Cognitive Resonance

Administrators preoccupied with the alliance between the university and global capital are nearly indifferent to the disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Now that capitalism has reached beyond the stage of nation-statism, its dependence on the nation-based academic disciplines is perceived, as has already been mentioned, to be less strategic by the university administrators as well as students, academic managers, and consumers. Those who are in the humanities, on the other hand, are preoccupied with cultural studies, identity politics, and postcolonial studies, as if oblivious to the real crisis of the humanities in the university, their erasure. They determinedly avoid facing the crucial issues of the ongoing exploitation of the poor and the powerless of the world. The question to be asked now is, Can civilization afford to discard the practice of self-criticism, if that is what the humanities are largely to be concerned with?

--Masao Miyoshi, "The University and the 'Global Economy'," in Japan After Japan (61)

Taught to read and write inside the stories of Christian salvation history and technoscientific progress, I am neither heretic, infidel, nor Jew, but I am a marked woman informed by those literacies as well as by those given to me by birth and education. Shaped as an insider and an outsider to the hegemonic powers and discourses of my European and North American legacies, I remember that anti-Semitism and misogyny intensified in the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution of early modern Europe, that racism and colonialism flourished in the traveling habits of the cosmopolitan Enlightenment, and that the intensified misery of billions of men and women seems organically rooted in the freedoms of transnational capitalism and technoscience. But I also remember the dreams and achievements of contingent freedoms, situated knowledges, and relief of suffering that are inextricable from this contaminated triple historical heritage. I remain a child of the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and technoscience. My modest witness cannot ever be simply oppositional. Rather, s/he is suspicious, implicated, knowing, ignorant, worried, and hopeful. Inside the net of stories, agencies, and instruments that constitute technoscience, s/he is committed to learning how to avoid both the narratives and realities of the Net that threaten her world at the end of the Second Christian Millennium. S/he is seeking to learn and practice the mixed literacies and differential consciousness that are more faithful to the way the world, including the world of technoscience, actually works.

--Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.
FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience (2-3)

Let no one forget modernity's appalling wounds--the achievement of economies of scale in officially sanctioned slaughter, the induced hatreds and ignorance, the profligate and systematic waste (and neglect) of human skills and good faith. It is an open question whether they can be healed by modern people, using the instruments of modernity alone. Perhaps these instruments--of production in all spheres, but especially the institutions and technologies of communication and representative democracy--will someday be surpassed in a postmodern revolution that enhances "local humanities," cushions societies against the vicissitudes of the market, and discloses a new form of political community beyond the simultaneously integrative and atomizing force of the contemporary state. Perhaps, one must always hope.
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The modern world, therefore, makes two contradictory promises to those who live in it. First, its fundamental processes--processes specific to itself--can be grasped via abstraction, but second, once so grasped these processes assume license to rule over those who created them. Thus the "contract" at the heart of modernity is not only between people, that is, a matter of institutional arrangements, but also between people and their own ideas. Abstraction is leviathan.

--Andrew E. Barshay, The Social Sciences in Modern Japan: The Marxian and Modernist Traditions (6, 9)

In 1098 Crusader destruction of the Syrian town of Ma'arra had been accompanied by acknowledged acts of Frankish cannibalism. Graphically described in the chronicle of Radulph of Caen (he admits that "In Ma'arra our troops boiled pagan adults in cooking pots; they impaled children on spits and devoured them grilled"), they were later "justified" in a letter sent to the Pope by the Christian commander, who blamed the lapse on extreme hunger. Needless to say, this excuse was dismissed by Arab historians who continued to describe their bloodthirsty enemies as eaters not only of people, but, what was worse, even of dogs, considered the uncleanest of species (Maalouf, 1984: 39-40).

--Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony (107)