IBM: Ideology, Babel And Museum
The Myth and Reality of Universities - Contd...

Kings College, Cambridge University

Discussion 2

In this discussion I would like to bring my second proposition, that is university as Babel Tower. In other words, I propose University as an unfinished project.

Babel Tower is a Biblical myth, in which the human beings who speak the same language try to build a tower to reach the heavens. The cement of their aspiration is the unity of their language. God, to spoil their efforts curse/bless them with different tongues so that they could no longer communicate in coherent way. As a result of this godly intervention, the Babel Project remains an eternally unfinished one.

My argument is Janus faced. One the one hand I would like to argue that the universities have/had a unified language and these universities have such a utopian aspiration similar to those people who attempted making the Babel Tower. However, thanks to the intervention of the Repressive State Apparatus (through its ISAs) the universities have lost their coherent language of articulating a common goal. One could perhaps dub this common aspiration as enlightenment through subjective transcendence. At the same time, the Utopian aspiration could be seen in the light of revolutionary aspirations engendered in the universities. The State and its organs repress these revolutionary aspirations by making the universities to speak different languages.

The disparity in terms of language happens as a result of the enhanced state/corporate investment in certain disciplines. Wuggenig observes:

“Central principles of differentiation are the capital specific to the field ie the extent to which the actors dispose of the specific capacities demanded by the field and the symbolic recognition granted by the other procedures. In the university field, this would be the evaluation by other scholars, who in turn have at their disposal a lot of field specific capital.” (Branding the Campus P.100)

While making survey of post modern condition Lyotard observes how the input-output ratio in capitalism turns everything into performance and result oriented activities. Higher education and research are not exceptions in this case. Lyotard notes:

“..it necessitates greater sophistication in the means of obtaining proof, and that in turn benefits performativity. Research funds are allocated by States, corporations and nationalized companies in accordance with this logic of power growth. Research sectors that are unable to argue that they contribute even indirectly to the optimization of the system’s performance are abandoned by the flow of capital and doomed to senescence. The criterion of performance is explicitly invoked by the authorities to justify their refusal to subsidize certain research centers.” (Post Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Jean Francois Lyotard, Manchester University Press, 1979, 1984. P. 47)

The confusion of language is facilitated from without through economic interventions and performance orientations. This has made the university project an unfinished one.

My second face looks at an inversed side of the same logic. In a Foucauldian sense, knowledge is power and power is not a thing so much to be detested. If so, the power ingrained in the university structure through the disseminatory faculties puts an end to the otherwise cacophonous nature of the universities and campuses. The polyphonic nature of the university is attributed to redeem the universities from this condition of attributed degradation by giving them a single tongue; the tongue that reproduces the same voice of the state.

Here, I would like to look at the metaphor of Babel Tower and its semantic structure. Studies show that the Babel Tower was within the city limits of Babylon and was called Babil. The Hebrew origin of the word suggests that it has a meaning like ‘Gate of God’. Also the lexicon meaning of the Babel tells us that it is making noise without meaning or coherence. The story in the Book of Genesis implies that the God had rendered the human beings (His subjects) into mere babblers. However, the intention of the subjects was perhaps to make a ‘gate of God’ through which they could reach to God or God could come down to them. Whatever be the case, the intervention of God left the people with a permanently impaired project.

Interestingly, the semantic forms of the word Babel lead us to an interesting turn. In this, a univalent structure is made into a polyvalent one. But this poly-valency is debilitating as it is incoherent and really creates confusion rather than understanding. The polyvalency generated by the ‘Babel Effect’ has an authoritarian nature. The authority determines which language is to be spoken by a particular individual. Deprived of his original tongue, he/she is left in lurch without having a real choice to make. Any individual forced to talk another language, according to Herbert Marcuse, is a violence done to him. That means, the Babel effect has made the human beings to undergo a kind of violence.

This violence gets an addition and emphasis in my second proposition. Here the Babel effect is in reverse. A multilingual structure is reduced into a mono-lingual structure. The variety of languages that are spoken in the universities are erased from the respective tongues and in turn they are indoctrinated with a forced language, that is the language of the state/corporate. This is a clear case of violence.

Contd.. »

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