Keith Windschuttle is terrified. Or terrorised. I’m not too sure. At any rate, he’s horrified at Sydney Uni’s Arts Faculty.
Why? Because of this conference. Oddly, the conference has been “postponed til further notice”.
Windschuttle rants about the terrible and criminal past of the “Marxist-postmodernist” Italian philosopher Antonio Negri. Negri’s best known as the co-author, with American literary theorist Michael Hardt of the best-selling Empire. Negri was arraigned in the Italian Courts in the 1970s for his association with radical groups. It’s clear from Windschuttle’s own article that the evidence purporting to indict Negri for complicity in assassinations was insufficient to convict him. It may be that he was just a member of groups aligned with the Red Brigades. Negri has served prison time for his membership (only for his membership) of a political group.
Now, I don’t find Empire at all convincing as a work of political theory, and Negri can be a very painfully difficult writer. And nor do I defend any species of political violence. But Tim Dunlop is surely right that Negri ought to have the right to speak at an academic conference. Windschuttle writes:
Institutions that have hosted the likes of Negri and Churchill commonly defend themselves on grounds of free speech, as if it would be illiberal to deny such political activists a platform. In reality, by lowering the bar to accommodate people with so little concern for civilised values, universities betray the intellectual and moral standards they were founded to preserve.
Let’s remember that Windschuttle was one of the first to claim that his ideas were scorned in the public domain because of “political correctness”. My strong suspicion is that the Conference has been postponed as a result of Windschuttle’s column and that Negri is encountering visa problems. Can anyone still maintain that right-wing conspicuous indignation is not the new PC?
So, for your reading pleasure, here’s an uncensored excerpt from Negri’s Time for Revolution. Make your own mind up how dangerous these ideas are:
There is no solitary love: love constructs tools, languages and politics of being within the common; and in generating, it creates being, i.e. it renews the eternal. But in the common, generation is always singular because it is characterised by poverty. Common being is generated setting out from a multitude of singular existences, and the eternity of the common is a sky whose stars are singularities. Love continuously illuminates the stars of this common sky.
I quite like that. In any case, where does the contention that ideas are dangerous and should not be aired (and tested in debate) come from? Certainly not, as Windschuttle himself admits, from the liberal academic tradition. Windschuttle claims that Universities are no longer liberal. If that were true, it would be no excuse for the defenders of liberal discourse and civility such as Windschuttle to start policing ideas. But that’s the business he’s now in. The right-wing PC police.
It’s just another one of these tedious left/right turf wars Mark. If it was Eugene Terreblanche speaking at Bond University, Tim D et alia would OUTRAGED!
No doubt, C.L. but noone’s suggesting Terreblanche is a philosopher! Negri, like him or loathe him, is.
And the bigger issue which transcends turf wars is censorship.
As I’ve argued before, the best way to remove all relevance for people like Negri (and, I suppose, Terreblanche as well if he wanted) is to install them in cultural studies departments.
Would you prefer him to be tossing bombs, or deconstructing capitalist modes of epistemology from a downstairs office somewhere in an underfunded Humanities department?
As for myself, I’d much prefer a prison term than a job in cultural studies.
but isn’t that what Negri does (ie deconstruct capitalist modes of epistemology), Liam?
and wearing my Andrea Harris hat, some of Mark’s friends work in cultural studies dept’s - and I have an MFA and did my thesis on deconstruction
Kim, my point exactly. Deconstruction is about the least socially threatening activity a smart person can do. It’s somewhere equal in the scales of dangerousness around belly-button-picking, smoking Holidays, or wearing a Simpsons tie to work.
If only Osama Bin Laden and Abu Bakar Bashir had tenured positions.
hard to establish standards of comparison, here, Liam. how dangerous are genital piercings?
The case for banning Negri seems to be negligible if the only grounds are his actions some decades ago. What is the current and immediate threat that his ideas pose? As a free trader in goods and ideas I can’t see the point of limiting free speech unless the speaker is well past some limit which will need to be defined from time to time. Obviously during a shooting war there will be many limits in place that are not appropriate in peacetime. Despite the war in Iraq I don’t see that we need to be on a war footing here so far as public debate is concerned.
Nice to see you here, Rafe. I agree with you about free speech. And I doubt that Negri’s political past is all that relevant these days - the Red Brigades terrorism of the 1970s (with which he may have had only the most tenuous connection) is long passed into history. Italy’s move to imprisoning people on the basis of their ideas and politics rather than actions also has to be condemned.
OT: You didn’t mention Popper! Now if I can only get Kim off her obsession with body mods in erogenous zones!
An afterthought on the ideological odyssey of Keith Windschuttle.
I admire the contribution that he has made in recent years and it is interesting to note that he was a leftwing radical in the 70s. The reason that he gives for his shift of position is very disappointing, and I can’t believe that it is the full story. He has said that he moved from radicalism to conservatism because he grew up (or got older).
The correct answer, if I am marking the paper, is (a) not to move to conservatism and (b) to move because non-socialist liberalism is a better way to achieve peace, freedom and prosperity
Rafe, it may only be a partial answer but I believe Windschuttle is on record as saying what caused him to abandon Marxism was the murder of a close friend of his by the Khmer Rouge. David Horowitz recounts a similar experience in his book ‘Radical Son’, where his conversion from radicalism was sparked by the Black Panthers’ murder of a friend. I hasten to say I have a lot more time for Windschuttle than the current Horowitz - although, do you know what, Horowitz’s ‘From Yalta to Vietnam’ was the bible of adolescent radicals in the early 70’s, including me.
The excerpt you quoted looks harmless enough, if only because I can’t make head nor tail of it.
That’s the insidious nature of the Marxist-postmodernists, mark. They wrap their evil sentiments in impenetrable prose, all the better to…?
No offence, but it struck me as New Age rather than post-modern. A string of sentences dotted with comforting words like ‘love’ and ‘eternal’ that, while grammatically correct, actually means less and less the more you look at it. (Sorry.)