Palestine, the University and the Military-Industrial Lifeworld
These students are the heroes we have been waiting for. They are fighting a key battle to save whatever is still academic about the academic world
By Ghassan Hage
From Pierre Bourdieu, I’ve learnt a lot about how to combine a commitment to maintaining the autonomy of the space of teaching and research from the political, and a commitment to a political opposition to everything that threatens the autonomy of this space. Bourdieu’s shift to activism is well-known to have been driven by the realisation that Neo-liberalism contained within it a project for the destruction of the autonomy of the university as a critical space of thinking. It did so both through the destruction of the working conditions of academics so as to steal from them their most precious possession: the time to take their time thinking through the issues they are researching and teaching thoroughly and rigorously. It also did so through the subjugation of research to narrow national economic needs and interests that stifled and impoverished the academic imagination.
It is hardly a secret that one of the key narrow economic interests that has always had an interest in subjugating university knowledge to its own ends has been what has long ago been referred to as ‘the military-industrial complex’. But the armament industry today is more than just an industrial complex, it is a lifeworld that is dictating its interest by colonising and narrowing the political imagination of our political leaders. What was the sorry sight of all those western leaders that went to Israel in the aftermath of Hamas’s murderous attack on October 7? Why were they all to legitimise military revenge and the huge armament production and consumption that comes with it and nothing else? Was it really a lapse of intelligence and foresight that disallowed them to see that October 7 should make clear the everyone concerned the dead ends of the path of political violence? Was it really commitment to Israel alone or a commitment to the armament industry, as well, that made them act as if it was not obvious that the last thing that would open up the area towards a resolution is to sublimate a vulgar ‘man on the street’ desire for revenge, and to rampage unhinged through the enemy’s territory, and elevate it into foreign policy?
More than ever, there is an inverse relation between the production and circulation of intelligent understanding of the world we live in and the production and circulation of armaments. The armement industry has a direct interest in the mediocre understanding of what is happening in Gaza today, the mediocre politics that is being pursued, the mediocre conceptions of anti-semitism that are thrown at people right and left, and the mediocre ethics that imposes itself through the power of the capital that is behind it rather than a careful consideration of what is right and what is wrong.
As such it can be said that this armament industry comes with its own mediocre life-world, rich with money capital and poor with everything else. This military industrial lifeworld is the antithesis of the life-world that a university ought to produce and inhabit. It is not by mistake that it is in the United States that students have come to realise the extent to which a thriving intelligent, ethical academic space for thinking can only be protected through the liberation of the university form its clutches. It is there where this lifeworld is thriving at the expense of university life most. These students are the heroes we have been waiting for. They are fighting a key battle to save whatever is still academic about the academic world.
If their struggle has been spurred and has become articulated to what is happening in Palestine it is because nowhere is the interest in the expansion of militarism and in depriving us of a sophisticated intellectual understanding of the world is more evident.
University managers who refuse to acknowledge that their students are struggling for a worthy cause, who refuse to protect them and negotiate with them, and who throw at them military might and cheap anti-intellectual insults, are clearly inhabitants of the military industrial lifeworld even if they are occupying the physical environment of the university. It is clearly in the military-industrial life world that they get their sustenance. The more they react to the students as if their life depends on it, the more it must indeed be the case.
