote this passage, and who subsequently disappears from history, had good reason to admire Aretino’s success in negotiating the literary patronage systems of the period.

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With this semantic field in mind, Glyn P. Norton has understood

Renaissance humanism as showing that “Criticism and crisis are

etymological friends”:

Throughout history, literary criticism and cultural crisis

have tended to follow convergent trajectories.

Renaissance humanism, above all, was responsible for

generating a language that would not only reflect the

cultural crisis at hand, but base that crisis in its own

distinctiveness as a period. The deepest, most central

impulses of humanism are thus critical.... The critical

temper, in its cultural as well as literary dimension,

fixes the Renaissance view of time squarely within the

Greek concept of krisis as designating a moment both

of separation and of decision.74

Taking a hint from these etymologies, I would propose that a

contemporary critical humanism should understand the present crisis

or crises as a trial or contest that calls upon us to exercise our powers

of distinguishing across the whole field of the civil commons, and in so

doing to separate ourselves decisively from the business-as-usual of

placid orthodoxy.

Let me be explicit. I am talking about taking sides against

corporatism, and repelling its incursions with all the resources of

critical analysis, rhetoric and public mobilization that may be at our

command.

If such language seems hortatory beyond the norms of

academic discourse, then it may be time we subjected those norms as

well to thorough criticism. For those who value intellectual freedom,

there is not, I think, any large choice to be made: when the whole

74 The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 3: The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 1.

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system of the civil commons is at stake, so also is the free critical

thinking that is one of its constituent parts.

But what particular forms of discernment could a critical

humanism, as opposed to other kinds of critical thinking, contribute to

this struggle? Anthony Grafton has argued persuasively that the

critical methods of humanist scholars in the Renaissance, based on a

growing awareness both of historical contexts and of dialectal

differences and changes in linguistic usage within the texts they

studied, arose out of the need to distinguish between genuinely

ancient texts and documents and the large numbers of

pseudepigraphic writings and outright forgeries that had accompanied

them in ancient Greece and Rome and in early Judaeo-Christian

traditions—as well as the vast quantity of more recent forgeries. 75 As

Grafton writes,

Forgery and philology fell and rose together, in the

Renaissance as in Hellenistic Alexandria…. And in all

cases criticism has been dependent for its development

on the stimulus that forgers have provided. Criticism

does not exist simply because the condition of the

sources creates a need for it. The existence of so many

sources created with a conscious intention to deceive,

75 Ancient forgeries and pseudepigrapha include at least thirteen of the forty-six surviving works ascribed to Aristotle, most of the Hippocratic canon, the complete works of the Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus, several of the canonical letters of the apostle Paul and his entire correspondence with Seneca, all of the writings of Paul’s disciple Dionysius the Areopagite, and large numbers of other literary, historical, medical and religious texts. The scale of more recent forgeries, many of them in the domain of law, is indicated by Grafton’s remark that “perhaps half the legal documents we possess from Merovingian times, and perhaps two-thirds of all documents issued to ecclesiastics before A.D. 1100, are fakes. And the volume swelled enormously as scientific jurisprudence established itself firmly in the West, and every practice and possession needed written documentation; the basic code of canon law, Gratian’s Decretum, contained some five hundred forged legal texts” (Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990], pp. 24-25).

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and the cleverness of so many of the deceptions,

played a vital role in bringing criticism into being.76

One of the most celebrated humanist exposures of forgery was

Lorenzo Valla’s demonstration in 1440 that the Donation of

Constantine, which documented the Emperor Constantine’s supposed

transfer of the western half of his empire to the papacy, contained

“elements that are contradictory, impossible, foolish, strange, and

ridiculous….” When Valla at the same time criticized this text as

having fraudulently legitimized papal corruption, war-making, and

“spiritual wickedness in high places,”77 he knew very well that he was

not just correcting a false understanding of the past, but was also, at

serious risk to his own safety, delegitimizing a contemporary structure

of political power.78

Grafton’s reference to “the existence of so many sources

created with a conscious intention to deceive” may strike one as

evoking a not unfamiliar contemporary situation. Any critical watcher

of CNN or Fox News, or any critical reader of the corporate press,

cannot help but be aware of some of the principal causes of that

widespread American ignorance of the world at large to which I

alluded at the outset—and of course the structures of deception and

mystification by means of which news media under highly

concentrated corporate ownership induce the population to acquiesce

in policies which are manifestly against its interests have been lucidly

76 Grafton, p. 123. 77 The Falsely-Believed and Forged Donation of Constantine, ii.6 and xxii.19; quoted from Lorenzo Valla, The Profession of the Religious and the principal arguments from The Falsely-Believed and Forged Donation of Constantine, ed. and trans. Olga Zorzi Pugliese (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 1985), pp. 65, 71. In the second passage Valla is quoting Ephesians 6:12. 78 See Valla, i.1, p. 63: “… how eagerly and hastily would they drag me off to torture, if they only could, now that I am writing not just against the dead but against the living too, not just against this or that individual but against a multitude of men, not merely private citizens but even public officials? And which officials? Why, even the Supreme Pontiff who is armed not only with a temporal sword, like kings and rulers, but with a spiritual one too….”

