Published Winter/Spring 2009
 
Geopolitical Translators
by David B. Downing | ns 71-72
In the fall of 1957, I was a young boy watching the grainy screen of our family's first television set when images of an odd, spherical object with whisker antennae and the word "Sputnik" flashed across it. A month later, they (and "they" were pretty bad folks) sent a dog, Laika, into orbit, without even a thought that they might actually try to bring the creature safely back to earth. I was astounded. I certainly couldn't imagine sending my own dog into space knowing that was the end of her. None of the watered down explanations about what was going on here made any sense to me, but I laughed when they called it "muttnik."
I didn't then understand it in terms of Cold War politics, but the 1947 Truman Commission on Higher Education for American Democracy (which later spurred the 1958 NDEA) provided the political discourse to translate these events into US funding for science education. These federal resources would propel me (and my generation) right through grade school and on into college. If any of these events did get translated into simple terms, they were Manichean views of us versus them. None of the imperialist features of US history got translated into any meaningful venue in my (or most anybody else's) primary and secondary education in the 1950s and 60s. Most of us white, middle-class baby-boomers growing up in the shadows of the Second World War never learned an intelligent word about socialism or Marxism in our formal schooling, and what we did learn about communism was a congeries of evil, fear, and inhumanity.
By the time (1961) Yuri Gagarin stepped out of his capsule, the first man who had ever been in "outer space," as we called it then, I was completely hooked. The sciences went wild, and I went with them. The only literature that mattered to me was Tom Swift science-fiction. I left for college to major in biology, funded with a scholarship from Hewlett-Packard, one of the postwar start-ups from California that opened a large facility in the emerging tech corridor along the Route 128 beltway outside Boston, only a few miles from my home. Now it is easy for me to see why my grad school teacher and mentor, Leslie Fiedler, had focused his 1950 Kenyon Review "Credo" as an attack on "scientific criticism," the culturally dominant but deadly effort to convert literary study into a field with scientific credentials. (1950 was also the founding year of the National Science Foundation.) Back then, Vannevar Bush's influential 1945 book, Science: The Endless Frontier, had set the stage for translating the dwindling frontiers of US geographical colonialism into the socio-political landscape of "Big Science" with a nationalist fervor, and Fiedler was beginning to mount his career-long critique of those myths. But as we entered the 1960s, I had hardly a doubt in the world about a ready-made path into a career in biological research.
Well, something happened along the way. You could call it politics, economics, culture, or perhaps the 1960s. America changed, and so did many of my cohort in the baby-boomer generation. Something got translated between culture and politics, art and society, science and the humanities; and the social effects of those translations reverberated around the globe.
My own turn towards the humanities was partly because I became acutely aware of all that my science-based education had deprived me of, and partly because it was relatively easy to do. All of higher education was riding the wave of the postwar boom—the GI Bill, NDEA, and deep investments in public education—even if it was driven by aggressive government favoring of science education so we could get to the moon first. The good thing was that the nationalist project of investing in competitive science carried along with it a surplus: the "soft" fields expanded right along with the "hard" disciplines. The growth of public higher education became a huge experiment as a growing majority of an emerging generation was allowed to be college and university students for a prolonged period before they became workers.
The experiment produced a lot of dissent. Indeed, the demographics of higher education changed: more women, minorities, working-class, and non-Western cultures swelled student ranks. And those of us who were white men could (until the 1969 draft lottery, at least), get student deferrals so we could protest the Vietnam War rather than fight in it. Many of us became part of what we called the "Movement," the broad-based amalgam of human rights, women's rights, gay rights, civil rights, ethnic rights, cultural rights, worker's rights, student's rights. The New Left, SDS, SNCC, NAM, NOW, GBLT, Amnesty International, the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF), the Free Speech Movement, and many other left-leaning organizations emerged on the scene. Even though relations between the different sectors of the movement didn't always work in harmony, they certainly couldn't be ignored.
When in November of 1968, the Black Students Union and the TWLF led a student strike at San Francisco State College (where I earned my MA a few years later), it turned into the longest strike in the history of higher education, and the credo then was pretty clear: a university had to have as priorities equity and social justice. Knowledge was not "neutral" or "disinterested" since it was always produced by human labor, and it should serve the broadest possible sense of human needs, not just the increased power of an elite few. "Liberation" became an educational mission, and it had tangible consequences for the university. For example, as part of the strike settlement agreement, the College of Ethnic Studies was established, the first of its kind, and many more would follow as area studies set up programs across the country. At San Francisco State University, Ethnic Studies celebrated its fortieth anniversary this past year, and now more than seventy percent of the student body there are people of color (and this from a student body that was once almost entirely white and middle class, like most of US higher education up through the 1950s).
