Pixel International Conferences

This paper probes into the ‘epistemological violence’ (Shiva, 1988)—brought about by the ruptures in the disciplinary paradigms in the aftermath of 1945—that consistently put into question the epistemic basis, social significance and economic viability of Humanities in particular and, liberal education in general. Knowledge has long become the most thriving industry in the post-industrial professional society. Consequently, modern university has fully gravitated towards approximating private corporations. Privatisation of higher education has reduced knowledge into its saleability making such epistemological branches as History, Philosophy, Literature, Fine Arts, Music, to name a few, redundant. Departments of Natural Sciences are undergoing an existential crisis, as well. On the contrary, the xenophobic nation-states’ paranoia for national security that seems to be pacified only by manufacturing nuclear weaponry and genocidal ammunitions, ironically finds consensual legitimisation by the ‘scientific temper’ of the milieu. An ideology of development embedded in this ‘scientific temper’ resolutely elevates ‘modern’ science (modern technologies being its public face) as sacrosanct, thereby, the most legitimate ‘justificatory principle’ (Nandy, 1988) of the state. On the flipside, this kind of systematic ‘scientisation’ of social psyche constructs a consensus against the importance of Liberal Arts, Humanities and Basic Sciences as legitimate academic disciplines in higher education. Such social conditioning, in the name of development, aids predominantly to supplant the pre-modern paradigms of knowledge with a reified, practical, professional, value-free, instrumentalist, vocational, and utilitarian one. As a result, critical knowledge derived from an intellectual enquiry becomes subjugated to uncritical emulation and dependency yielding to the production of homogenous skilled workers for the corporate (Heller, 2016). In view of the above, this paper questions the moral imperative of university education. Is there an ‘outside’ or an ‘alternative’ to knowledge capitalism and technocratic control over systems of higher education?

Keywords: Human Sciences; knowledge capitalism, epistemological violence, scientisation;

References
[1] Heller, H. (2016). The Capitalist University: The Transformations of Higher Education in the United States since 1945. London: Pluto Press.
[2] Nandy, A. (1988). Introduction: Science as a Reason of State. In A. Nandy (Ed.), Science, Hegemony & Violence: A Requiem for Modernity. New Dehli: Oxford University Press.
[3] Shiva, V. (1988). Reductionist Science as Epitemological Violence. In Science, Hegemony & Violence: A Requiem for Modernity. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.