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analyzed by (among others) Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky.79

The processes by which governments and the media collaborate in the

manufacture of consent commonly involve fabricated evidence: it

would, for example, be difficult to find any recent publicly

acknowledged act of war on the part of the United States that was not

accompanied and justified by a cloud of deliberate falsehoods.80 In this

context, the metaphor of “mind-forged manacles”81 by which William

Blake explained the perpetuation of bondage and oppression can be

understood as carrying a double sense.

The primary purposes of the critical work I am proposing—to

unmask and discredit falsehoods circulated by the apologists of

corporate power and to delegitimize the agencies responsible for

them—resemble those of Lorenzo Valla’s critical labours. Yet what is

involved, I would emphasize, is not just the philological detective work

required to expose forgeries, plagiarisms, or impostures, but also,

perhaps more importantly, a critical deployment of contextual and

historical analyses capable of showing up those larger processes of

79 See Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon, 1988), and also, as samples of other critical perspectives on the media, Joyce Nelson, The Perfect Machine: TV in the Nuclear Age (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1987), and Linda McQuaig, Shooting the Hippo: Death by Deficit and Other Canadian Myths (Toronto: Penguin, 1995). 80 Some salient examples: the American invasion of Vietnam was justified by fraudulent claims of a North Vietnamese invasion of the south and by the fabricated Gulf of Tonkin naval incident; U.S. aggression against Nicaragua in the 1980s (condemned by a judgment of the World Court) was justified by fraudulent claims of Sandinista subversion of neighbouring countries; the U.S. refusal to contemplate a negotiated withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991 was supported by fabricated atrocity claims and the lie that Iraq was preparing to invade Saudi Arabia; in 1993, a cruise missile attack on Baghdad was justified by fraudulent claims that the Iraqi dictatorship had attempted to assassinate ex-President George Bush; in 1999, the NATO attack on Serbia was justified by false claims of massacres in Kosovo; and finally, in 2003 the U.S./U.K. invasion of Iraq was justified by multiple falsehoods, including outright forgeries and plagiarisms, which were exposed by critical analysts almost as quickly as they were launched (for evidence, see Michael Keefer, ed., War on Iraq: Critical Resources, available at this website. 81 The Poems of William Blake, ed. W. B. Yeats (London: Lawrence & Bullen; N.Y: Scribner’s, 1893), “London,” p. 77.

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distortion-through-selective-omission that I have elsewhere termed

“subtractive politicizing.”82

Beyond this defensive work there lies the further constructive

labour of what I would call forging freedom: the consolidation of our

civil commons, and the extension of the civil commons into domains

where the necessity of preservation through public stewardship has

not previously been acknowledged. If in the present political climate

such a project seems utopian, I can only say in response that

utopianism is one of the native dialects of critical humanism.

Let me admit that the key question of how to get there from

here is not going to be answered in this paper. I am inclined to agree

with Noam Chomsky’s off-the-cuff remark, when asked what might be

a good strategy for organizing against the harm caused by

imperialism and such international agencies at the World Trade

Organization, that “Everything is a good strategy.”83 Within my own

sphere of work, I would therefore support any movement towards a

de-corporatizing of universities, and towards a corresponding

enhancement of the emancipatory potential of their social function as

institutions of social reproduction; more widely, I would support any

movement towards restoring the primacy of human and life values

over money values and profits.84

I want to conclude, however, with a reminder of the odds which

any project of taking past practices and traditions as a guide to

present struggles must face. Sixty years ago, in 1940, the year of his

death, Walter Benjamin wrote in his great meditation on history that

Articulating the past historically does not mean

recognizing it “the way it really was.” It means

82 See Lunar Perspectives, pp. 86-95, 122-24, 205-06. Since subtractive politicizing is a practice thoroughly embedded in the formative history of my own discipline of English Literature, my closest colleagues and I may have a head start in work of this kind. 83 Quoted by Milan Rai, Chomsky’s Politics (London: Verso, 1995), p. 121. 84 See John McMurtry, Unequal Freedoms, pp. 330-31.

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appropriating a memory as it flashes up at a moment

of danger.... The danger threatens both the content of

the tradition and those who inherit it. For both, it is one

and the same thing: the danger of becoming a tool of

the ruling classes.... The only historian capable of

fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is

firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe

from the enemy if he is victorious.85

85 Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” VI, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings et al. (4 vols.; Cambridge. Mass: Harvard University Press, 1996-2003), vol. 4, p. 391.