The Movement joined hands on the basic credo: equity and social justice. Even if there was little practical expectation that it could be realized, social justice certainly seemed a worthy goal. When we marched on Washington or got tear-gassed in Madison as National Guard armored vehicles lined University Ave., it was hard not to have a sense of solidarity that we were part of a changing world and that solidarity in the movements all around us could indeed have positive effects on bringing about those changes. We were young, idealistic, and sometimes just plain wrong, self-centered, or stoned-out, but right enough in large numbers that our commitments to social justice would not go away, even as the reactionary defunding of the humanities got underway in earnest in the 1970s.
The last thirty years has largely been the story of how the party crashed for many reasons: the right-wing backlash, the oil crisis, free market fundamentalism, structural adjustment, spiraling maldistribution of wealth. The economy went sour along with the US balance of trade, the huge rise in reactionary neoliberal and neoconservative think tanks designed to shape and influence public policy, the attack on organized labor, and the rise of unilateral militarism. It seems historically accurate to say the social-welfare state has been mostly dismantled, and we now work within the "post-welfare state university" (Williams).
This period of contraction accelerated during the 1970s, when I moved through graduate school. The academic job market collapsed. Whereas I had listened to my professors' stories of getting jobs ABD in the 1960s by selecting first the area of the country where they wanted to settle, I and those in my cohort have stories that resonate more with current circumstances. In the fall of 1978, I applied for 75 jobs and got 3 interviews, one where there were 900 other applicants in the pool. It was a tangible task to survive, let alone flourish, in these kinds of working conditions. And I was one of the lucky ones, since I slipped into a tenure-track job in 1979. Anyone wondering why politics, economics, and the social entered the profession with a rage about that time only needs to consider the many stories of my less-lucky peers who became the intellectual migrant workers, rushing between temporary and adjunct positions, many of them ending up leaving the profession altogether.
There were some pretty intense translations between the academic and the political. Those of us on the political left were often in the humanities and social sciences because those were the fields where we felt we could most directly address social and political issues in education and culture to make the world better. That was a pretty generalized, if sometimes vague, version of a credo, even though careerism sometimes eventually blunted those ideals. The old rhetoric of disinterested research and knowledge for its own sake seemed like ideological pipe dreams from the start of our careers.
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For the past thirty years transnational capitalism has been translating profits for wealthy corporations into pockets of geopolitical power at rates not seen since the age of robber barons. How different peoples in different parts of the world can recover from the damage of this project requires the utmost skills of what I call "geopolitical translators." This term reflects one of the two key dimensions of my own credo: all of us are engaged in the inevitably social and political struggle to translate between different discourses, different histories, and different geographical places where the local and global intersect. My credo thus has two interrelated components: the task of translation and the ethos of social justice. Especially for those of us in the humanities—our training is in language, discourse, representation, and rhetoric, so we bear field-specific skills as geopolitical translators. Our work may differ in focus, content, and institutional circumstance from non-academic work, but we have considerable social obligations to translate between those different circumstances as shaped by the global economy.
One important task immediately before us is to re-write and translate a viable credo in our age of turbo-capitalism. We ought to ask now some basic questions: what can we do, how should we organize, and what kind of hopes can we have as we enter what no doubt will be a difficult time of global depression? My own credo for geopolitical translators bearing a social ethos has its personal roots in the 1960s (and we should not forget some of the organizational models of the 1930s), but we must accept that such a task is inevitably a project of critical utopianism, imagining visions of a more just world even as we organize in our unjust world.
A problem we have often had in our mantras about justice is that invoking such an abstract concept can often seem like an intractable problem if pursued with all the philosophical rigor it deserves. After our affair with postmodernism and poststructuralism, it can be a risky venture to even imagine, let alone articulate normative claims about global justice. The historical archive, however, is pretty resourceful on this score. The traditions of socialism, Marxism, and the left have offered the most provocative visions of social justice. At root is a simple principle: the value added to any raw materials in the process of production need not be maldistributed to an elite group of owners and employers—it can be redistributed to all citizens.
In this tradition, social philosopher Nancy Fraser offers a theoretical model of justice that I believe can be adapted for our everyday lives and our professional concerns. For Fraser, any consideration of justice involves both issues of recognition and redistribution. In simple terms, recognition involves issues of status, and redistribution issues of class; the former focuses primarily on attitudes, beliefs, and identities, whereas the latter focuses on material resources, wealth, and economic inequalities. Of course, any socio-cultural situation or event involves both recognition and redistribution. There are good reasons, however, to keep the analytic separation because in many instances the two dimensions do not always point in the same direction. All the social movements I named above have had more success at the level of recognition than redistribution: area studies, ethnic studies, multicultural, transnational, transgendered processes have too easily been tied to liberal versions of diversity that don't always call for substantive kinds of economic change. Thus recognition without redistribution conceals the class struggle and fuels material inequity. Fraser argues that this "general decoupling of the cultural politics of recognition from the social politics of redistribution" has become the main dilemma of our "postsocialist condition" (Justice 3). Her goal (like mine) of a credible vision for the left calls for the creation of "another 'postsocialism,' one that incorporates, rather than repudiates, the best of socialism" (4).
