The dirty birth of the disciplines

14 Jul, 2019 - 00:07 0 Views
The dirty birth of the disciplines

The Sunday News

Cetshwayo Mabhena

Academic disciplines and the professions and professionals that they produce are not natural objects or are they innocent. 

Economics has given us economists, sociology has produced sociologists and psychology has made psychologists a reality and it all looks perfectly fine. Political scientists are trusted experts as much as historians are reliable resource persons. Clearly there is little or nothing we can do to undo the disciplines. I argue in this article that the disciplines can be liberated from their dirty birth and criminal history. We can recover them from the original colonial reasons and purposes for which they were constructed and given to the world as ways of knowing and constructing reality. Decolonial undisciplinarity is one way of disabusing the disciplines of their dirty birth and origins and giving them a new liberatory charge of energy and purpose, I argue.

Birth of the Disciplines

There was a time in the life of the world when the search for the Truth and for Knowledge was a beautiful and also powerful vocation of discovery. This was the time in the West when philosophy was science and science was philosophy. Knowledge making had not yet been divided into boxes and categories with names and labels such as physics, biology, chemistry, history, economics and development studies. It is capitalist economic reason that brought brands and labels into knowledge making. Like all other commodities in the rapacious market place knowledges had to be packaged and sold for profit. The knowledge disciplines were not created for happy reasons but for tragic purposes that reduced the truth value of knowledges and elevated their market value. It is the disciplines that turned knowledges into products and artefacts with brands and labels in the academy as a market place in the world capitalist economy. Mahmood Mamdani is correct when he describes the lives of academics in the present university in Africa as the life of “scholars in the market place” that are trying to make a living in the busy, greedy and thankless knowledge economy. It is thanks to capitalist economics and political rationality that we presently have designer knowledges that carry labels on which their market value is measured.

Power and Knowledge

When science was removed from philosophy a gap in knowledge makers was created. The scientists chose to rely on empirical evidence and statistics for truth. They created a tyranny of quantitative and positivist thinking on one hand. On the other hand, the philosophers delved into metaphysics and created their own regime of qualitative thinking and knowledge making. There was a strict polarity. Truth was either quantitative or qualitative and nothing in between. It was a civil war of the academy. It is then that a third force emerged and claimed that scientific methods of knowledge could be combined with philosophical interpretation to give out stronger and more balanced truth about life, society and things. That was the birth of the social sciences as a compromise between so called pure sciences and pure humanities. Up to this day knowledge making and the search for the truth and meaning of things is a terrain that is contested and where theories and methods are in perpetual competition. There is true capitalist competition in the knowledge economy. The academy is, true to Mamdani a dog eat dog market place.

Social Science as Imperialism

In 1979 the Nigerian scholar Claude Ake published a telling book titled: Social Science as Imperialism. Ake was correct in that assertion. It is capitalism and imperial politics that created the social sciences and all the disciplines as we know and experience them today. The first social science was history that the German scholar Leopold Ranke insisted was supposed to be strictly a study of the past that dwelt on perusing ancient archives. Powerful people and organisations of the time did not want to be studied or have their powerful lives scrutinised. Scholars were supposed to study the ancients and past events and not words and actions of rulers of the present. In that way, Empire reduced the discipline of history to an art of telling folktales and not unmasking present truths and meanings.

After the French Revolution of 1789 three important realities emerged because of the overthrow of the idea and practice of the divine rule of kings. The State became more important with its institutions, civil society was born, and the market became more organised and powerful. The discipline of sociology was invented to study the civil society so that it could be managed and controlled. Economics became the science of understanding the market and thinkers like Adam Smith became prophets with their imperialist and capitalist ideas about the wealth of nations. Political Science was manufactured as the science of studying and fortifying the state and its accessories. These three disciplines were not created for the liberation of the people but for the strengthening of Empire. Knowledge was, through the use of the disciplines subordinated to power and its interests.

The Euro-American Empire wanted intelligence and knowledge about the Oriental people, the Asians. Orientalism was created as a discipline and ideology to research and spy on Asia and its people so that they could be managed and ruled well. Missionaries and scholars came to Africa to study the natives in order to manage and overcome them well. This discipline became Anthropology as the art and science of understanding and knowing the colonial other. Orientalism and Anthropology as disciplines were created specifically for colonial reasons. Area Studies, another imperials discipline, was created for Empire to research and understand the people and places outside America and Europe as objects of conquest, colonisation and enslavement.

Imperial Americanism and the Disciplines

Effectively, the United States assumed the leadership of the world in 1945. The spectre of Communism was in rampage and anti-colonial struggles of Africa were in rage. The Global South was enchanted with communism. Africans in particular were drawn to the communists that promised liberation from colonialism. After all, as foreign as it was, communism was the closest thing to African communalism. The USA and its allies agonised to find a language of understanding Africa and Africans beyond what Anthropology and Area Studies had provided. Empire needed a more forceful propaganda against communist politics and economics that was enveloping the Global South. Development studies was invented for exactly that purpose. As a discipline, development studies was created as a method of spying into economies of the Global South and a capitalist propaganda against the spectre of communism. Development studies was in that way the development of underdevelopment. It was a strategy and a method for capitalist development not the development of African polities and economies. Claude Ake was thus very correct that social sciences were an arm of imperialism and the political ideology of Empire.

Why Undisciplinarity?

Decolonial scholars, from the dependency theorists, world systems analysts and philosophers of liberation, have always been not only suspicious but also contemptuous of the disciplines. There is perhaps no escaping the disciplines, they are a durable reality now. What can be done is to decolonise them. Recover them from their use for imperialism and colonialism and convert them to tools and methods of liberation. Undisciplinarity means exactly that, to disrespect and discard the colonial and imperial foundations of the disciplines and instrumentalise the disciplines for decolonial intellectual and political agendas. The disciplines were created for dirty and evil purposes of Empire and now they can only be allowed to live if they are converted and reloaded for undoing coloniality.

Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from the Fort Hare University in East London: [email protected]

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