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There is sometimes a vexed calculus of recognition and redistribution in higher education. For instance, one can recognize composition as a separate discipline but defund salaries for those "service-oriented" writing faculty. A credible alternative to this kind of institutional decoupling of recognition and redistribution requires a conception of justice willing to invoke normative claims: that is, the goal of justice is to achieve "participatory parity" (Redistribution 36-37). As normative ideals, they are not difficult to conceptualize. Recognition parity would mean that all (adult) participants in a given social situation have equal rights and recognition to participate in decision-making that affects the social body (shared governance); likewise, for such recognition parity to even be possible also means that there must be relative parity of economic, material resources.
The ethical impulses for recognition and redistribution also have a relatively empirical basis best represented in the work of some of the capabilities theorists of social justice. To speak of human capabilities is an attempt to name the cross-cultural conditions for human flourishing. This is a necessary phase of the process of articulating and translating some of the crucial normative conditions we hold as a credo to guide our work for human dignity, participatory parity, and social justice for all human beings. Martha Nussbaum offers ten "Central Human Capabilities" that include basic needs for bodily health and integrity (including reproductive health, food, clothing, shelter, etc.); but also capabilities for emotional attachments, love, care; the capacity for reason, imagination, thought, and sensual experience; the capabilities for affiliation, identity, respect, dignity (thus nondiscrimination); opportunities for play, laughter, enjoyment; and political and material control over one's environment (76-78). Without elaborating on them here, what should be clear is that these are substantive, outcome-oriented goals for human well-being, and are very close therefore to the human rights movement. They are not just procedural stipulations, however, and you can't have them without substantial kinds of both recognition and redistribution.
The social ethos I have just outlined needs to be combined with the tasks of geopolitical translators. "Geopolitical" emphasizes the global and the inevitable socio-historical significance of all our translations; "translators" combines the literal and metaphorical meanings of "translation" and emphasizes the interpretive dimension of carrying meaning ("trans") from the general to specific circumstances and vice versa. Our translations invariably cross political borders and disciplinary divisions. Our rhetorical performances must be accountable to academic and public audiences so that the virtues of academic enclosures from profit are a public good and not a private enclave.
With respect to higher education, the basic principle of academic freedom that we prize so highly has generally been cast in a humanist light as the necessary condition for "knowledge for its own sake." But another way to think of it is socialist in nature: a protection of inquiry and the labor of creating new knowledge in a public domain relatively free from direct capital control. Creativity, imagination, and play are human capabilities calling for recognition and distribution of social resources to sustain them for all peoples, and thus work in the humanities calls for a social contract that secures such spaces of freedom from exclusive focus on profit/loss ratios. The humanities are not just luxuries to be had once we get a surplus, but one among many other domains crucial to human flourishing and global justice. Education itself becomes a socialized necessity as a precondition for serving basic human capacities to learn, know, and imaginatively interpret our complex worlds.
The task of all humanities workers is therefore inevitably historical: we all need self-reflective translations among the histories of our specialized disciplines, the histories of the many different kinds of higher education, and the complicated histories of global capitalism. This often means we have to create and clarify our choice of the historical frames by which we make intelligible the crucial links between local and global contexts.
In the crucial coming months, with President Obama putting neoliberal gurus like Paul Volcker, Lawrence Summers, and others at the head of his economic team, those of us on the left more than ever need to communicate the alternatives, and thus to renew an anti-capitalist critique that creates solidarity across disciplines and across various public domains, with as much rhetorical clarity for a wider audience as we can muster. And we need to do this without nostalgia for the 1960s. Translating between these and other domains and discourses in such a way as to further the project of social justice seems to me like a worthy credo. So far as I can see, the more geopolitical translators doing this kind of work in and out of the academy, the better the world will be.
Works Cited
Fiedler, Leslie A. "Toward an Amateur Criticism." The Kenyon Review 12.4 (Autumn, 1950): 561-74.
Fraser, Nancy. Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the "Postsocialist" Condition. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Fraser, Nancy, and Axel Honneth. Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange. London: Verso, 2003.
Nussbaum, Martha C. Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2006.
Williams, Jeffrey J. "The Post-Welfare State University." American Literary History 18.1 (Spring 2006): 190-216.
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